Welcome to Retail Checks and Balances, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the bustling world of commerce and culinary delights to help you grow your business and win. Join us as we explore the fascinating stories, trends, and challenges that shape the retail and hospitality industry, from cozy corner cafes to sprawling shopping malls and everything in between. And now, here's your host, Kevin Spencer.

Welcome again to Retail Checks and Balances. Today, we're going to talk about IT systems and user errors. You know, let's start by defining what we mean by IT system and user errors. You know, IT systems encompass all the hardware, software, network, and related infrastructure that businesses and individuals use to process and manage information. User errors, on the other hand, are mistakes made by people interacting with these systems. So, for example, you know, it's morning, you finish rushing to finish a report, you click save and close your document only to realize you accidentally saved over an important file with a blank template, for example. We've all been there. This is a classic example of user error. But why do these errors happen so frequently? Certainly user errors often stem from a combination of factors, such as poor system design, lack of training, and the inherent complexity of many systems. When systems are not intuitive or when users are not adequately, sorry, trained, the likelihood of mistakes increases. Additional stress and multitasking can accelerate that problem as well. You know, we think this makes sense, you know, when we look at these common user errors and the potential impact. You know, let's talk by, sometimes people are mistyping their password and they get frustrated and say, oh, the system doesn't let me in. But it could be a combination of the new hidden cap lock, or you didn't, you, when you save the password before it was uppercase, it was lowercase, you know, things like that. Accidentally deleting files, sending emails to wrong recipients, You know, this has happened a lot. This has happened to everybody. You send an email to somebody named George and you have five George in your contacts. You don't look at the last name and you just end up sending it to somebody else. Sometimes misconfiguring system settings, whether it's from the, you know, the complexity of the system, These type of errors can lead to data loss, security beaches, operational disruptions, which can be costly for a business, right? And these impacts are serious. So what can be done to mitigate these user errors or system errors? And there are several strategies that organizations can implement. First, investing in user-friendly system design is crucial. So your users must be able to be comfortable or it should be intuitive and provide clear feedback from everyone to whoever is selecting the system, right? Secondly, we can talk about comprehensive training program that can equip users with the necessary skills and knowledge. Also, creating some sort of super users that users can go to who are also their compadres in any project or operational strategy within the business. And sometimes you need regular updates and refreshes, which are so important as systems evolve. You know, because some people might say it's faster to do it this way and this and you want to have a standard structure to handle that. We also got to implement safeguards, such as confirmation prompts. So you want to prompt somebody to say, are you sure you want to do this? If it's deleting something, you say yes. Autosaves, so saving your work at a certain point in time by confirming what section of wherever in the application you are. And some access controls, meaning from a security perspective, you can prevent errors from occurring and minimize the impact. So I know some of the examples of how companies have successfully reduced user errors. One notable example I can remember is provided implemented a new electronic customer record system and we call it CRM, right? They invested heavily in training their staff and designing the system with user friendly interfaces and built in error checking. Meaning that within this solution, when you build this customer record, the system would prompt to say, all right, you did not put in a data booth or you did not put in a shopper level or risk level. Meaning from the sense of ensuring that the record is complete. And as a result of this, they would have seen significant decrease in these user errors and improvement in overall efficiency. So basically, they started seeing less and less errors as this particular project moved on. And when it went into production, you wouldn't have seen these specific errors coming back to the solution provider. And, you know, let me just shift gears for the listeners in terms of things I've seen dealing with normal user errors in everyday use. So some people would say, you know, we've got some data entry errors, you know, what are some practical steps to reduce these errors? So one effective approach is to implement the validation checks in your data entry, right? Meaning that you wanna make sure that you enter the correct date. So the date, since the date format between, I would say the US and probably the English speaking Caribbean. In English speaking Caribbean, we use day, month, year. In the US, it's Monday. So putting in a data boot or putting in a transaction to change price or whatever the case, it must be specific to what the data is. So sometimes people people will or systems will actually put a pop-up box to pop up the date so they can actually select the correct date instead of entering a date. So that's some of the things that you can do to ensure that the system is implemented properly. Another thing might be, you know, if somebody makes a detrimental change, you want to make sure you have backups of a table or backup of an entry that you can restore data, especially if it gets corrupted or whatever the case is. And, you know, sometimes the prompts need to be very specific for the user to understand and, you know, probably reference some help files so they can know, all right, duplicated entry, some people try to enter duplicated customer number and say this is duplicate because it's already there. Or even an item, item number, item barcode or something like that might be duplicated. So sometimes these things must be taken into consideration from any system that you implement. So I believe even from the sense from saving entries or trying to make sure that you're on top of your work, you want to make sure that If your systems allows it to save after you reach a certain point of the task, or they want to make sure and set some sort of reminder or notepad on your screen to say, I need to save my work at this point. Some system allows you to enter notes so you can reference it or tasks so you can see where you are in the process. So I hope this has given you some insight in terms of what's required. I mean, sometimes, you know, there are specific system errors. So, for instance, something went wrong with the network or some virus came in and the system is not functioning as it should. So you got to make sure on the system side that you're protected in terms of infrastructure from any sort of virus. You want to make sure that for the users not to get frustrated that you have full operations or how they like to say that you know, your operations is up to par in terms of running, you know, eight hour operations, or even in some cases, 24 hours. So high availability on your servers, high availability on any sort of hardware infrastructure to make sure you have redundancy is also something that from the system side that they should make sure is implemented to ensure that your user is not frustrated by system errors. Right. Even, you know, we talk about the cloud and backups and, you know, using the cloud technology or using some sort of cloud server to run your application. It's sometimes where you can tweak faster, tweak it to work faster, whatever the case is. So Thank you very much for listening today. It's a short episode to really give you an idea where things are at when it comes to IT system errors and user errors and give you that sort of understanding to go forward. Thank you very much. Have a great day.

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