Shared Responsibility

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:

• District Manager and Store Manager collaborate together on prioritising and launching missions (typically in convenience retail or smaller format stores)
• Store Manager and Assistant Store Manager cover for one another, each working shifts on overlapping weekdays
• Department Managers take the lead on launching missions, with support and coaching from their Store Manager (typically in large stores with 1000+ product lines demanding strong department leads)
• Holiday Cover can be more easily managed with a senior colleague able to temporarily cover for a Manager during holidays or other absences, and that Manager can quickly pick up in-flight missions on their return

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

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.

KPI personalisation

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…

How much improvement opportunity each member of your team sitting on?

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.

Drive Team Performance at every level of your business

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:

• As an Executive, you can keep abreast of overall business performance with a high-level Region-by-Region performance breakdown
• As a Regional Manager, you can assess the performance of your team of District Managers and identify your champions as well as who needs support
• As a District Manager, you can coach each of the Store Managers in your District
• And as a Store Manager, you can review and manage performance of each Department within your Store

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.

KPI-specific Suggestion Thresholds

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.

Single-step Reject

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.

Top Opportunities – status indicators

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.

Your Team, Sorted

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:

• Best-performing missions: identify and congratulate who’s driven the most improvement in the last week
• Worst-performing missions: see who needs a bit of assistance with their live missions
• Most missions: who are your champions with the most live missions on the go?
• Least missions: who needs a bit of a nudge?

Coming soon over the next couple of weeks, we’ll also be adding:

• Last seen most recently / longest ago: so you know who’s most enthusiastic or who’s engagement has dwindled
• Best/worst KPI performance: see who’s doing best/worst on their KPIs and prioritize who most needs your help and support
• Value of incoming missions: see how many missions each person has in their Mission Inbox and who has the most value that they are still to take action on this week

Insights Explorer now even easier to use on mobile

1. Insights Explorer now opens full-screen. First, choose the view, units and time period option you want to see
2. Press “View” and the options collapse down, giving you the maximum amount of screen space devoted to exploring your data

• With Insights Explorer, you can explore available data by up to two “view by” dimensions at a time, such as category, brand, product, weekday or daypart
• There are different units you can view:
  • Actual Sales: to see your best and worst-selling products
  • Peer Variance: to see where you’re over/underperforming similar stores
  • Opportunity Value: to see how much more you could be making on each product if you improved inline with peers
• Opportunity Value dictates the colour-coding: the brighter the red, the bigger the opportunity. You can use this to identify patterns and launch missions that drive improvement across a range of underperforming products
• Set time period to “last 4 weeks” to smooth out any week-to-week volatility and see wider patterns and identify structural issues with even greater potential impact

On desktop, it looks like this:

When should I Accept or Reject a Mission?

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

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):

• Seasonal sales across all departments
• Premium or high-margin products
• Waste % across all fresh produce categories

Universal filter: get better prepared for agile coaching calls and site visits

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: pre-caching for incoming missions

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 and delete comments

Submitted a comment with a typo? No problemo:

Now you can quickly correct mistakes by selecting the menu icon at the top-right of any of your comments.

Show/hide password icon on the log-in form

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:

Mission Control: now even snappier on mobile

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:

Heatmap makeover!

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.

Managing KPIs

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 at your fingertips, on the shop floor

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… aka the Netflix of KPIs!

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.

You can now set up your KPIs around your high-level business goals like:

• Increase Sales
• Operational Efficiency
• Customer Happiness
• Employee Health & Wellbeing
• Net Zero Emissions by 2030

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?

Also in this release:

• Accept or Reject: every week, you’ll get 3–5 incoming missions in your Mission Inbox and be offered the simple decision:
  • Accept the mission if you’re going to take action to drive improvement
  • Reject the mission if it’s not something you can act on this week and we’ll learn to send you fewer missions like that in the future
• Delete drafts: accepted a mission and then realise you can’t act on it? No problem, you can now delete it
• Complete your mission early: achieved the result you were after already? Now you can end a mission before the target date you set and it’ll move over to your “Archive” column
• Site names in Mission Control: we now show which site/store each mission relates to on all the Mission Control cards

Dynamic KPI baselines

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:

• Sales vs. last year
• Basket size vs a fixed target
• Conversion rate vs. peer average
• Labour Spend vs. budget

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:

In other news…

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 all users

Our customers often share stories about how using Quorso helps drive transparency and accountability throughout the business in a really healthy way. Access to up-to-date performance data; visibility of how you’re doing compared to similar stores; and most crucially,  instant learning of missions other people are succeeding with.

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!

Also in this release:

• Tick off those tasks: previously, we sent you one task at the start of the week to “Review my suggestions”. Because every mission counts, you’ll now get a task for each suggestion. This makes it quicker for you to jump into each one and act on it. Plus, you get to feel the satisfaction as you launch each mission and tick off another task!
• Quality over quantity: you might notice you’re now getting fewer notifications from Quorso. We’ve removed a few of the less important ones to help you focus on what matters most. We now only notify you about the events that are most relevant and important to you, like new suggestions for you and feedback or comments from your colleagues.

Friendly faces

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:

• On Mission Control, live missions are ordered by % change so you can more easily compare performance across different metrics, with the missions that are driving the biggest % improvement shown first.
• KPI targets: If a KPI has a target, this is shown on the graph on the KPI Drill-down page, after you’ve clicked into that KPI from the Business screen
• KPI filtering: We’ve made it quicker and easier to switch between business units by constraining the filter to just one business unit at a time (you can also still filter to multiple business units by choosing a wider location and/or category)
• KPI rankings: Archived business units were being considered when calculating KPI rankings, so you could get a situation where for example you’d see all of your live business units but the rankings would start at 4th, 5th, etc. Archived sites are now excluded from those rankings
• KPI re-loading: We fixed a bug that could sometimes occur if you filtered the KPI page to a single business unit and then reloaded the page

Your Top Stats

‘My Team’ shows you how each of your team members is doing, but what about how you’re doing overall?

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:

• Live missions and what proportion are driving improvement.
• Average improvement across all those live missions since they were launched.
• KPI performance, which shows you the distribution of how your KPIs are doing across all the sites that you manage. The colours indicate the proportion of KPI-Site pairings that are performing in each quartile of performance, with dark green signifying the top 25%, down to dark red signifying the bottom 25%.
• All-time success is your all-time count of missions that were completed and generated improvement.
• Star performer is the one to celebrate! This is a recently completed mission that moved the furthest up the rankings.

How many sites are underperforming on each KPI?

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).

Rankings

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:

• The Ranking of each site on KPI performance across all the sites that have data (how’s each site doing on the KPI?)
• The Trend (change in KPI ranking) and 1-week-change (in KPI value) compared to the previous week (who’s going up and who’s going down?)
• Live missions and whether they are driving improvement or not (who’s taking action and what’s working?)

How might a Regional Manager interpret and use this information?

• “Morgan Rd” has shot to 1st position, moving 11 places up the leaderboard with an improvement of $0.59 in their average basket size, driven by 1 successful live mission. It’s a similar story at “Pearson Ave.” and “S Hall Ave.”
• Whereas “AL-101” moved down 18 places, losing $1.00 in basket size as their live mission fails to improve performance
• Overall, overall degradation in the KPI is driven by just 3 sites with declining performance, while 5 are on the up—and the top three of those all have successful live missions on the go—maybe these could be replicated elsewhere?