RETEL TECHNOLOGIES

On behalf of ourselves and our partner TecPro Solutions, we’d like to congratulate Jeff Creel of McPherson Oil, who recently won a new Apple iPad during this year’s NACS show.

ReTel and TecPro had a very strong showing at this year’s NACS convenience store show, where we presented the industry’s most advanced surveillance solutions to help chains and owner/operators enhance their loss prevention, operations and marketing activities. ReTel and TecPro’s show special is still available for a limited time. To learn about this special package, download our show special flyer here.

Without a doubt, cash and product theft is one of the most damaging sources of shrink faced by retailers and restaurant chains. As such, many now employ POS systems that offer robust exceptions-based reporting (XBR) to flag events that might suggest theft or shrink. And, while these systems can often capture a decent number of events that are actual theft, there are a few critical capability gaps that prevent them from truly being a comprehensive theft prevention system. These critical capability gaps are our exceptions to XBR.

XBR Exception #1: Theft that occurs outside the POS. Smarter dishonest employees have come to recognize that certain transaction keys – voids, cancellations and refunds, for instance – are now used by XBR to identify events that should be flagged and reviewed for shrink. Therefore, if they can perform transactions entirely outside of the POS, there is no opportunity for an event to be flagged in the POS. Examples of this include sweethearting (giving product away for free to friends and family), leaving the cash drawer open between transactions, and selling hard-to-inventory items (such as drinks) without using the POS.

XBR Exception #2: Too many false positives. Much like that car alarm down the block, or the boy who cried wolf, too many false positives in any XBR system renders it useless as the personnel assigned to monitor the system either lose the capability to effectively find actual events, or simply lose interest in using the system altogether. While thresholds and triggers can be adjusted to account for false positives, this often comes at the expense of reducing the system’s capability to find actual events – a classic Catch 22 situation. This problem can be exacerbated significantly if multiple locations are using XBR simultaneously, thereby flooding the loss prevention or asset protection department with volumes of events that are too numerous to review.

While these problems are serious, they aren’t impossible to solve. ReTel’s new CashAudit service is designed specifically to both discover shrink events that occur outside of the POS, and also work directly with XBR systems to act as a second filter on captured events to deliver only those that need added LP review to internal auditors. The result? XBR as it should be, and true deterrents to employee theft no matter how many locations need to be monitored. To learn more about CashAudit, please click here.

Does it seem like you’re always hiring new employees? If you manage a retail or restaurant establishment, then you’re familiar with rapid and constant employee turnover. The reasons for such rapid turnover are varied, but there are a number of common factors from business to business: general job dissatisfaction, a lack of opportunities for advancement, diminished loyalty to the employer and employees’ own recognition of poor performance and therefore a desire to “wipe the slate clean” by going somewhere new. All in all, retailers and restaurants face a workforce that typically turns over every six months – and sometimes even more often than that.

Beyond the constant challenge of hiring new employees to replace those that have left, this turnover leads to other issues that managers and owner/operators must face. In this post, we’ll focus on employees’ understanding of management expectations as they pertain to quality of customer service and loss prevention.

When a new employee is hired, one of the first things that employee does is go through training. In that training period, management sets expectations of job performance that the employee is expected to meet. Once that employee completes training, there can typically be a period of good performance, followed by a slow decline into poor service, dishonesty and overall diminished performance that does not meet management expectations. Given that, at any given time, any number of employees are moving further down the path towards their six-month anniversary/exit, it can therefore be assumed that a range of attitudes towards job performance will exist within any retail or restaurant staff. This leads to a problem: social proof takes over quickly, as new employees see the bar set by their more senior co-workers. A vicious cycle begins, and soon, the time that it takes for an employee to go from a new, higher performer to an older, lower performer contracts significantly.

At this point, many managers start to look for mechanisms by which they can reinstate a culture of higher performance. This can include positive incentives, such as bonuses, or negative incentives, such as the dreaded public execution, where a particularly low performing employee (even one whose tenure is longer than 6 months) is fired for repeat infractions or more grievous events such as cash theft. Often times, these rare and sporadic mechanisms will have a near-term effect on performance, with all employees generally increasing their level of performance to either help attain a bonus collectively, or minimize the chance of being the next “public execution” individually. Soon after this near-term performance bump, however, employee behavior starts to trend back towards the mean and the status quo is reinstated.

