The quest to deliver a seamless and satisfying customer experience is central to retail companies’ strategies, and those efforts are even more important as the industry’s “peak season” is in full swing.
Overall retail spend this holiday season is expected to grow between 3.5% and 4.6%, with analysts predicting sales of up $1.56 trillion between November and January. To support the demand, retailers are investing in their workforces, hiring as many as 100,000 seasonal employees. Employees are the face of the retail experience, so those new hires will be a critical part of creating customer delight during the busiest time of year.
With so many workers onboarding at once, operational issues retailers may have been able to overlook during slower periods can quickly lead to unhappy customers and lost profits. While they are more acute during peak season, operational concerns also impact full-time employees year round. When team members don’t have the support they need to do their jobs well, both customer and employee loyalty is threatened.
Retail leaders should take this opportunity to evaluate and improve the employee experience, and in turn bolster the customer experience. Here’s how:
Consider the impact of lingering pandemic-era processes
The pandemic created major shifts in buying habits—like the embrace of delivery and curbside pickup—that are here to stay. But many retailers haven’t updated their technology and processes to help employees manage this change long-term. When higher in-store foot traffic collides with elevated BOPIS orders, the result can be an additional headache for employees.
If a retailer has not made the permanent process changes needed to make in-store order fulfillment as efficient as possible, seasonal employees will struggle to adapt to ad hoc systems and processes. The first step to successfully training many new team members at once is being clear about expectations and processes so they can get up to speed quickly. Before bringing new people on, retailers need to ensure that they have done their part to analyze, simplify and optimize the way tasks are handled. Collecting feedback from tenured employees on how day-to-day operations have evolved over time can provide the insights leaders need to update processes, and make experienced employees feel heard.
Explore how technology can ease the retail employee experience
Addressing operational challenges starts with understanding how to find inefficient business processes and create value in them. For example, an iconic retail brand is leveraging process mining technology to manage their logistics process from dock to stock to carrier performance. By accurately predicting when shipments will arrive, store managers can better plan staffing.
Uncertain or inflexible schedules are one of the biggest reasons retail employees quit, and seasonal employees with weaker ties to the company may be more likely to quit when faced with schedule frustration. This in turn puts pressure on other team members who may have to cover shifts unexpectedly. If leaders can provide more notice or consistency in shift assignments based on data, employee satisfaction will improve.
Customer-facing technology can also optimize both the employee and the customer experience. Reformation’s dressing room technology enables shoppers to select alternative sizes or other items to try on. Employees can quickly grab new items, ensuring customers stay in dressing rooms longer and ultimately buy more products.
Align corporate decisions with frontline experience
Small changes from corporate leaders can have a big impact on the frontline employee experience. Leaders should make clear to corporate employees that their mission is to set up field teams for success. For example, Sephora’s headquarters is called its Field Support Center, while Nike refers to store employees as athletes to foster a culture of teamwork. These language choices can go a long way to create a sense of support and camaraderie for retail workers.
Analyzing employee satisfaction can also help leaders get ahead of employee burnout and turnover. If employee satisfaction lags, additional benefits and perks can help: Starbucks, for example, covers college tuition coverage, while Amazon offers warehouse workers a portion of their paycheck at the end of every shift instead of a traditional two week pay period. Even offering more flexibility to in-store employees—like opportunities to try both customer-facing roles and operational ones—can bolster engagement and satisfaction by helping workers lean into their strengths.
Retail leaders must also be thoughtful about preparing employees for busy times before peak season arrives. Using periods of slower demand to prioritize training up full-time employees will instill more confidence in their ability to help seasonal employees learn the ropes when the time comes. Since this year’s peak season has already arrived, leaders should monitor performance through the end of the year and then take a step back to evaluate how their processes held up under pressure. By reviewing key KPIs, efficiency data, soliciting feedback from employees and reflecting on the experience from an operational perspective, leaders can make better decisions that ease next year’s peak season processes.
What’s next
No matter the season, a seamless, consistent customer experience depends on employees feeling prepared, empowered and supported in their jobs. As retailers gear up for a busy final quarter, leaders should take stock of what both permanent and temporary employees need to be successful, and ensure their processes are as efficient and worker-friendly as possible. Companies that prioritize employee experience will gain an advantage in customer satisfaction this holiday season.
