The prime focus of the report is to analyze the chosen industry and the current trends, and the skills and expertise required for the job role. This assignment will cover the retail industry and briefly analyzes the roles and responsibilities in the retail industry. This assignment will also focus on the preferred job role and the job advertisement for the vacancy in the prefered industry. As a management graduate, I wish to get employed in the retail industry as it is one of the fastest-growing industries, and the current diseases of Covid-19 have reshaped the customer’s attitude towards retail shopping. After graduation, I want to gain more knowledge about the retail industry and continue to learn more expertise required for the field.
The retail industry comprises departmental stores, supermarkets, street market stalls, online retailers, and many more. The retail industry in the UK has a broader spectrum, and it is not only confined within the sales on the high street. The retail industry has started to think about the shopping attitude of the customers.
There are effects of technology, and globalization greatly impacts the retail industry. Small to medium-sized retail organization uses the technological advantage to make themselves a well-known brand (Kelvin 2021). The retail brands use omnichannel concepts and automated tools to beat the market competition. The concept of omnichannel is helping the brand to influence the customers to get a better shopping experience and increasing the customer loyalty towards the brand (Christoforou and Melanthiou 2019). The automated tools are helping the brand managers to manage the labour shortage issues to handle the sales. Another technological trend in the retail industry is social commerce which can be considered as the biggest digital trend in the retail industry. The high usage of artificial intelligence helps enhance the interaction during shopping, and it helps reduce the gap between the online and offline shopping experience of the customers (Moorhouse, Dieck and Jung 2018). The offline retailers are changing their business model to execute a new way to earn revenue.
Globalization is considered a continual process that any nation cannot avoid, and the trends of globalization greatly impact the development of the retail sector. The impact of globalization can be observed by enhancing online retailing and the international process of retail operation (Alkiviadis et al. 2022). Globalization in terms of exchanging good and new ideas has existed from the primitive age. Due to the globalization internationalization effect, there has been a huge change in the customer’s preferences, and also the advent of technology has restructured the concept of online retail trade, and apart from that, several aspects are gradually changing in terms of business activities.
Every industry requires certain skills and expertise in a specific field. The industry experts expect specific key skills from the applicant, especially freshers, yet to start their careers. Here the list of key skills is as follows:
The retail industry is all about dealing with the customer’s queries and trying to cross-sell to the customers. The employees are expected to know to deal with the customers and take them into the stages of sale fannel and ultimately close the deal (Castillo 2018). The organization can train their employees through ways. Role-playing can be the best option to make them learn the technique of selling the product to the customers. Short videos can be an option to teach the employees about retail sales.
General Trends
The retail associates are expected to be multitaskers as someone in this job role has to manage many customers once at a time. The employees should know to prioritize customer queries and other tasks as multiple customers may simultaneously seek the salesperson’s attention (Simpson, McKechnie and Hobbs 2018). The employees should have the knowledge to handle the situation.
The sales associate has to have the skills to handle the register and know the correct folding of the clothes in the display. The stores regularly update their inventory and display settings every week in the retail industry (Broekhuizen, Bakker and Postma 2018). The employees need to learn the new store display very quickly, and the employees are expected to be proactive with the technology as the retail industry is closely integrated with the mobile POS technology.
Communication skill is the most important and inevitable skill that one must have before coming to the retail industry. Every job role in this particular sector is all about dealing with customers. The employees are expected to have excellent communication skills to deal with customers’ queries, greet the customers while entering the store, and address their problems with any store products (Aryanti and Adhariani 2020). The sales associates are expected to assist the customers with particular product suggestions, and there they need to have excellent communication skills to deal with that situation.
In today’s shopping landscape, sales associate needs to have storytelling skills to promote particular products to their customers. Retail products are often being commoditized, and the retailers are encouraging their associates to create stories for their specific product to build a connection with their potential customers (Sundström, Lundberg and Ziakas 2021).
The retail industry requires certain areas of knowledge and expertise that helps to create a better customer experience about the stores. The areas of knowledge and expertise in the retail industry are following:
The retail associate must have a deep understanding and accurate product knowledge to address the customer queries and guide them with the best-suited solution. The sales associate needs to identify the bestselling products and the key attributes (Robertson, Ferreira and Botha 2018). Organizations can keep posters and flyers filled with an infographic to make their employees knowledgeable about certain product specifications and features.
