Retail Experience
I worked with one of Britain’s most successful and dynamic supermarket chains when it sought to deploy self-service tills.
The questions which my customer wanted me to address were:
- How could we realise the potential productivity gains ?
- Shoplifting: was it a problem with these tills ?
- How would the tills integrate into the general running of a store ?
- What special skills or approach would staff need ?
- How could traffic be driven up: would the shopper ‘bite’ ?
The Company had been badly let down by its Technology ‘partner’ which had supplied highly innovative tills but entirely neglected to provide support on processes and human factors. An inevitable consequence of this was that stores which had taken self-service tills were underperforming and customer satisfaction with the tills was extremely low.
My approach was:
- To fix the user experience and that meant
- Tackling up-stream processes
- Improving support-staff selection and training
The Human Touch
Where stores had failed — that is, where staff and public alike had lost faith in the capacity of the tills to do their job properly — we had a big problem. A vicious circle had developed in which supporting self-service tills was seen as a ‘rotten job’. So the role didn’t attract the best people, so it wasn’t tackled in a positive way, so the customer experience worsened, so customers became less happy still.
Our only practical way forward with failing stores was to withdraw the tills. When we started in a new store with a clean slate and good people, and kept the experience positive, the results were astounding, with store targets for throughput being reached in days rather than the expected weeks.
By being given access to the best people and internally marketing the role as an elite one, I transformed the job’s standing and the calibre of the applicants for it. Now we had the best people, well trained, and all measures of customer satisfaction rose dramatically.
And the job needed very good people. It needed multi-taskers who could watch four tills and deal with exceptional events along with the mundane, like age verification and security-tag removal. With the right training, backed up with good support, the best people really excelled and made the job their own.
Fear of failure
If a shopper tries a self-service till and the experience is bad, they are very unlikely to repeat the attempt. Fear of failure is bad enough, but here we have fear of public failure, and concern that you might be the one holding up the queue.
Obviously, ignoring the human dimension of this work was a serious mistake but one that was entirely typical of a technology-driven approach to a project.
We simply couldn’t afford for customers’ early experiences to be bad. If they were, they never used the lanes again. So training of staff and support of the shopper became hugely important — particularly in early days.
So I took on training. I both wrote and delivered it at a number of stores, each time building on the last. Again, the bottom-line results showed that this sort of investment is not a luxury but an absolute prerequisite for such a challenging project to succeed.
Red for ‘danger’
So support for the customer had to be really good without defeating the initiative’s staffing objectives and having lots of staff hanging around. From my point of view, this first meant significant re-working of the ‘customer interface’: the screen that shoppers need to touch in order to select goods, apply vouchers and pay. One change was, in retrospect, glaringly obvious: we changed ‘Next’ and ‘Proceed’ buttons from the red chosen by the technology boffins to green. People don’t expect concepts of ‘yes’, ‘go on’ and ‘next’ to be associated with the red of ‘error’ or ‘danger’.
Look-up screens for fresh vegetables also needed reworking. Photographs of fruit and vegetables had all been taken so that they were as big as possible. But this proved confusing: it was hard to tell the difference between a yellow melon and a lemon. So we discovered that although shape and colour are the first things we look for in selecting items pictorially, relative size was very important too.
Reduced-price goods
Goods nearing their sell-by dates were routinely discounted. This was usually done by night staff printing sticky labels using hand-held printers. When these failed to print well, bar-code scanners failed to read them.
This had long been the case, and till staff knew to look at just the digits in which the price had been encoded and put the goods through on an over-ride. But self-service-till customers couldn’t do this. So the new tills high-lit a problem that had been covered up by till-staff innovation. It meant that we had to improve print quality for the stickers, as failing to do that guaranteed a bad experience for the customer ... and a grumbled promise of ‘never again’.
This shows how processes seldom exist in true isolation. Any process will have complex up- and down-stream effects, and the many consequences are impossible to predict.