Peak hours are the ultimate stress test for your retail operations. Aisles are packed, checkout lines stretch endlessly, and employees’ stress levels are through the roof.
How your store performs during peak hours directly affects your bottom line. When managed effectively, these busy periods turn into substantial revenue. However, if you’re not equipped to handle the surge, you’ll end up with angry customers and lost sales.
Getting peak hours right is easier said than done. Increased foot traffic puts a huge strain on your systems—lifts, HVAC, POS equipment, and refrigeration all feel the heat.
Effective retail facilities management means frontline workers can focus on what matters: customers. It ensures your operations run as planned, delivering the excellent in-store experience customers expect. We’ve got nine tips to make it happen.
1. Stay proactive with a year-round strategy
Facility management is all about staying one step ahead of users, clients, and customers’ needs. It means anticipating their demands and creating an environment that exceeds their expectations. By proactively identifying what your clients, customers, and users need, facility management can directly support the core functions of your business.
In retail facility management, that means mastering customer behaviour, predicting peak seasons, and planning your FM efforts throughout the year. For example, knowing that customers start holiday shopping in November to save money means your FM teams should preempt this surge in foot traffic.
Customer expectations and shopping patterns shift with seasons and trends. This is why facility managers must be committed all year-round. From planning work for the year ahead to adjusting for seasonal challenges, it’s a constant cycle of enhancement and adaptation.
2. Adapt FM needs to weather-driven challenges
Managing retail spaces means contending with the weather’s effects, such as salt damage in colder months or wet, muddy floors after spring showers.
Maintaining a pristine environment, inside and out, is non-negotiable for keeping customers satisfied. Consistency matters greatly to consumers, regardless of the forecast. 70% of consumers think less of a brand without consistent experience. One single bad experience, and 52% of shoppers will walk out without buying a thing.
Winter doesn’t just bring cold—it brings problems. Picture your customers carrying packages or wrestling trolleys across frozen parking lots. Keeping your environments safe and comfortable becomes even more important during your highest-revenue period.
Act quickly: clear snow and ice before it becomes a problem, keep entrances spotless and dry, and make sure your stores feel warm and inviting.
3. Use off-peak periods to strengthen ops and reset environment
The groundwork for a successful peak season is laid during quieter months, not in chaos. This is when to tighten the screws, fine-tune maintenance programs, and address recurring pain points.
Spring is your moment to define the customer experience your maintenance program will deliver all year round. By establishing clear standards now, you can create actionable steps to keep your retail environments in top shape and strengthen operations ahead of peak shopping seasons.
Autumn is your last chance to prepare for the winter holiday rush. From POS systems to entrance doors, even the smallest hiccup can snowball into massive customer frustration when stores are packed.
Test every piece of equipment, from checkout stations to fitting room lights, and schedule preventive maintenance when traffic is low. Make use of summer performance data. Meet with your team to review metrics, dashboards, performance reports to recalibrate before the rush.
4. Prioritise staff well-being and morale
High pressure, tighter deadlines, extended work hours: emotional strain is real during peak season. This year, 69% of retail workers were already exhausted before the holiday rush even began.
It is no secret that increased duties during peak seasons can take a toll on your employees’ mental health, affecting their overall well-being and even their personal lives. The last thing you need is your FM team burning out mid-storm. Facility managers play a huge role in mitigating this, but it can be hard to know where to start. The answer is simple: just ask them.
How are they doing? What do they need? Where can we improve? Acknowledge their hard work, recognise those who go above and beyond, and, most importantly, encourage them to take breaks.
5. Ensure teams are well-staffed
With rising labour costs and tighter margins, every hour of staffing matters. And while cost savings are paramount in retail FM, being understaffed is the fastest way to burn people out—especially during peak hours.
It’s a widespread issue, with 51% of stores admitting they are short-staffed during busy periods. This leaves 82% of associates regularly feeling overwhelmed at work due to inadequate staffing levels.
Don’t think customers won’t notice when you’re short-staffed. A significant 77% of retail associates attribute lost sales to inadequate staffing or scheduling.
