Q&A: Mark Thomas, VP of Customer Success, Rotageek
Mark has over twenty years’ experience in workforce management and joined Rotageek late last year. Prior to WFM he worked in the hospitality and leisure industry in senior management roles both in UK and overseas.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I’ve been working in Workforce management for 20 years and have held senior leadership roles for the last 10 years. My experience covers solution design, implementation, support, and Customer success.
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
We’re disrupting traditional employee scheduling to optimise the experience for retailers, staff and customers. Rotageek is a best-of-breed workforce management solution that helps you spend less 1:1 time with the rota, and more with the people that matter.
What advantage does it add?
By digitising key tasks such as rota creation, time and attendance, shift swaps and employee communications you gain error-free workforce management and smarter labour alignment for better service, sales and NPS.
How does a product/service implementation actually look like and how do you measure success?
Importantly, we first meet the team, to review the scope, agree our success criteria, define roles and responsibilities, establish the timeline, identify milestones and build our cadence of project meetings.
From there it’s a design and build thing, tested to the nth degree. After this we run a conference room pilot, just to make sure everything is as expected before the stores get their hands on it as we train and deploy.
Throughout the implementation and beyond there’s a laser focus on the customers’ business outcomes, it’s why we’re doing this after all.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like? Can you share a case study with us?
Competition for customers and, as important, motivated, and engaged staff is where Rotageek focuses – Accurate, easy-to-create schedules that are within budget – with everyone available to meet the customers’ needs at the right time.
Visible to everyone from any device, the Rotageek platform ensures the team stays informed and can collaborate, swap shifts, book leave and check their paid hours. This drives engagement and the fairness-based scheduling rules make sure everyone gets the same opportunities.
Are there other companies you partner with?
Rotageek partners with over 150 complementary solutions enabling a seamless experience for your entire workforce: https://www.rotageek.com/partnerships-integrations.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2022 / What challenges are retailers facing in 2023?
The search to recruit and retain high-quality talent continues through 22 and will likely continue into 23. Couple this with spiralling costs, in-stock & materials, logistics and business expenses, the need to manage the workforce efficiently & productively has never been greater and, this can’t be just through slashing hours and pushing self-service into ‘no service, no sale’ environments or reducing headcount to unmanageable levels. Retailers need to be smart and only deploy the team where the business can show a need but at the right level. All the time trying to balance the expectations of a workforce that no longer looks at having a job as an end in itself.
How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
Not only digitally savvy but digitally demanding, the modern retail worker wants an always-on, intuitive product that helps them navigate their complex work-life blend. Rotageek’s training-free mobile experience and richly functional web app brings all these needs into one place with a simple login experience and an array of tools and information to help staff manage their days and managers manage their team.
Accurate forecasts, machine learning driven scheduling algorithms, clock-free time & attendance, absence management and a suite of reports give teams, managers, operators and support teams alike, all the data they need – at their fingertips and in real-time.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
At Rotageek we know the world of work is changing at almost revolutionary pace and our product and engineering teams are constantly looking for the new north star. In the short term, we continue to develop our auto-scheduling and forecasting tools to keep pace with and innovate in this rapidly evolving world and research new ways to forecast both demand and labour.
To find out how Rotageek can help you with your retail operation, click here.
