Refresh & Rollout: Elevating Your Brand, Customer Experience

Rolling out retail store refreshes for hundreds or thousands of sites nationwide can easily lead to inefficiencies and unexpected costs. Staying on the right track is no small feat.

The central mission is to take your brand vision and strategy and turn it into a smooth, successful rollout that brings your brand to life while delivering a great customer experience in every store and across all digital touchpoints.

With over 60 years of experience, Miller Zell understands what it takes to create an efficient, start-to-finish process for store refreshes and nationwide rollouts.

Let’s explore this process, which leads with data, strategic insights and creativity and follows through with efficient production, digital savvy and outstanding program management.

It starts before you begin

RFPs are like dating. Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not and what’s a good fit and what’s not.

So, establish clearly what you’re looking for in the upcoming collaboration. And what you’re not. Know which “gray areas” you want to red flag in RFP responses, and whether the words you’re reading match the vendor’s proven track record.

Your wording also matters, too. RFPs that clearly define project requirements, deadlines and budgets provide vendors the parameters they will need to work within. They also engage with potential partners asking questions and seeking more clarity to ensure that their team, resources and capabilities match the demands of the RFP.

Otherwise, there can be surprises and friction during rollout — delivery date inflexibility, out-of-scope work, exit & low-volume penalties, rush-job charges, endless go-backs, etc. — that ruin budgets, timelines and end results.

A well-executed RFP attracts the best partner with the best solutions, ensuring transparency before beginning a collaboration that should be mutually beneficial.

Implementing a strategy to bring your brand to life

Before you refresh your store fleet, it’s important to challenge your general goals and potential solutions with granular analysis. This starts with conducting a thorough, boots-on-the-ground review of your current spaces, identifying areas that need improvement and how different footprints and different regions often have different needs.

This, of course, also includes gathering input from customers and staff and analyzing sales and survey data. And don’t underestimate associate input, as making their jobs easier and more rewarding boosts your brand and directly connects to customer experiences.

This all feeds your design team’s focuses and goals. It also should fuel a “What about this?” prototyping process that tests updated design concepts, your brand’s potential evolutions and new trends and technology. Consider in advance how feedback can be interpreted and should influence the rollout process.

As the design development process advances, the focus shifts to scalability, often with a “good, better, best” approach for various footprints and store locations that follows highly detailed site surveys.

If this refresh targets a significant number of stores, as is typically the case, scalability becomes a main driver for the final designs, including a complete, in-advance understanding of material selections, fabrication, procurement, warehousing, kit packing, shipping and installation.

Program management: technology and human expertise

A successful transition from design development to rollout is preceded by clarity on four issues.

• Be informed and aware of the whole cost, from design through installation.
• Make sure software and communications systems are aligned between you and your vendor partners.
• Understand next steps, processes and protocols by asking for centralized program management.
• If necessary, adopt phased implementation to ensure store operations continue with as little interruption as possible.

Because few significant national rollouts avoid all moment of unexpected friction — weather! Port workers’ strike — understanding the end-to-end process should include protocols for overcoming potential disruptions that could cause budget overruns.

Part of this includes a complete understanding of all the SaaS retail logistics platforms that will be used during the project. These should be transparent and user-friendly, and they should include robust attribute capabilities to track all details of each location.

Are there billing and procurement systems to integrate? What is the process for purchase orders and change orders? Are you set up in your supplier’s system to eliminate potential delays down the road?

These systems combine with efficient human program management expertise and provide transparency across survey management, location attributes, floor plans, orders, shipping, scheduling, inventory and installation progress for multi-unit operations. This allows you to be certain about where things stand and what’s ahead.

Installation, quality control and follow-up

Rollouts aren’t robotic. Not only do they often include unexpected challenges, they also offer unexpected opportunities for cost savings and value engineering.

Auditing pilot store executions often leads to valuable learnings that help streamline custom installation and ease of build or even how kit-packed boxes will be organized inside delivery trucks and offloaded into stores.

Adopt and refine an installation protocol guided by project managers who collaborate with design development, procurement, production and warehousing quality control.

Learning and adapting quickly is how a program efficiently and purposefully accelerates and scales the installation process from five or six stores a week to 30 or 40.

Understanding an exacting process beforehand, which includes learnings and implementation flexibility, ensures that ISDs (in-store dates) are met, and quality is maintained across multi-unit projects.

Moreover, conducting post-rollout evaluations to measure the impact and success of the updates provides a deeper understanding of your improving customer experience and where you might go next.

Great planning, communication and attention to details during large-scale retail refreshes and rollouts aren’t easy to establish and maintain.

But the rewards for optimized environmental design, brand activation and in-store execution are high. They bring your brand to life through great customer experiences, increased brand loyalty and ROI.