YOOBIC NEO: An AI Coach for Scaling Frontline Employee Experience in Retail and Hospitality

The future of retail and hospitality operations lies in the effective utilization of AI.

This is more than a bold prediction — it's a reality unfolding before our eyes — backed by compelling data and rapidly evolving consumer behavior.

"AI is no longer just an aspiration in the retail sector; it's a reality reshaping every facet of the industry," said Leslie Hand, Group Vice President for IDC Retail Insights.

AI is setting new efficiency and growth standards in retail and hospitality

According to new research, the AI in retail market is projected to reach $57.8 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 41 percent from 2023 to 2030.

This growth is driven by a few key factors:

• Increasing access and awareness about AI, big data, and analytics
• Adoption of multichannel or omnichannel retailing strategies
• The need to enhance customer experience and improve employee productivity

"Beyond personalized recommendations and inventory predictions, AI is also creating a smart, responsive, data-driven framework for employee and workforce management. By transforming multiple dimensions of retail operations, AI is setting a new standard in retail, driving both efficiency and growth,” Hand said.

It makes sense that scaling and personalizing frontline management is a key focus.

More organizations are beginning to invest in their frontline team operations, because retail and hospitality leaders have already demonstrated that when you do, sales growth rates are above average.

Introducing YOOBIC NEO for easier frontline management

As the need for digital transformation intensifies, YOOBIC has stepped up, launching YOOBIC NEO — a suite of AI tools that will redefine how organizations engage, train, and communicate with their frontline teams.

YOOBIC NEO’s AI features — designed to integrate seamlessly with YOOBIC’s existing workflows — will deliver unprecedented productivity gains for admins and managers, while providing personalized employee experiences for each deskless worker based on their individual behaviors, performance goals, and learning patterns.

The YOOBIC NEO AI suite includes:

• NEO Writer provides AI prompts and custom commands for creating consistent, high-quality, and engaging content.
  
  
• NEO Moderator automatically flags inappropriate posts or comments to maintain a respectful environment, fostering stronger community interactions.
  
  
• NEO L&D Designer revolutionizes the creation of training material, reducing the time needed to develop training programs by over 75 percent.
  
  
• NEO SKU Performance pinpoints operations areas responsible for sales declines.
  
  
• NEO Next Best Action recommends actions based on performance.

In this article, we’ll teach you more about each of these revolutionary AI features.

Intelligent communications within content moderation

At work, store team members want to feel part of a community, but managers and HQ are failing to cultivate a fully connected workplace community.

In our 2022 Frontline Employee Experience Survey, 68 percent of frontline workers said they value a strong workplace community as very important, rising to 81 percent in the hospitality industry.

Although the majority said they feel close to their coworkers, the connection to those higher up in the organization is a different story. In fact, just 38 percent felt well connected to their organization’s management and HQ.

It takes consistent, personalized communications to drive the kind of employee adoption and engagement that builds a meaningful community.

NEO Writer can help frontline leaders craft those communications.

YOOBIC NEO Writer: Content and image generator for Newsfeed

Mental blocks and creative drain can hinder even the most straightforward communications — especially when you really want to get your message just right.

NEO Writer is an AI-assisted content and image generator for the YOOBIC Newsfeed that helps you create engaging messages and generate high-quality images quickly and easily.

Choose from a diverse selection of AI prompts and custom commands anytime you need to communicate with your frontline team.

You can easily create highly personalized content like:

• Happy Birthday wishes 
• Work Anniversary announcements
• How-To posts
• Company updates
• Wellbeing messages
• Employee recognition

And with settings to define tone, format, and length of post, managers and leaders have the ability to create scalable content that resonates with different employee audience groups, while staying aligned with internal communication objectives.

How does NEO Writer work?

1. Write or choose a predefined prompt 
2. Customize the message style by selecting its tone, format, and length
3. Generate an AI Image to add to the post

With NEO Writer, a message that used to take you 20+ pain-staking minutes to craft can now be perfected in less than 5 minutes.

YOOBIC NEO Moderator: Flag and review inappropriate user-generated content

According to a 2020 report by McKinsey, an inclusive work environment can increase employee engagement by up to 47 percent and improve productivity by as much as 12 percent.

YOOBIC NEO Moderator helps you foster safe, productive frontline community spaces by checking for inappropriate user-generated posts or comments and automatically flagging them to maintain a respectful environment.

Inappropriate content is automatically categorized in one of seven ways: Sexual, hate, violence, self-harm, sexual/minors, hate/threatening, or violence/graphic.

If a post is recognized as inappropriate, NEO Moderator displays an alert to the user and the content is flagged for admins to review. That means you can feel more confident opening up comms to your team.

NEO Moderator encourages more open participation from frontline employees, fostering an even stronger community and enhancing a more vibrant exchange of ideas and information.

Personalized training: The key to retention and performance

Frontline employees want to develop and progress their careers in the industry, but many aren’t being given the opportunity to do so.

