The urgent question among retailers today is, who’s doing it right? Fortunately, best practices for responding to the pandemic are emerging. Here’s a smart, targeted list.

What we are seeing in the marketplace today is unprecedented. Retailers are making profound changes to the shopping experience and back-end business without a playbook or trusted guidelines. They are turning on a dime and doing things they have never contemplated in their wildest imaginations.

And doing them in real time, making things up as they go, launching game-changing initiatives day after day.

Best Practices Are Emerging

With so much happening so fast, keeping up with the speed of change and flood of information has become an essential and time-consuming task.

The best resource for a comprehensive list of dozens of fresh stories about retailer responses to the pandemic is in the Coronavirus Retail News section of the RIS website.

Beyond the latest news, retailers also need insightful analysis about what to do next. Here is a smart, practical list of emerging best practices based on an aggregation of the latest trends emerging in the marketplace:

• Altruism is a dominant trend and strikes the best possible note. Aside from Jack Dorsey pledging to give away $1 billion and winning the give-away competition, others pledging to give away millions include: Walmart ($25 million), Lowe’s ($25 million), Amazon ($20 million), Ralph Lauren ($10), Target ($10 million), Ahold Delhaize ($10 million), and Kroger ($3 million). Many other retailers are pledging to match shopper donations and donating face masks, sanitizing supplies, ventialtors, meals to healthcare responders (Stop & Shop), and rubber shoes (Crocs).
• Reinvent stores to ensure social distancing and health safety, such as contactless POS (Publix), installing handwashing stations to protect staff and customers (Chick-fil-A), limit in-store traffic by counting customers and admitting one at a time, create one-way aisles, record temperature of associates prior to each shift (Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot), reduce store hours to improve restocking and sanitation, prohibit shoppers bring reusable bags, designate hours for at-risk population groups, stop accepting returns, one-person-per-cart, supercharge BOPIS and home delivery, install plexiglass shields at checkout, and, of course, prioritize sanitizing cleaning and hand-washing practices.
• In a time of massive layoffs and hyper hiring, many retailers are showing compassion for workers, such as increasing wages and offering staff bonuses (Target, Walmart, Lowe’s) and providing extra paid sick leave (Lowe’s), pay employees for lost wages while stores are closed (Nordstrom, J.Crew, Levis) and close for Easter to give employees a break (Lowe’s).

What Tech Vendors Can Do?

Just as retailers are taking steps to help their customers in a time of crisis, tech vendors can also help their customers – retailers. Responding to the crisis, many vendors are dedicating resources to accelerate implementations, waiving upfront fees, providing free usage for a limited time, offer free portfolio assessments,

One tech company has devised a plan to help retailers fill in software gaps even during a time of crisis with a “try before you buy” approach, according to Clay Parnell, president and managing partner at The Parker Avery Group.

Parnell’s recommendations for tech vendors include: providing a bucket of “complementary hours” to existing customers, discounting service offerings, deferring billing, offering free trials, suspending or reducing subscription costs for cloud applications or platforms, providing crisis and post-crisis change-management roadmaps, and simply “helping out where needed most.”

Regarding the last point, Parnell suggests retailers should not hesitate to reach out to tech vendors “for assistance, with the assumption that no tech or consulting partner in this current period is thinking they will be hitting their revenue/utilization targets anyway and they may more than willing to help. If nothing else, have a conversation. It will allow you to step away from the fray for a few minutes and may lead to a new idea, a potential solution, or some unexpected help.”