AI in Retail: Beyond The Hype and Into Reality for Store Operations.
The Top 10 AI use cases that Retail Operators at every level told us would transform their daily work. AI for Retail Operations is...
Shared Responsibility (Sept 2021)
When we first started building Quorso, we believed that it was crucial for accountability that exactly one person was responsible for each area of a business.
Since then, we’ve learned much more about how Store Teams actually work and how flexibility and adaptability has become increasingly important. For many companies, there’s a strong emphasis on shared ownership of performance and results across the team.
To reflect this idea of shared ownership, there’s now a new way you can set up Quorso, with multiple people sharing responsibility, each able to launch, collaborate on and provide updates on missions:
There are several scenarios where we’ve seen teams turbocharging how they’re using Quorso, increasing the number of missions they can take on and boosting the results they’re getting.
Models of shared responsibility that we’ve seen working well include:
Just like you, we continue to evolve.
We’re excited to introduce this new, more flexible and powerful way of working as a team in Quorso.
We believe strongly in a future (actually, a present!) where every team member is empowered with access to the most relevant data, insights from their peers and missions they can own and be proud of!
Snooze Missions (August 2021)
From August, we are changing the way that Responsible Managers reject missions, to give them more control over what happens after they’ve done so.
Users will be asked to select from a set of organisation- and metric-specific “reasons” that are offered when rejecting a mission. They will then be able to “snooze” the mission for a period of time, or forever if need be.
Quorso will not put the item back into its pool of potential mission suggestions until the specified snooze period has ended.
Personalised KPI dashboards (May 2021)
See just the KPIs that matter to you.
Different people in your company most likely have different priorities, and your KPI Dashboard can now be set up to reflect that. For example, if you’re a Fresh Produce Manager, you’ll only see KPIs related to fresh produce; and a Store Manager could have a more focused set of KPIs than an Operational Director’s broader set. This way, the right data gets to the right people, and no one need be distracted or overwhelmed.
Also in this release…
We now show the number and financial value of incoming missions that each member of your team has in their Mission Inbox, so you can see who has the most room for improvement and who’s leaving value on the table.
Multi-level Team view
KPI-specific Suggestion thresholds
Single-step Reject
Top Opportunities status indicators
(April 2021)
With the latest updates we’ve made to the Team experience, managers at any level in your company’s structure can now see a tailored view of how their team is performing:
No matter which role you play, the Team experience gives you clear visibility of what’s going on at the level (or levels) below you. As well as driving transparency and accountability, the Team experience helps every manager prioritise where (and with whom) their attention needs to be focussed to get the biggest results.
Not all KPIs are equal. Maybe a $200/week opportunity to improve sales of a Grocery product category is significant, but for Home Appliances, it’s only really worth taking on opportunities worth $1,000 or more. Now KPI Managers can set a specific minimum threshold for each KPI. Only missions that exceed that value will be sent to the Mission Inbox.
Sometimes sales can take a dip and there’s a good reason or explanation for it. When this happens, it’s now a single-step process to quickly “Reject” the incoming mission, so you can focus on the most actionable and valuable missions in your Inbox.
When you drill down into a KPI, we show you all the opportunities to improve its performance. Against each one, we now indicate whether there is an Incoming Mission, Pre-launch Mission or Live Mission on it, or if it’s been Rejected, so you can see clearly which of the top opportunities are already being acted on, and which might need a nudge from you.
Team screen sort (April 2021)
We know that as a Regional, Area or District Manager, you want to both celebrate successes and identify who most needs your coaching and support. Now, you can sort your team members by their activity and results in Quorso:
As well as the default order (by name), you can sort by:
Insights Explorer Enhancements on Desktop and Mobile (April 2021)
On desktop, it looks like this:
Reject Mission Guidance (April 2021)
To help users understand the difference between Accepting and Rejecting a Mission, we now provide in-app guidance on when to do which, and what the consequence of each of them is:
Multi-item KPIs (April 2021)
We now support multi-item KPIs on your Business screen, which gives you more flexibility to create KPIs that contain items across multiple different departments or product lines. For example, you could track (and generate incoming missions for):
Universal filter (March 2021)
If you are a District Manager, Regional Manager or Executive with a remit including multiple sites, you can now apply a location filter across the whole of Quorso, focussing down your view of Mission Control, Team, and KPIs to everything associated with that location.
Preparing for your regular call with one of your direct reports?
Quickly filter to their district or store and see how they’re performing across their KPIs, the status of their missions in Mission Control, and what impact each team member is having via the Team screen.
This takes the pain out of preparing for a valuable and productive conversation about the successes, challenges, and opportunities facing this location, based on the same holistic view of performance that you can each see in Quorso.
We’re gradually rolling out the universal filter to everyone and you’ll have it first on desktop, followed a week later by tablet-friendly and mobile web-app views.
