We all have stories about how an associate made a difference in our personal shopping experiences. Recently, blog posts from David Dorf at Oracle and Kronos’ Joyce Maroney highlighted several situations from this past holiday season in which the actions of individual associates changed the course of a sale and built customer loyalty. While stories like these reinforce how important we think the associate is in the customer experience, these are anecdotes. To date, there has been no study or survey to back up these great stories with hard data. That is, there haven’t been any studies until now.
Next week at the NRF 101st Annual Convention & Expo, Axsium Group and Empathica will be releasing a joint whitepaper that establishes a concrete link between the retail customer experience and the workforce. The whitepaper goes beyond a simple summary of the research. It includes a self-assessment for retailers so that they can understand if their workforce is empowered to deliver the customer experience the consumers want, and provides concrete actions that can be taken if they are not.
The data comes from Empathica’s latest Consumer Insights Panel that polled 5,000 shoppers with specific questions about consumer shopping experience and the impact that the retail workforce has on their buying behavior. While the results aren’t surprising (hint: the workforce has a significant impact on the customer experience), they provide those hard facts that you need to show that your workforce management initiative can have a real impact on your top line revenue.
If you’re going to be in New York next week, stop by booth 2068 to pick up a copy of this landmark paper. If you’re not going to NRF, you can download a copy from Axsium’s website next week.