French fashion retailer The Kooples has partnered with digital workplace solution YOOBIC to improve employee engagement, compliance and customer experience.

The fashion brand said the YOOBIC platform bas enabled frontline staff to contribute their expertise to inform product design and has led by a 90 per cent increase in in-store compliance.

The Kooples said this has enabled a smooth, successful reopening of its store network post-lockdown.

The French clothing and accessories brand, has more than 1,000 frontline staff in 330 stores across 13 countries including 20 in the UK.

The company first deployed the YOOBIC mobile-first platform in 2018 as a response to the increasingly digitised retail environment.

The Kooples recognised the need to modernise and streamline communications and visual merchandising (VM), quality and maintenance processes across its store network, the company said.

The brand launched a series of missions, delivered to staff on their mobile devices in the flow of work, focused on ensuring the appearance of each store met the retailer’s standards.

Livio Tabbi, retail director Europe for The Kooples, said: “The first challenge was needing a tool which could be picked up quickly by the frontlines teams and above all a tool capable of meeting our need for agility, to retrieve information quickly. In the past, telephones were forbidden on the sales floor, but today they are an essential tool for accompanying customers, for understanding the product and for training. The average age of our teams is 28, they spend on average four hours per day on their smartphone, so we needed to design solutions that fit to their expectations.”

The company also sought to reduce the number of defective products sold to customers, and created a faulty product mission that allowed store staff to identify flawed products, whose sale and subsequent return, was impacting profit margins.

The retailer has also transferred all the maintenance management of its stores into the platform, allowing stores to send messages direct to the maintenance department when issues arose.

Fabrice Haiat, CEO and co-founder of YOOBIC, commented: “We are absolutely delighted with the results our partnership with The Kooples has achieved. As a retailer they genuinely understand the value and insight their frontline employees provide and understand the crucial role mobile technology, and appropriately formatted content, plays for their staff in terms of driving engagement and cohesion.”

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