Employee Happiness = Customer Happiness

By Will Roche, VP of Sales (Americas), Xterprise

No matter how much technology you throw at the retail store the most critical factor that will make or break your customer experience is human interaction. A recent article in Forbes written by Eric Siu reported that, “63 percent of employees today are ‘not engaged’ (24 percent are ‘actively disengaged’) in their jobs. This essentially means that 87 percent of employees have no passion for their work, lack motivation to get the job done and are unhappy. This has an impact on the bottom line, too…companies with a low level of employee engagement have a 33 percent annual decline in operating income and an 11 percent annual decline in growth“.  This should not be a big surprise, but how do you have a great in-store customer experience in light of these statistics?

There are many things that need to come together such as environment, culture, compensation/benefits, work flexibility, and tools. What I want to address here is the increased burden that the omnichannel customer experience is putting on your sales associates. One of the biggest customer dissatisfactions cited by numerous reports identifies out of stock as the top cause. How can your employees serve your customers while also manually monitoring the shelves and turnarounds for correct product inventory? What typically happens is sales associates monitor inventory by looking to see if the shelves and turnarounds are filled with product, not what style, size and colors are available. When a customer finds the product they want and their size is not available, they do one of three things; keep looking at other options, run down a sales associate, or leave. If they call on that sales associate and the answer is “sorry, we don’t have it, can I order it for you?”, then you have just created a problem. The customer’s first thought is, “I can order this--why do I need you?” The employee is frustrated, the customer is not happy and your company may have just lost a sale and possibly a customer. Add to this the relatively new capabilities of in-store pickup of online orders and ship from store to the responsibilities sales associates already have,  and one can see how the fire is being dampened in terms of happy and engaged employees.

Please log in or register below to read the full article.