Sometimes when you're building a product, it's not about creating something completely novel (adoption would be terrible). Instead, it's better to first consider the obvious, "low-hanging fruit" problems that your customers can't solve on their own. We learned this lesson first hand in the early days of Endear.

Before we started building anything, we spent a lot of time speaking to our target audience. It became clear very quickly that retail associates had a lot of logistical obstacles and hurdles that stood in the way of how well they could do their jobs. Try as they might, without any tech solution, many of our future users were stuck in the stone age of physical notebooks, pen, and paper at the same time that their customers were flocking to e-commerce.

Endear is all about moving retail forward, we also knew that overlooking pre-existing pain points that may have seemed small on the surface could also limit user interest. A solution to a pre-existing problem is often more welcome than an entirely new approach to a job that also comes with a learning curve.

The immediate problems we solved are not the reasons a brand is interested in using Endear, but we believe they are part of why adoption is so rapid.

It has become harder and harder for stores to rely on organic foot traffic in order to reach their monthly goals. With that in mind, many associates take it upon themselves to clientele so that they can better predict and ensure both traffic and sales. The problem we saw early on is that without a CRM like Endear, associates only felt comfortable reaching out to customers they were closest with - ones who had expressly asked to be contacted about a specific product, or ones who shopped so often that it was only natural to have their contact info. That meant that any time something news-worthy would happen at a store, most associates would repeatedly reach out to the same dozen or so clients - and of course all of these conversations lived within an associate's personal phone if they were texting with that customer.

The beauty of a strong brand is that your customers will seek out your store in every city they visit. That means that as you open up more locations, customers may build unique relationships with each of your store teams. While that's great news overall, you run the risk of overwhelming customers - getting a note about your brand's latest product drop from three different salespeople makes for a pretty lousy experience.

When we spoke to associates about what details were most important about their customers, logically they told us it was their order history. But they also told us that a lot of the time, they could only see what a customer purchased at their exact location, and sometimes reviewing this data was so cumbersome that many took to recording their top customers' purchases on their own (in a notebook or google sheet). The inefficiency of this approach was one thing - but what frustrated us even more was that a customer's order history was there, in one way or another, it was just not being shared with retail teams.

Brands that sell online invest heavily in high-quality product photos. They capture every product in different layouts and on different models so that e-commerce customers have an endless supply of content to inform their purchase - now sometimes even in the form of video! But before we came along, these assets were exclusive to e-commerce - admittedly, not always by choice. It may not have been clear why a retail team would need these assets - customers were seeing the product in person, why would associates need access to product photos? Plus, manually uploading every asset to a shared folder was too inefficient to manage long-term.

Associates often need to use this type of imagery in order to entice customers to come visit in the first place. But without access to these high-production images, they would instead send pictures of clothes on hangers or selfies of themselves in the products. They'd send these images one after another, sometimes a dozen at a time. Of course, these products were not linked, no title, no price, no information whatsoever.

When we asked potential users how they determined which customers to contact, many said that they would receive a static report at the beginning of the month from the corporate team. Then over the course of the month, they'd gradually reach out to these customers. Here's the problem: between the time it takes to compose this report, distribute it to stores, and then actually reach out to customers, the data is stale and does not allow the sender to confidently incorporate any of the insights into his or her outreach.

Store associates dedicate a lot of time and effort to motivate a customer to purchase something. However, their capacity and enthusiasm is capped by an unnecessary limitation: their commission potential. Until Endear, most associates were disincentivized to encourage online purchases because they wouldn't get credit for the sale and, as a result, also miss out on commissions. If an associate is not willing to generate a sale, even if it means it happens online, neither they nor the brand they work for are truly reaching maximum performance. Without the opportunity to benefit from online purchases, there's very little motivation for an associate to work with customers interested in shopping online.

The more associates rely on their own devices, the less protected customer data becomes and the less control a brand has over what is said to its customers. And while turnover at any company is inevitable, the big problem for stores is that when an associate leaves, she may be taking customer relationships, contact info, or new developments with her. Depending on what an associate has access to, there may be even riskier outcomes at stake.

When we spoke to retail decision makers, one question we frequently asked was, "How do you know what your store teams are up to on a daily basis?" We took a look at some of the reports that store managers were sharing with regional managers or directors of retail and reports were primarily made up of anecdotal stories about customer interactions or general impressions of traffic. This type of reporting makes it nearly impossible to compare different stores' performance or track changes over time.

Finding time to sit down with every member of your retail team to review their performance on a regular basis can be a challenge. But the problem for associates is it can often be hard to gauge how they stack up compared to their peers. Without a way to keep tabs, their performance can often come down to one number: total in-store sales. That can be a very limited view of someone's contribution, and can also be very discouraging for the individual if they have no course of action through which to improve.

Endear's mission is to help associates enhance the work they do in order to play an ever-growing role in a brand's success. With the right tools, a sales team can be as powerful online as offline, and make the difference between an average quarter and immense growth and increased customer satisfaction. Learn more about how we can bring your team into the modern era.