Our 2022 Frontline Employee Experience Survey uncovered some alarming revelations:

• 53 percent of frontline workers don’t receive regular training to develop their skills
• 58 percent don’t think their organization has invested in their professional development

The fact is, learning and job satisfaction go hand in hand. Our survey found that frontline workers who reported being dissatisfied with their jobs also reported having a lack of learning and development opportunities.

Meanwhile, traditional training can be time-consuming and costly. According to the Association for Talent Development, companies spend an average of $1,286 per employee on training each year.

NEO L&D Designer disrupts this troubling paradigm by enabling corporate teams to convert existing content into impactful courses and quizzes quickly.

NEO L&D Designer: Personalized employee training programs at scale

NEO L&D Designer leverages generative AI technology to accelerate and improve training content creation beyond what traditional LMS tools can supply.

Now you can convert existing content, including videos or ungated webpages, into courses and quizzes quickly and easily. This will result in a drastic reduction in the time to create training programs by more than 75 percent.

How does the NEO L&D Designer work? It uses AI to pull out the best content for impactful lessons and quizzes.

1. Open the YOOBIC app to create a new course
2. Launch NEO L&D Designer
3. Upload your existing content or paste in a URL ( Eg. Details of a new store safety protocol)
4. Hit “Generate” button
5. Check and edit the generated lesson(s) 
6. Check and edit the corresponding quiz(s) 
7. Launch the course! 
   
   

Regularly updated, dynamic learning content acts as a springboard for employee engagement, cultivating a vibrant learning culture within the organization.

With LinkedIn's 2020 Workplace Learning Report revealing that 51 percent of employees prefer learning at their own pace, personalized learning experiences are vital.

YOOBIC NEO L&D Designer uses machine learning algorithms to tailor the curriculum to each frontline employee's job requirements, performance, and learning behaviors.

This approach ensures a bespoke learning experience, prioritizing individual needs over a generic, one-size-fits-all solution, and automatically selects the most suitable learning content to promote upskilling and knowledge retention.

Predictive Sales Performance: The Future of Retail

In a world where 87 percent of retail leaders believe that predictive analytics will be a significant trend (Retail Info Systems, 2021), YOOBIC NEO stands out.

Retail predictive analytics is a method of using existing information to make predictions that answer important questions and smaller ones that affect retail success.

This involves forecasting specific numbers or studying the factors that affect those numbers and seeing what happens when those factors change.

Capitalizing on its comprehensive integration with key physical retail software like POS and staffing scheduling systems, YOOBIC's all-in-one platform offers a synergistic correlation between communication, training, operational efficiency, and sales performance.

Enhancing this further, YOOBIC provides innovative AI Sales Performance tools. This predictive mechanism can automatically identify inconsistencies in sales patterns, comparing them across stores through the creation of dynamic clustering offering unprecedented insights.

NEO SKU Performance: Identify anomalies from your sales data

Big sets of data are difficult to interpret. YOOBIC’s NEO SKU Performance tool can identify complex patterns in your sales data thanks to big data techniques.

Here’s a visualized example scenario to help illustrate how NEO SKU Performance works. (This isn’t a product screenshot; only a visualization to educate.) 

In this scenario, NEO SKU Performance identifies a group of stores which are very similar across their sales of five SKUs. But we can also see that one of those stores doesn’t perform as well as the others on one of the SKUs. This is the anomaly we want to investigate.

And that’s where NEO Next Best Action comes in.

NEO Next Best Action: AI-recommended actions based on performance

YOOBIC NEO SKU Performance will not only identify which store or operation areas are responsible for sales declines — it can also suggest precise corrective actions with its YOOBIC NEO Next Best Action tool.

NEO Next Best Action can pinpoint an incomplete new store merchandising task and automatically recommend a remedy.

Or it can pinpoint a SKU underselling in a store and send a message and a task to check on the status of the item in the store. (E.g. The status of whether that item is out of stock, in the backroom, or not displayed properly.)

Once an anomaly is detected, NEO Next Best Action offers smart recommendations and preemptive actions, empowering frontline employees to anticipate issues and excel in their roles, all under the guidance of AI-driven insights.

Conclusion: Meeting Frontline Operations Needs with AI

As frontline operations continue to face new challenges in the retail and hospitality landscape, there is a growing need for advanced, data-driven tools.

YOOBIC NEO addresses these needs with our suite of AI tools that offer targeted solutions and empower companies to navigate the future with confidence.

"We are witnessing a watershed moment — the dawn of AI and its profound implications for the future of frontline workers," said Fabrice Haiat, co-founder and CEO of YOOBIC.

"AI not only unleashes productivity, but also helps foster a nurturing work environment with enhanced communications and training that encourage career growth and reduce attrition rates. Organizations armed with AI-powered insights are equipped to navigate the evolving business landscape with agility and foresight. Those who lag behind in adopting these AI tools will inevitably be left in the dust.”

The future of retail and hospitality operations is here, and it's powered by YOOBIC NEO.

Want to see YOOBIC NEO in action? Request a demo.