Dive Brief:

• Tulip Retail, developer of a mobile application platform for retail stores and sales associates, announced a new management suite and mobile app enhancements aimed to help store managers and associates increase productivity for store managers and associates, create a stronger employee community across stores and enable managers to operate a more efficient store, according to a press release.

• The management suite software introduces management functions for operations, district, regional and store managers to drive store manager agility, efficiency and effectiveness. Users can manage e-mail and SMS client communication templates and manage shared document files and folders for store associates. New document management capabilities help managers organize, access and share files in real time with store associates.

• Tulip Retail's web app's new interface is designed to expand the ability for store managers and corporate merchandising, marketing and operational managers to access the platform from anywhere and streamline management functions, thereby potentially increasing productivity.

Dive Insight:

In addition to the new management suite and web browser expansion, Tulip Retail also announced "clienteling" enhancements — new features intended to support better communication between store associates and customers. These include customer profile improvements and new configuration options for profile management and customer communications, as well as email enhancements that enable store associates to attach images taken using their device to e-mail messages for customers.

One can imagine this latter feature being used in a situation where a store associate follows up with a customer who had been in-store looking for a product that turned out to be out of stock. When it's back in stock, the associate could email the customer a picture of the product on the shelf to let them know. The associate could even grab two or three competing products and send the customer a pic with some details on the differences between the brands.

The footnote here is that a recent survey by Tulip Retail found that many shoppers actually believe they are more knowledgeable about products than store associates, and therefore don't want to ask associates for help. Tulip Retail's platform strengths can help store associates counter that assumption, and the result is also a more personalized customer experience.

In addition to the other enhancements mentioned, Tulip Retail also announced internationalization and Localization enhancements: The expands platform support for global retailers; adding translation support for the web app, extending the product catalog language support with additional languages, and adding support for regular, discounted, and variant pricing per location.

All of these tools in the scope of a mobile platform give store managers and associates greater ability to influence the shopping experience for consumers. That is not only going to make customers happy. It's also going to make store employees feel more empowered, and give them a bigger stake in their employer's success.