Let's explore the critical interplay between employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) and the opportunities for retailers to take both to the next level.
Are you focusing enough on the human experience?
Customers generate revenue, but employees drive the experience. Many retailers talk about the importance of customer experience (CX) and have invested in technologies to support their CX strategy. But only a few leading retailers realise that the secret to a great CX is your employee experience (EX).
Your retail staff are the ones who look your customers in the eye every day and make the customer experience come to life. Therefore, investing in your most untapped yet powerful resource—your people—is an investment in your bottom line.
More broadly, we're talking about the human experience—a human-centric approach to creating exceptional interactions that starts by connecting employee and customer experiences.
Let's explore the critical interplay between EX and CX and the opportunities for retailers to take both to the next level.
Historically, brands have treated EX and CX as separate, disconnected initiatives. But it's become clear that a great customer experience can only exist with engaged employees.
Marriott International's founder, J Willard Marriott, constantly advised his managers, "Take care of associates, and they'll take care of your customers." Employees who are happy, engaged, and motivated deliver better customer service. They know the products better, which makes them more capable of selling, cross-selling and up-selling.
These exceptional experiences delight customers, who then spend more and turn into loyal, repeat customers who will advocate on behalf of the brand.
The employee experience is also important to customers. Customers increasingly want to align their purchase decisions with their values and ethics regarding how companies engage with employees. Customers want to do business with those who value their employees, treat them fairly, and prioritise their happiness.
How employee experience impacts customer experience:
Let's not forget that for many brands, your employees - and their friends and family - are actually some of your best customers, even long after they work for the brand.
Retail's primary responsibility for delivering an exceptional customer experience lies with frontline sales staff. Still, they can only do so with access to the tools, resources, training, and autonomy that make their job easier.
Here's how to equip your staff to succeed:
Retail teams are often seen as representatives of the brand. But from a CX point of view, they are also agents of the customer. For that, they need to be able to access the whole brand behind them to provide what the customer needs and deliver an exceptional customer experience. For leaders, this means removing the red tape and giving staff ownership of the outcomes they manage.
Despite interacting with customers daily, retail staff rarely attend CX strategies meetings. They are told how to sell but are often not asked how customers buy. Bring them into the mix. The frontline staff have value and insights to add that can make all the difference to your CX.
It's tough to be engaged when it's hard to get your work done. Outdated and inefficient systems and tools sap energy and motivation, waste time, and make it challenging to serve the customer. The most productive and driven employees will be the first to leave if they are hindered by slow tech.
Invest in better tools to support your employees and, therefore, your customer experience. You can even make them part of the process of deciding what works.
Staff with the proper CX tools can ensure customers get a 'receipt' for their time – what they tried on, their saved size/style/preferences, and other recommendations. Even if a sale doesn't happen in the store today, these staff can increase the chances of a future purchase (and get credit for it).
Most platforms actively exclude staff from the experiences they create for their customers – but that's not the right approach.
Employees are often customers before and after they become staff. Does your CX or loyalty platform acknowledge this? How are their friends and families formally recognised? Rather than allowing staff to buy family items using their discount and hiding these customers from the brand, consider how you can bring them and give them an authentic customer experience.
Also, consider whether the incentive mechanics you use to encourage and acknowledge your best customers can be remixed to provide staff incentives for great CX performance.
You must provide constant training to improve the retail staff's customer interactions. Train employees on upselling, cross-selling, and clienteling. Ensure they are trained to use technology to provide the best customer experience.
Think of the customer experience as helping a single customer shop. The customer already knows you exist, likes the brand, and is ready to shop. How do you help them? And how do you ensure every experience doesn't end in the sale but is the start of the next sale?
Providing a great customer experience means you can be confident you have increased the chances of the customer shopping with you again sooner and instead of a competitor. It’s more about how they want to shop than how you want to sell to them.
The biggest CX opportunities lie in plain sight. Here are some of the top opportunities for retailers:
Customers want more control over their data and how it is used. Research by Capterra found that 84% of Australians say they would like more control over how companies collect and use their personal information, with 63% saying they are nervous about sharing personal information with companies when shopping online.
Think about the moments that can build customer trust by giving them the privacy they want—that could mean self-signing up for loyalty programs rather than reading out their private details for others to hear.
Letting customers choose what information in-store staff can see and use could be a key differentiator. For example, Omneo's Profile Portal only requires a mobile number or email address when customers sign up for an account. Available online and in-store, the portal also cuts time and friction from the sign-up and recovery process. It also means customers never have to read their details ‘out loud’ over the counter in earshot of other customers.
Think of a wishlist like a playlist. In music apps, a playlist lets the user see everything they've listened to so far and what they want to listen to next. The wishlist does the same for products. Customers can take it into the store and add it to their phone, or a staff member can fill it in for them to shop online later. You are enabling customers to pick up where they left off, whatever channels they are shopping on. This means you must give staff the capability and tools to help people explore products they want to buy and save to their profile. A customer’s wishlist is far more likely to convert in the future than any AI-based recommendation engine, which often biases towards what has been purchased in the past rather than what I might like to buy in the future.
Using Omneo Clienteling, retail staff can pull up a customer's wishlists, previous purchases, and size preferences to suggest relevant new in-stock items, style matches, and combinations while addressing the customer by name. Staff members can also enhance customers' profiles with new insights as they get to know them better through valuable in-store interactions.
According to pymnts.com, 87% of today's consumers aged 22 to 44 want to be able to break up large purchases into monthly instalments. When it comes to payments, flexibility is your best option. Customers want to be satisfied with not just what they buy and the price they pay but also how they pay. That's why flexible payments, such as BNPL, are one of the fastest-growing segments in digital sales, especially among millennials and Gen Z. Rather than forcing your customers to sign up to third-party payment platforms, consider how you might mix up the traditional transactions for your brand into alternative ways of purchasing products and services.
Leading voices in the industry, such as John Gualtieri, CEO of Kmart, underscore the pivotal role of digital technology in retail today. Gualtieri notes, 'The biggest investment area for retail is digital technology – from online shopping and delivery to inventory management and better design processes, technology has enabled us to connect more closely to our Kmart customers.'
As Daniel Bracken, CEO of Michael Hill, highlights, the focus on customer data is transforming retail strategies. Bracken explains, 'Truly understanding the customer through data is undoubtedly the big investment area for retail… Data has traditionally been maintained within marketing teams, but we are shaking this up, bringing customer data to the forefront of our digital retail communications and interactions.
Don’t forget that ‘understanding the (capital C) Customer’ in aggregate is very different to understanding the individual (lowercase c) customer at the point that they are actually shopping with you.
Omnichannel strategies increasingly shape the evolution of CX in the Australian retail sector. According to insights from retail.org.au, brands can create incremental value and differentiate from their competitors on holistic customer experiences achieved through omnichannel strategies, which integrate stores, online, and mobile into a single, frictionless customer experience.
Offering Click and Collect, or buy online pick up in-store (BOPIS), allows retailers to blend the online and in-store experience to engage with customers and provide the convenience they want. This relies on the process being completely streamlined. Staff at the customer's selected store must immediately be notified of the order to prepare it for pickup. If customers turn up and the order isn't ready, it will only detract from the customer experience.
The key to winning market share in the retail space is creating an exceptional human experience. The correlation between a great employee and customer experience becomes more obvious as retail becomes competitive. Retail leaders must prioritise actions that ensure employees are engaged, motivated, and armed with the right tools to provide customers with the best service possible.
