New Job Alert: In-store Employee Experience Officer

Teaser: Most retailers don’t have a Chief employee eXperience Officer. Is it time to get one?

Retail organizations have long operated within the context of razor-thin margins.

In their pursuit for endlessly higher efficiency, retailers have scrutinized every aspect of the business—from shipping partnerships and loyalty programs to energy consumption and in-store technology—seeking areas for incremental improvement. Every area, that is, save one: the in-store employee experience.

Despite serving as the front line to the customer, retailers often neglect to consider their in-store employee experience and its effect on the business. And that’s a real problem because it’s never been harder to work in a retail store.?

As companies roll out new initiatives to meet the needs of customers, it is often employees left holding the metaphorical bag. It is up to frontline workers to support a dizzying array of new services—be it online order fulfillment, click-and-collect, dynamic pricing, price matching, contactless checkouts—and also master the enabling technologies, tools and processes for each individual program.

And therein lies the problem: The reason why the in-store employee experience is so complex is because it’s fractured. And it’s fractured because there is no single person overseeing it. Disparate initiatives are managed by different teams and functions. Optimization efforts are created and deployed without any real input from employees or someone advocating on their behalf. Without a unifying agent, employees feel the pressure, and that, in turn, leads to lower levels of engagement, higher dissatisfaction and, ultimately, turnover.

To solve this issue, retailers can consider borrowing a page from the customer experience playbook and appoint a chief experience officer dedicated specifically to in-store employees. Like a customer experience leader, this person would oversee the entire end-to-end employee journey. They would help ensure all channels and initiatives are connected, pinpointing and eliminating friction along the way. Most of all, they would help workers manage an increasingly complex and, at times conflicting, set of priorities.

A closer look at the problem

In some ways, it’s understandable that retailers’ in-store employee experience is lacking. Over the past five years, stores have undergone rapid and profound change, most of which was rolled out haphazardly during the pandemic.

When we think about what the average in-store employee experience was just a few years ago, it was relatively straight-forward: People worked on clearly defined tasks, be it stocking shelves, checking out customers, or managing the floor.

Today, however, the role of the in-store associate is vastly different and significantly more complex. In the modern store, someone’s primary responsibility may still be replenishing shelves, but they might be tasked with any number of other things too: picking and packing orders, managing returns, adjusting pricing, opening anti-theft cases, matching web offers and so on.

In many cases, there is no integration of processes, which means that the backend experience of the store employee consists of piecemeal components crudely stitched together—sometimes even held together by employees themselves.

Why retailers need an end-to-end in-store employee experience

For many years, in-store employees have been treated as a resource with a limited shelf life. Turnover was a given and, until somewhat recently, a revolving door of talent was able to continuously meet the needs of the business.

But that’s no longer the case. In a highly demanding landscape, retailers face stiff competition to attract and retain talent. They’re competing not just with others in the retail sector, but a host of new roles in the gig economy and “side hustles” turned main income stream. As a result, turnover is climbing, and so too is the cost to the business, with some experts estimating the cost of rehiring and training a single front-line retail store employee to be more than $3000.

In this landscape, retailers cannot afford to instigate turnover. Companies need to provide a great experience not just to retain talent, but to maximize profitability and better serve their customers.

Where many retailers go wrong with the employee experience

From my perspective, many retailers are making the same mistake when it comes to in-store operations: They focus on optimization as opposed to experience.

As a board or C-Suite task force, they ask: How do we reduce costs? How do we decrease man hours? How do we minimize the number of steps within a process so that it can be done more quickly or cheaply??

The question that never comes up: How do we empower our in-store employees, specifically, to be effective, engaged and efficient??

In fact, many retailers take quite the opposite approach. Rather than giving their employees more resources to help them manage constant change and increasing complexity, they simply expect their workers to do more with the same. They put pressure on people to work faster, to manage more tasks, to take on more complex jobs without giving them any real guidance or support to help them do so.?

The problem with this approach is that when you challenge workers to move faster, one natural reaction is to cut corners, which could have a negative impact on both the customer experience and the corporate reputation. Also, not for nothing, the efficiency-at-all-costs mindset is simply not an enjoyable environment to work in. When you consistently squeeze more and more out of people, you may just make it easier for them to slip out the door.?

Take, for instance, the growing trend of installing anti-theft cases for relatively inexpensive items like household goods or personal care items throughout stores. While retailers almost certainly realized that this feature would increase friction in the customer experience, their solution was simply to shift that inconvenience onto the employee experience by requiring in-store workers to respond to every customer who wants to purchase items as benign as deodorant. Data coming in shows that these cases are having a negative impact on revenue—and that’s to say nothing of the losses incurred by having employees spend time opening and closing cases throughout their shift.??

This example underscores the idea that retailers need to consider what efficiency looks like with respect to the employee’s role—as opposed to figuring out how enhancing efficiency can deliver on organizational objectives. To do that, there needs to be a mutual understanding between in-store employees and leadership about the issues they need to solve and the goals they want to meet.?

And that’s difficult for most organizations to do because in-store employees don’t have a true leader.?

Introducing the chief in-store employee experience officer

Segmentation within the store may have been acceptable in the past, but today’s retail environment requires closer coordination and comprehensive oversight.

With an employee experience leader at the helm, retailers can get very clear on what their current employee experience is, what they want it to be and the parts that need to change. This person would also help set the strategy to drive the metrics the business cares about: reducing turnover, lowering costs, and increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction.

As a technology executive, I know that technology also has an important role to play in this equation. But before we begin to develop new tools to help frontline employees manage their day-to-day tasks, we need to hear from them about the challenges they face and the opportunities they see. Even as their daily to-do list grows, I’d like to think that asking them to offer ways the business could improve their experience is one extra task that they would actually welcome.

Is this a problem that your organization is challenged with? If so, I'd love to discuss with you an understand more how you're approaching it and what progress you've made. Additionally, we at 高知特 Cognizant have plenty of capabilities we could bring to help if you're you're stuck or just getting started.