More filters are in the works; let us know what other filters would be most useful to facilitate the conversations that are important to you and your goals.
Also in this release…
Insights Explorer views now come up almost instantly for incoming missions, enabling you to quickly diagnose the issue and leap into action!
Insights Explorer is now available for almost all data points, helping you understand and track what’s going on, often to product-level detail.
Edit/delete comments, eyeball your password, and enjoy Mission Control on the go (March 2021)
We recommend using a password manager that automatically fills in a unique and strong password for each app you use.
However, we know that some people don’t have that option and need to manually type their passwords. This can be tricky when you can’t see what you’re typing, especially on mobile. To see what you’re typing, simply tap the show/hide icon on the right:
As you swipe left and right to check out all your missions, we now “snap” your view to the nearest column, so you can see a whole card at a time. Just a little touch to make it even easier to use Quorso on your mobile:
Single-hue Heatmap and KPI Management
The heatmap in Insights Explorer has changed into a single colour gradient based on the value size of the opportunity (previously, it featured three distinct colours based on value bands).
Each area that shows as red on the heatmap represents an opportunity, and the depth of colour shows you the degree to which you should focus on the values.
Users that are designated ‘KPI Managers’ can now create, group and edit KPIs quickly and easily, so that KPIs are displayed in a way that is clearer or more familiar to your organisation. Changes are reflected across all users’ KPI dashboards.
Insights Explorer on remote devices (February 2021)
Quorso is all about empowering the frontline to quickly take informed action. Now, frontline managers can access Insights Explorer on any device. Whether you need to see exactly which products are underselling or which times of day you might have overallocated staff, you can explore the data, decide what to do and take action, right there and then.
Grouped KPIs (February 2021)
We know you have multiple priorities across your business. To help you keep track of all these, the KPI Dashboard can now be organised into groups of related KPIs.
Within each group, you can see all the KPIs side-by-side and scroll to the right for more. Usually, they’ll be organised with the most important priorities first.
Taking a holistic view across a range of KPIs like this allows teams to quickly shift focus and adapt to changing priorities.
With the increasing complexity facing businesses and managers at every level, we believe this kind of agility is essential to being successful in 2021.
We always love to hear from you: what impact is it having for you and your team to be able to track KPIs in Quorso and launch missions across all the metrics that matter?
Dynamic KPI baselines (January 2021)
It’s not always possible to set a flat target for how each of your KPIs should be performing every week, especially in these volatile times,
We have added the ability to assess the performance of your KPIs in Quorso versus whatever baseline makes the most sense for each KPI, for example:
To adapt to the different realities of each of your stores, these baselines are also dynamic: they can vary per store, vary over time and even adjust themselves automatically based on some other measure, such as footfall.
Then, when you drill into a particular KPI, you’ll see that stores can be ranked either based on the raw KPI value or on the variance to that dynamic baseline:
Mission Control is now your Quorso homepage!
As missions are the centre of what you do in Quorso, Mission Control is now the first screen you’ll see after logging in. Here’s a quick run-through of where everything can be found:
Mission Control for everyone (December 2020)
Connecting executives and central teams to what’s happening at the front-line is also something we really believe in, so today we’ve released an update that takes that a step further.
Now, everyone can see “Mission Control”, so for those who need oversight of the whole business, you can see all of the live missions across all of your stores, as well as those that have been suggested and are being planned.
And this is just the start. We have a few more updates coming for you in January to help you make the most of this unprecedented view of your business!
Profile Picture Upload (December 2020)
In these strange times, it’s nice to be reminded of the brilliant real people we are collaborating with on our shared missions. So we’ve made it even easier to upload a profile picture when you join Quorso. And if you didn’t upload a picture already, you still can: just go to “Profile” in the main menu and click the camera icon. Now everyone can put a friendly face to your name ?
Also in this release:
Top Stats Bar (November 2020)
At the top of every page in Quorso, you can now see your overall numbers, giving you an at-a-glance view of how you’re doing.
See your:
KPI Dashboard Enhancements (November 2020)
It’s useful to know how a KPI is performing overall across all your sites, but what if that number is masking some sites where there’s still significant underperformance?
Now you can see how many sites are worse than target on your KPI dashboard:
Drill-down to the KPI Rankings to see which sites those are and investigate further. You can sort by any of the columns; for example you could use ‘1-week change’ to see who’s performance has dipped the most last week.
Then click on any of the sites to see the top opportunities for improvement (use the filter to reset your view to see all sites).
The KPI Leaderboard (October 2020)
One of the first things you want to know when drilling down into a KPI is: who’s doing well at this and who’s not? Well, now that’s exactly what we’ll show as soon as you open up a KPI!
Here you can see:
How might a Regional Manager interpret and use this information?