Succeeding in Communication
Early last year when I penned the very first CEO Corner, the initial topic was communication. Not particularly shocking, given it was, in fact, a new form of communication aimed at our customers and Partners. Since that first issue of CEO Corner, communication seems to have been a dominate topic, consuming more words than any other topic, to date. Well, I will add to that topical dominance once more by making this issue focus on communication. We are very serious here at Retail Pro about improving the quality, clarity and usefulness of our communication to both our customers and our Partners. We have improved the look and feel of our communication templates, along with making sure the readability is greatly improved. We have broadened our content and purposely been more open and transparent about Retail Pro, past, present and future. We have established a blog on the www.retailpro.com site. We are actively investing in our social media marketing strategy. All of this, I believed, was significantly moving us collectively forward on establishing meaningful communication and properly "telling the Retail Pro story".
So, imagine if you will, how dumbstruck I was when in a recent set of focus groups, both Partners and customers alike unanimously agreed that Retail Pro is not communicating enough or communicating clearly; Proof positive that sometimes effort alone will not get the job done. Our current policy is to send important announcements or newsletters to designated subsets of our contact list, once and only once. After which, we post these communications to the My Retail Pro site (for customers) and to the business partner portal site for our Partners. Without question, this process alone is not getting the job done. To ensure that critical Retail Pro communications are received and read, we will immediately re-evaluate our communication frequency, delivery mechanisms, and try to expand the universe of who is being targeted as the proper audience.
Also, I want to make a formal plea to you, our customers and Partners, as to what mechanism you think would work better to disseminate important and helpful Retail Pro information. What tools are your other important partners using to keep you abreast of changes, improvements and future offerings? What format do you prefer? Email? Snail mail? Conference call?...... I really want to hear any feedback you have to help improve the entire communication ecosystem in the Retail Pro universe. Feel free to forward your ideas and feedback to me at klemos@retailpro.com.
The timing of all of this is critical, as in the next 90 days we will have so much exciting news to share with all of you. We have a fantastic new release of Version 9 coming out soon, just bursting with useful new features designed to make retailer's daily tasks more efficient and ultimately generate more money. We also have the debut release of two new products coming in these 90 days: Retail Pro Prism POS (formally codenamed Aruba) and the Retail Pro Ecommerce solution which will link natively to version 9 and Prism. Believe me; we are doing great things to insure the success of our mutual futures, the last thing I want is to not have the story be heard.
Thanks for listening.
Sincerely,
Kerry Lemos
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