Retail is a people business, it employs myriad staff – as many as 3.57 million in the UK alone – and it, of course, services the shopping needs of pretty much everyone.

But it also sits at the perhaps unenviable nexus of people and technology – bringing tech to bear on how people shop, the experience they get when they do so and, of course, how store staff work.

With this in mind, Grocery Gazette and Flooid gathered together senior executives from grocers including Morrisons, M&S, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and Fortnum & Mason to explore this interweave of tech and people and what it means today to be a grocery business.

Conducted over breakfast late last month under Chatham House to encourage free and frank discussion, the group raised some interesting insights into how tech is both a friend and a foe to both people and business.

Flooid, a leading unified commerce platform provider to grocery retailers around the world, works closely with retail organisations to address the challenges raised by these iconic brands.

Power to the people

The biggest challenge echoed by all present was that customers now expect so much from retailers: deep product and store knowledge at their fingertips, but they don’t want to pay a premium for it.

As a leading supermarket told the room, what customers want is information. And with many retailers having to cut staff head count as a result of the cost-of-living-crisis, they are having to do this with fewer staff. This means that each associate needs to be more knowledgeable than ever. How do you solve that problem?

Of the retailers gathered, two major retailers candidly admitted that perhaps they hadn’t invested as much in tech as they should over the years, but that that was now changing – and at speed.

“We have under invested in tech, but what has been put in place in last four years is putting us back on a path to engage better with customers,” said one retailer.

“We are investing significantly this year; a transformative amount. We have deployed headsets, which has driven how we face into our customers on a daily basis. Every staff member now carries a company iPhone. We are introducing mobile payment later this year.”

Here technology is seen as a great leveller. Arming staff with smartphones or tablets, in theory at least, makes them all experts, but not all retailers present believed that this was the case.

One upmarket grocer, for instance, believes that customers expect knowledge as part of the high-end retail experience, and so whipping out an iPhone to help them looks like they don’t have the knowledge.

One of the big four supermarkets present, on the other hand, expects its staff to be multiskilled up to a point, with everyone knowing where everything is in the store and how to find it, but with many staff not working there for long, training them deeply is often a waste of time and money.

“Customers want ease and speed of checkout, ease of movement, availability and friendly and knowledgeable staff,” the exec told the room.

“What we have done in one flagship store is retrain the whole staff off site and coach them in our new values. We have instigated subject matter experts in certain departments – alcohol, wine, meats, fish – and we are using technology such as digital screens to help answer consumer questions with a colleague on hand to help.”

This chimes with how grocery retail is changing. The trend in the US is to expect more from all supermarket staff, not just at the high end.

They might not know the origin of where the berries were farmed, but need to know how to find that information. And this is impacting retailers here in the UK, the panel revealed.

A panellist from a health and nutrition brand made added: “You have to balance liability. If you are wrongly informed it opens the retailer up to all sorts of liability problems. But you need them to know where things are. In sports nutrition we sell through grocers and other specialists. These are very specific products with a lot of knowledge around them. Stores don’t want to take the chance of misinforming people where it could be dangerous.”

The answer, believes the top four supermarket is that the sector needs, instead, to educate customers to be able to find that information themselves. Offer them QR codes and other ways to get online and find what they need to know.

There is still a role for specialised and expert staff, however, believes a mid-market supermarket exec.

“We don’t have the same expectations [as the high-end grocer’s customers], but we do have a fish monger, butcher and baker and they can offer more detailed advice so we do have areas of expertise and customers use it.”

People (with) skills

The challenge is in finding the people with these skills or those with the hunger to learn them, says the exec. Where, for example, is the company to find a skilled butcher when the old guard doing it today start to retire?

Here lies the heart of tech versus training debate for retailers. How much is training and how much is tech?

According to another well-known food retailer, it is both. “You need to have consistency across all employees as you are only as good as your worst employee. Technology can level that up.

The high-end grocer agreed. “Like all stores we are looking at adding self-checkout, but it’s a fine balance. Personally, I believe that technology has its place, but in our stores we have to be very careful as to how we deploy it.

“Mobile checkout is fine during peak, when the luxury experience is to be able to checkout without joining an enormous queue, but the rest of the year this isn’t what our customers want. We need to rely on training to a very high level, rather than tech.”

Problem child: what about GenZ?

