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Integrating Employee & Customer Experience to Drive Business Performance

A decline in overall customer experience was observed over a three-month period at previously high performing locations belonging to a luxury retail client.

This trend was disturbing, and urgent intervention was needed as the negative change in customer experience was also connected to a significant and continual downward trend in overall sales.

Connecting data from our transactional customer experience VOC and employee engagement VOE surveys, we reviewed customer comments from the stores in question to capture key themes among those giving poor performance ratings.

Additionally, employee comments obtained from the most recent employee engagement VOE survey were reviewed to provide a more complete picture. Finally, the retailer’s corporate operations team placed direct calls to store managers at the affected stores to gather their thoughts on both the performance and sales declines.

After a collaborative review between the store operations team, customer experience team and executive leadership, the source of discontent was discovered. A recent staffing model change reduced the number of staff hours at several store locations. The algorithm used to adjust staffing was misaligned with traffic volumes, therefore leaving high traffic stores short staffed during peak times. This ultimately led to customer and staff frustration which negatively impacted experience, sales and employee morale.

The Outcome

As a result of this collaborative effort, the store operations team reassessed the staffing algorithm across all stores with a specific focus on those with observed declines in sales or customer experience ratings. Any stores that seemed adversely impacted were assessed and the staffing at those locations were adjusted. Within one-month, improvements in customer experience and overall sales volumes had increased at the impacted locations returning to levels observed prior to the staffing changes.