In the retail industry, internal customers are just as important as the external customers. When people say ‘the customer is always right’ they are usually focusing on external customers. However, it is important to remember that the way staff members are treated and made to feel will affect the quality of service they provide your external customers with.
Keeping expenditure at a minimum while hiring the right workforce to boost your business remains a challenge in Ireland. Fortunately, the attendance tracking software provides a way of dealing with this challenge of managing the workforce.
How Does Attendance Tracking Software Help?
Attendance tracking software provides more valuable information that one could imagine. The name tends to limit what it is perceived to provide. The comprehensive list of offerings below shows how broad the scope of application to the retail industry in Ireland truly is.
- The number one need in the retail industry is to provide excellent customer service. This directly affects the success of a business. The software can be leveraged to engage the best-suited prospects for the job, as well as to employ and keep them employed to you.
- Having retained the best staff for your retail business, you will want to keep track of their attendance trends. You may track and record anything from policy breaches to consistent lateness. These variables affect productivity, efficiency and profitability.
- Attendance tracking software helps to fine-tune scheduling and planning ahead. A retail business owner can schedule employees based on skill sets, or based on demand. This tool is vital for forecasting and helps eliminate the issue of over or under staffing.
- Since the system allows for a variety of methods for clocking into work, it can be used to monitor attendance trends along the way and ensure the honesty of employees. The fingerprint clocking option definitely eliminates problems associated with dishonest logging practices.
- The system facilitates the regulation of absenteeism and attendance. The reports and overviews it makes available allow for the assessment of absence trends and attendance habits. This data can be used to regulate workforce distribution and keep overtime costs to a minimum.
- The fact that the system can be integrated into other interfaces makes it a powerful tool. It can be integrated into your existing payroll system, to compensate for overtime and unpaid time off entitlements. It can also be added into the existing human resource software or other administrative or financial software.
- The diversity of the tracking software is such that it can also be linked to point of sale systems. This allows employee productivity to be tracked based on sales.
What are the Benefits of Attendance Tracking Software?
- The time-saving benefits of the system are further seen through its paid time off the interface. Employees and managers or supervisors can use the system to schedule paid time off for departmental days, sick days, vacation or any other entitlements. The automated system notifies the relevant parties of the request for time off and a response can be given accordingly. Employees can also track their remaining entitlements and plan accordingly.
- The system is so impressive that is has safety features to ensure the protection of all employees. The scheduling function makes information available as to the location of each employee. In the event of a fire, natural disaster or other emergencies, this information can be used to locate each employee for safe evacuation.
- The system has a control in place to ensure that budgetary constraints are complied with. It sends alerts to the relevant parties if there are threats of surpassing the budget for overtime. The proactive approach of the software assures that this happens prior to the hours being worked.
- The implementation of the system removes the mistakes associated with human error, some of which are costly. The time intensive task associated with scheduling employees, now placed under the control of the system saves time, improves accuracy and saves money. Some of these tasks might have previously been performed outside of regular working hours. With this in place, administrative staff will be able to focus on more pertinent aspects of the day to day operations.
The applications for use in the retail industry in Ireland seem endless. The user-friendly nature of the attendance tracking software makes it easy to navigate. The highly customizable features of the interface allow for easy configuration.
An actual example of the success of the system can be drawn from the Lifestyle Sports Case Study. With over a thousand employees in several locations, they wanted to test the system in terms of accurate record keeping and streamlining of work activities. They were able to report a decrease in their wage bills as well as company growth.