What, then, can the smart manager do to maintain consistently high performance without resorting to erratic tactics that only lead to short-term gains? As the axiom goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Therefore, the answer is providing employees with constant awareness that they are under constant measurement – and that they will be treated appropriately for their performance (and that includes beneficial treatment for better performance).

In the past, constant measurement like this was tedious, costly, impossible, or all of these. With the advent of tools like ReTel’s ConstantAudit, however, ongoing measurement can be performed easily and at a low cost to help management keep track of critical information such as employee theft events, speed of service and consumer experience. These tools can also be used by management to provide ongoing feedback to employees to both provide awareness that measurement exists, as well as share best practices and provide benchmarks that employees can strive to meet or exceed to earn bonuses and accolades.

And, most importantly, by setting an ongoing culture of accountability in every store, the old culture of getting away with “just good enough” work rapidly disappears. New employees will be entering an environment where their peers perform at a higher level for longer periods of time, reversing the vicious cycle of diminishing performance and consistently allowing for further optimization. It takes time to achieve, but once the tipping point is reached, the results are well worth the effort.

To request this white paper, click here now.

As the world economy continues its weak recovery, internal shrink and fraud continues to plague both retailers and restaurants as the biggest source of loss for these organizations. The combination of a high volume of cash transactions, valuable and useful product inventories, cash-strapped employees and insufficient utilization of existing deterrent mechanisms has served to increase both the frequency and significance of these loss events.

Fortunately, there are many tools available to managers now to help curtail these losses, starting with understanding the employee motivation to steal at its psychological core, and then understanding how to replace these motivations to steal with motivations to perform.

To explain these motivations, our latest white paper explores the management concept of Expectancy Theory as it relates to employee theft and employee performance.

In this white paper, we will explore:

• The three psychological factors that determine whether or not an employee is likely to steal
• One simple change you can make today to instantly transform high-theft employees into high-performing employees
• How the same forces that hamper employee performance can also hinder management attempts to reduce shrink and increase revenues.

To request this white paper, click here now.

To learn more about Expectancy Theory, click here.

QUICK LINK: Download the whitepaper here – no registration is required.

Within the retail industry, it’s commonly known that internal fraud – that is, losses that occur because of employees – account for the majority of thefts and losses suffered by retailers. With the one exception of organized retail crime, these internal losses are typically the biggest concern for retailers’ loss prevention (LP) and asset protection (AP) departments.

Internal loss comes in a variety of forms. At the simplest level, asset misappropriation activities such as skimming (taking cash before it hits the books) and larceny (stealing cash and product that is already on the books) can be pervasive throughout the organization, from the stores to the warehouse to corporate HQ. At a more complicated level, corruption activities such as embezzlement are often more isolated to senior management levels, and are often very difficult to detect.

In their latest Report To The Nations, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) surveyed corporations and independent CFEs worldwide to discover three key sets of data:

1. The types of fraud events that organizations typically experience
2. The total dollar amount associated with each type of fraud event
3. The average amount of time it takes to detect a fraud event

The report was both fascinating and sobering. Overall, most organizations lose five percent of their annual revenues to fraud. Factor in the low margins of retailers, and this becomes an extremely significant hit to the bottom line. Even more troubling, however, is that fraud events often go undetected for as long as two years. Early detection, and technology that enables early detection, therefore becomes paramount to organizations that suffer regularly from these losses. It can make the difference between profitability and significant losses.

We have taken the 2010 Report To The Nations and analyzed the key points that are relevant to retail LP and AP professionals. In particular, we look at the impact that early detection has on reducing losses suffered as a result of fraud. The white paper is available for download by clicking on this link, and no registration is required. Please feel free to distribute this white paper, and your feedback is appreciated.

ReTel Technologies will be exhibiting in booth 1140 at the
National Retail Federation Loss Prevention Conference and Exposition in Atlanta from June 14-16, 2010.

ReTel’s powerful surveillance discovery platform has been designed from the ground up to extract, organize and report on the valuable loss prevention, operations and marketing data captured by existing surveillance systems as efficiently as possible. ReTel’s surveillance discovery platform seamlessly blends the capabilities of a trained auditing workforce with the efficiency of cloud-based video processing to deliver next generation surveillance solutions with radical shifts in cost, accuracy and reliability.

To schedule a meeting at the show, please contact us today.

The team will be meeting with prospects, existing clients and security vendors and they look forward to forging new partnerships at this event.