The store of the future is one that excels at customer experience by making your brand come to life. Customer experience has been hailed as the way to compete against digitally native retailers, with in-store human interactions considered the last defense against the retail apocalypse.

While there are many participants in this interaction, the experience centres around the customer and the associate.

Retail is still a people business

An engaged associate is enthusiastic, and their enthusiasm is contagious – especially with customers. But how best to engage associates?

If you ask them, many will say higher wages, more hours and better tools and education are a good place to start. But competing on compensation alone isn’t a wise long-term strategy. You need to look for ways to encourage associates to become a part of your brand community.

Dealing with the realities

The reality is that most store associates work on a part-time basis with unpredictable hours, resulting in it becoming a transient position, and leaving them less engaged and less connected with your brand.

Additional realities include:

• The challenges of today’s bricks-and-mortar profitability has resulted in reduced on-boarding and training spend.
• Product knowledge (PK) is key to being a positive influence on the interaction between an associate and a customer. Generally, the higher the PK, the better the interaction.
• Tenure influences the ability to absorb PK. The longer an associate stays with a retailer, the more PK they absorb. With high staff turnover in retail, maintaining a well-trained team becomes challenging.
• Retail remains a simple business – success in driving in-store customer experience is dependent upon finding a way to engage associates to embrace each customer interaction.

Practical strategies retailers can use to drive associate engagement

Spending more time and effort on the hiring process is a good start, but it doesn’t guarantee you a sustainable, positive store environment. Three practical, cost-effective ways to drive associate engagement are:

1. Wherever geographically possible, pool labour requirements across stores and pop-ups to allow associates to work at multiple locations. You’ll increase their weekly hours and increase your odds of retaining tenured, knowledgeable staff.
2. Gamify EVERYTHING. Communicating with associates on how they or their stores rank in key metrics like conversion, basket or UPT can create that environment of contagious enthusiasm. Leaderboards, streaks, rankings and lifetime sales stats all have the opportunity to motivate and engage associates when reported automatically and delivered privately to each associate through technology.
3. Speak directly to your associates through a communication platform, providing them with information on that is both useful AND creates interest and a shared vision. Use these tools to collect feedback from your front line, and allow your associates to interact with each other to create your brand community.