Nowadays, the customers are well-informed about the shopping trend through the advent of technology. The research shows that 83% of the customers think they are way smarter and more knowledgeable than the sales associate (Meyer, Siemon and Robra-Bissantz 2021). The sales associate need to develop certain industry expertise to engage the customers with the shopping experience and put them enough information that is completely unknown to the customers. The sales associates who work in the offline retail outlets, the employees need to work on the in-store branding and retail marketing techniques so that they can be well aware of retail in-store layout.
Here for this part of the assignment, TESCO Plc has been chosen. TESCO Plc is a British multinational retail organization. The organization is ranked in the 3rd position to earn the gross revenue (Liberadzki, Jaworski and Liberadzki 2021). Figure.2 (Appendix.2) shows that the job advertisement is about the customer service assistant position. This job role mentioned in the appendix excites me because, being a management graduate, I can get exposure in the practical field in a reputed company like TESCO Plc. This job will allow me to deal with the customer’s queries and also help me to learn the technique to attend to the customer. This job role will help me gain adequate product knowledge and service of the company they are dealing with. This particular job role helps me understand the customer’s needs and demands and get a better understanding of the working culture of the retail industry.
I have chosen the retail industry, which can give me a better exposure to dealing with customer service only within a retail organization like TESCO Plc. Being a management graduate, I intend to deal with customer service, and this job role in my prefered industry will assist me with the opportunity.
Marketing is all about understanding the customers’ needs and providing them with the proper solution (Nadube 2018). The job role of customer service assistant is a part of marketing where the executive’s responsibility is to understand the problem of the customers they are facing and suggest a best-suited solution to make their shopping experience better. This is the reason I prefer this job opportunity.
This is an emerging job in the chosen retail industry. The organization has sales associates for their department to assist their in-store customers. But this job role of customers service assistant is an emerging position in the organization to assist the customer’s queries not only within in-store but also helping the customers who order from the website of TESCO Plc. This job position has future potential. Anyone who belongs to the graduate criteria should apply for this job role. It will allow the candidate to better understand the industry working culture to do better in their next job role.
Conclusion
This assignment is based on the secondary research work of identifying skills required for the retail industry and the area of knowledge and industry expertise. A particular job role of customer service assistant has been chosen to get exposure to the retail world of customer dealing.
References
Alkiviadis, K., Grigoris, L., Dimitrios, K. and Christina, T., 2022. Complexity of costing systems, integrated information technology and retail industry performance. Journal of Accounting and Taxation, 14(1), pp.102-111.
Aryanti, C. and Adhariani, D., 2020. Students’ perceptions and expectation gap on the skills and knowledge of accounting graduates. The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics, and Business, 7(9), pp.649-657.
Broekhuizen, T.L., Bakker, T. and Postma, T.J., 2018. Implementing new business models: What challenges lie ahead?. Business Horizons, 61(4), pp.555-566.
Castillo, J., 2018. How interactions influence customer empowerment and satisfaction in the retail industry. Journal Of Business And Retail Management Research (JBRMR), 12(4).
Christoforou, T. and Melanthiou, Y., 2019. The practicable aspect of the omni-channel retailing strategy and its impact on customer loyalty. In The synergy of business theory and practice (pp. 239-260). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Kelvin, C.H.L., 2021. Analysis of the development of e-commerce in the retail industry in the recent years. Hong Kong Institute of Business Studies, pp.1-22.
Liberadzki, M., Jaworski, P. and Liberadzki, K., 2021. Spread Analysis of the Sustainability-Linked Bonds Tied to an Issuer’s Greenhouse Gases Emissions Reduction Target. Energies, 14(23), p.7918.
Meyer, M., Siemon, D. and Robra-Bissantz, S., 2021. Emotion-based IS support for Customer-Salesperson Interaction.
Moorhouse, N., Dieck, M. and Jung, T., 2018. Technological innovations transforming the consumer retail experience: A review of literature. Augmented reality and virtual reality, pp.133-143.
Nadube, P.M., 2018. Understanding integrated marketing communication: Concepts, definitions and.Robertson, J., Ferreira, C. and Botha, E., 2018. The influence of product knowledge on the relative importance of extrinsic product attributes of wine. Journal of wine research, 29(3), pp.159-176.
Simpson, A., McKechnie, J. and Hobbs, S., 2018. Learning in work: perceptions from working teenagers. Journal of Education and Work, 31(4), pp.433-446.
Sundström, M., Lundberg, C. and Ziakas, V., 2021. Episodic retail settings: A sustainable and adaptive strategy for city centre stores. Sustainability, 13(5), p.2482.
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