Trying to save on labour costs by understaffing can backfire. If you push your team too hard without a break, they’re likely to make productivity-killing mistakes or simply walk out of the door. You definitely don’t want to find yourself hiring and training new staff again, particularly this late in the season.
6. Invest in collaboration tools
In retail, service request management can go wrong in a hundred different ways.
For one, service requests are often delayed because the store manager is nowhere to be found. Which sucks if it involves a piece of revenue-generating equipment.
Service requests need to move faster than a Black Friday checkout queue. But most store employees lack the authority or knowledge to handle a service request, especially when it means wrestling the backroom computer software. And to be frank, peak season is not the time to familiarise yourself with clunky IT systems.
Once the request is made, you need visibility into which vendor is assigned and their prior history with the company. Live updates are an absolute must as staff must know when the service repair company plans to be at the store.
Not to mention that stores will likely have multiple work orders and service requests across multiple teams and locations. If you can spare your staff this kind of stress during peak season, that’s next level leadership right there.
Infraspeak brings reporters, internal teams, and vendors into one platform with role‑based permissions. Easily track vendor arrival times and ensure work meets expectations. Let the platform handle routing, reminders, documents, and reporting so retail workers can use peak season momentum to focus on revenue-generating tasks. Explore Infraspeak for retail here.
7. Centre your FM strategy around the basics of in-store customer experience
Many blame e-commerce for the churn in retail. But in reality, too many retailers have neglected the basics that matter most to shoppers. Customers are met with messy shelves, filthy bathrooms, and flickering lights. The in-store experience is failing, and shoppers are fed up. 64% have walked out of a store because it was messy, dirty, or poorly maintained.
Meanwhile, the list of things retail FM teams need to maintain keeps growing—flashy digital signage, self-checkout stations, interactive maps, mobile charging stations. Retailers are busier than ever trying to keep up with all this tech. But here’s the truth: four out of five shoppers would rather see a clean, organised store than more tech, and the majority thinks retailers are far too focused on gadgets and not enough on getting the basics right.
8. Build a reliable supplier network
Your first line of defence during peak season is a dependable supplier network.
Use spring to dissect your provider relationships and strengthen those connections. Now is the time to secure reliable support across every location — especially if you’re operating in less-populated areas where qualified providers are scarce.
Dig into last year’s work order data to identify gaps in coverage or response times. Then use that intel to forge iron-clad SLAs, set response time expectations, and line up backup providers for your most critical assets.
A broad supplier base enables you to quickly deploy the right technician for any issue, which minimises downtime and protects the customer experience across all your stores.
To nurture and expand these connections, we recommend a Supplier Relationship Management solution like Infraspeak Network, which puts numerous qualified vendors at your fingertips.
9. Implement preventive maintenance programmes
That refreshing blast of cold air as you step into a store on a scorching day? Or that cosy warmth wrapping around you on a freezing January afternoon? That’s not magic. That’s preventive maintenance at work.
Perfect indoor temperature does not happen by chance. It’s the result of proactive HVAC servicing to keep systems running at their peak before extreme weather hits.
Forget about the holy in-store customer experience for a second. Facility management costs are already up 7.6% and climbing. To counter this, two areas to focus on are energy efficiency and a solid preventive maintenance plan.
Regular inspections and maintenance help reduce the risk of expensive emergency repairs by catching small issues before they escalate to major problems. Implement regular, preventive asset maintenance on all equipment and pay special attention to performance and wear-and-tear of revenue-critical assets.
Peak season is in the bag. But is that all?
Bulletproof your systems, your teams, and your supplier network. Make preventive maintenance your priority, meticulously mapping out the entire year-long before peak season hits. Do all this, and your successful peak season is practically in the bag, perfected behind the scenes through preparation and strategy.
But sustainable success isn’t built on one stellar season, or even year. The real deal is securing the viability of your retail FM operations for the years to come. We have a blueprint for this, too. Explore our white paper to learn how to build resilient retail facility management.