etail, because both sectors offer different experiences. It uncovered many of the stresses that shopfloor employees feel across the entire sales experience. Most notably, shopfloor employees in retail are anxious about how informed, empowered and demanding customers are today, and frustrated that they don’t have access to the technology that customers do. They worry that they won’t be able to make customers happy, or will be blamed if an item is out of stock. And they can feel terrible if the customer is not happy after the sale. “A lot of people are shopping with technology and shopfloor employees are feeling quite redundant,” observed Dr Carla Ferraro, associate director, research, at ACRS. “In some cases, they used words like ‘invisible’ and ‘unwanted’. Shopping in a store these days is so heavily influenced by technology and its making employees feel quite negative about the whole experience. “Customers, on the other hand, are approaching the experience feeling confident, informed and empowered. Then they interact with an employee who is feeling quite different and that is creating a tension around the service experience and sometimes causing it to fail.” She added that these days, floor staff generally expected every customer who walked in to negotiate on price, helped along by what they were able to find online on their phones while they were physically in the store. “Of course, employees in grocery stores see their role differently and acknowledge that in this context, their role is expected to be quite minimal. It’s around processing, unless the customer has an issue that they need resolved. These employees didn’t feel as negatively about things because their experience is different.” Ferraro said that when brands and retailers are thinking about the customer experience, often how the employee feels and reacts, as a party involved in the exchange, is not heavily considered. “Frontline employees play such a critical role for a brand and in the customer experience they really need to be trained and developed in a way that enables them to perform at their best,” she said. “What came through in the research was that a lot of the training and development that employees are receiving in retail today is still geared towards generating a sale and sales conversion when people come into a store. But actually what’s required is to equip employees with softer skills that allow them to deal with heavily empowered, entitled and informed consumers and to choose what’s appropriate in the moment.” Hands tied, ill equipped The ACRS research, which forms part of ACRS’ annual Retail Thought Leadership study, revealed that store employees often believed they were not equipped to address problems such as the product selection, or not having something in stock with confidence. “Employees found they had policies in place that allowed them to come to a solution, but customers expected them to be much more flexible in the recovery,” Ferraro said. “In that process, customers didn’t want employees to follow a generic procedure. They wanted a flexible solution on the spot tailored to their needs. Employees are saying they are just not empowered with that ability or authority.” Similarly, Dr Violet Lazarevic, a research consultant at ACRS, noted that employees often felt they had their hands tied by company policies. “They couldn’t match the price or accept a return because of what policy dictated, even if they thought it was reasonable,” she said. “The key thing is for employees to be empowered to make decisions while they are facing the customer, rather than having to default to whatever the strict policy guidelines are.” Ferraro believed retailers had to be prepared and accept that service failures happened and were sometimes beyond their control because, for example, they relied on partners in the supply chain for deliveries. By examining some global experiences, the study demonstrates how those service failures can be turned into huge opportunities for retailers to create positive experiences if they are handled appropriately. “But shopfloor employees are not empowered to handle these turnarounds,” said Ferraro. “In Australia, that hasn’t been encouraged to date. Employees do recognise that customers expect to be delighted, but they don’t have the tools or empowerment to deliver that on the spot.” Lazarevic said the study found that customers thought employees should also be able to read their body language when they entered a store. “They needed to be able to pick up subtle clues to be able to identify the level of service the person wants. Customers don’t want to be oversold to or pushed into a sale. “The research also reveals that retailers need to understand the technology they are using in their service design and tailor their training of employees to that, so that employees can understand where their role starts and ends.” As part of the four phases of the study, ACRS researchers first held focus groups with customers and employees and got them to map out how they approached each other, examining their thoughts and feelings. Customers were then fitted with eye tracking goggles and observed as they shopped. The experiences from both the employees’ and customers’ perspective were mapped out and customer journeys created. These maps were then validated with customers and a series of interviews conducted to delve more deeply into some parts of the maps.