The elephant in any room when discussing staff is how do you handle the next generation of employees, GenZ. They are seen by many as very different when it comes to employment, coming to the employment market with buckets of entitlement and attitude. How do you tackle that when trying to train experts in the company?

The high-end grocer sees the problem not as a generational one, but more about individuals. “Some people do want to learn and what to carve out an knowledge career in retail. But retention is a problem. Once you’ve trained them, they often leave to do other things.

He continued: “We’ve been taking younger people recently, which we then lose to travelling or education and so on – and that loses us the time and money spent in training. Older people are perhaps less likely to disappear and are easier to hold on to.

Another supermarket boss agrees: “Retention is a huge problem for all retailers – there is easily 30 to 35% turnover for many – and it is more expensive to train nowadays as we are fighting labour turnover by offering premium pay packages for supermarkets, so the cost of turnover is now huge.”

This is why one retailer believes it is getting more staff coming to retail as their second, later life career. “We get a lot of people at the end of their working lives: policemen, teachers and the like and they are amazing and hard working employees who are generally skilled and keen to work. GenZ-ers are all about what the employer will do about their wellbeing.”

Check this out

While there is much to say around how technology impacts associates and their training and skills, one area where it has had a profound impact on both associates and shoppers is at checkout.

The rise of self-checkout has been greeted with mixed reactions. However, they are now seen as something of a necessity. They need fewer staff and can, when run properly, actually improve throughput and aid customer satisfaction.

According to the mid-market grocer, the main thing is people don’t want to have to queue.

One way round it is to multiskill staff, give them headsets to rapidly call colleagues to open checkouts. “We have to be super reactive to customers at all touch point and the queues have to be minimised throughout. It is all about managing that as it has to give customers the experience they want,” says the grocer.

The problem, agreed the panel, is that we keep adding technology on technology, even though it’s not perfect. In fact, retailers often add more complexity and make it even more difficult.

As one retailer put it: “We add more tech to iron out the imperfections or we make it worse. Eventually we either hit the jackpot or we rip the tech out.”

However, self-service checkout is vital to business. For the well-known food store some 70% of transactions go through self-service.

In many of its stores it is forced on people, but it allows the throughput of shoppers, especially in the convenience stores in stations.

But most retailers now can’t afford to put the necessary labour back in to offer manned checkout and, largely, self-checkout works – people just don’t notice when it works, only when it doesn’t.

The mid-market grocer has adopted an almost curated approach to check out.

“We have reverted from technology in some parts,” she told the room. “We have changed checkouts to cater to different needs. We have introduced kids checkout where kids can take part; no rush checkout that allows older people to stop and chat; and fast and self-serve checkouts for those in a hurry. This is like curated checkout and so long as it’s clearly labelled then people can choose what they want to do when it comes to checkout.”

Friction or security?

Shrinkage in grocery and department stores is huge and self-checkout has added to that cost. How is training, staffing and tech helping here?

According to one big four supermarket present: “There are huge issues with crime and shrinkage, but you can’t invest in the staff you need to protect you from that so you have to add barriers.”

Another exec added: “Back in the ‘old days’ we had barriers to stop shop lifting. This was seen as a friction, so the barriers were taken out. We then added self-checkout, but these were too frictionless, so people were stealing – so the barriers went back in. You keep adding and removing tech as the process evolves. We want it to be frictionless, but not too frictionless… it’s hard to balance and keeps changing.”

Sainsbury’s is one retailer that has introduced exit barriers on self-checkout

According to the high-end grocer: “We offer great service to try and make it less likely that people steal. In more ‘choice’ locations staff are told to just let it go.”

The top four supermarket agreed that staff should not try to reprehend offenders. “It is best to not get involved. Provide service but never intervene and just let them walk out. We have security cameras and shelf edge tech which we can also use, but we don’t want staff to engage.”

As mid market grocery puts it: “Deter not detain. Kill them with kindness.”

So, what can be done to help? Through a combination of decades of retail experience and composable, flexible technology innovations, Flooid is able to advise and collaborate with grocery retailers, enabling them to succeed in capitalising on the wave of change in the fast-paced world in which we play.

It’s imperative that thought leadership and open discussions such as this recent roundtable bring together retailers and their partners as allies in a common battleground to keep retail winning in the fast-paced world of economic, social and other pressures.