Blog

Strategic employee scheduling boosts consumer experience, bottom line

It may not sound as sexy as emerging technologies like mobile pay or cutting-edge digital signage, but workforce scheduling delivers just as much value.

February 12, 2016 by Fast Casual

It may not sound as sexy as emerging technologies like mobile pay or cutting-edge digital signage, but workforce scheduling delivers just as much value, maybe even more in some cases, and the return on investment comes fast.

Why? Because every restaurant employee shares one primary role as part of their his or her job: serving as a brand agent whose actions at some point impact the customer’s retail experience.

So Retail Customer Experience, sister site of FastCasual.com, reached out to a provider of smart scheduling, Workplace, to investigate why more business owners are deploying tools to enhance customer experience, save money, better tap an employee’s skills for a specific store task and, just as importantly, drive more passion and connection between employees and the business.

Workplace Group CEO David Farquhar has spent more than two decades helping deliver enterprise software and serving as CEO in six companies. Workplace has led the market for workforce management products for more than 25 years. Originally this meant controlling costs with time and attendance monitoring. Now it means helping consumer-facing sectors like retail, transportation and hospitality to increase sales by creating schedules that improve customer service. In an interview with Retail Customer Experience, Farquhar reveals why such technology is increasingly being deployed by big and mid-sized retailers across a wide range of vertical industries and reasons it’s proving to be a win-win-win for the retailer, the employee and the customer.

RCE: Employee scheduling seems like one of the typical business tasks for any retailer yet few realize what a critical role it plays in various areas, from more efficient labor use to customer service to consumer satisfaction. Do most retailers understand that at this point or are they at a learning juncture regarding the need for improved scheduling strategy?

FARQUHAR: Sincerestaurateurs are always looking to improve their performances, we focus on how workforce management has evolved to include smart scheduling. Those who make this shift in focus are the ones who are seeking to grow revenues through improved operations, and they get this. They get that turnover continues to be higher than is desirable, that employee engagement never seems to rise measurably despite sincere efforts, and that they are in a tough position.

What we find is that educating the employer that there are benefits beyond giving the hourly employee a reason to smile more, and these are benefits that tend to be hidden from plain view. These benefits include measurable boosts in transaction sizes, greater customer satisfaction because the sales associate was able to spend more time assisting them, and reduced call-outs and turnover among employees because of increased job satisfaction. You can attribute specific metrics to these changes that show up as positive gains in revenues.

For example, improved scheduling — or as we call it, Smart Scheduling — entails an open and honest effort to balance the needs of employees with those of the business. If you involve the employee in building the schedule by making it super simple to determine their availability and preferred shifts, including the opportunity to swap shifts or pick up extra hours, plus the ability to access that schedule and get those needs met without having to go to their place of employment, then they feel as though they have an added benefit by working there. Considering that restaurant work is largely minimum wage labor, Smart Schedules give arestaurateur a competitive advantage to attract and retain the best talent without sacrificing profitability.

This eliminates an onerous task for managers and directors, too, who also gaining the ability to better match staffing needs with store demand like never before. When you walk them through it, it is eye opening in a positive way. At the same time, a smart schedule leverages those preferences to the put the employee in the right place at the right time to meet their prospective customers — increasing sales and conversion rates.

RCE: What tip or piece of advice would you give arestaurateur interested in getting a better strategy in place — is there any internal task or business initiative (getting top level support, creating a C-team taskforce to drive it forward) that a retailer should initiate before deploying a new tool or strategy?

FARQUHAR: We say just test drive the technology with a one store pilot. The integration is simple on our end and the amount of work involved for the employer is less than they devote to creating a schedule today (assuming they are still doing it manually or using outdated technology).

We can demonstrate ROI very quickly with real, honest results that a retailer can replicate across the entire business. And if the retailer has resistance to such change, they should speak with their hourly employees to understand the challenges they encounter in their work lives today with the current scheduling process that’s in place.

Again, an eye opening exercise that highlights the need for improvement.

RCE: What is one of the biggest misconceptions regarding employee scheduling that you typically educate a client about regarding the need to make employee scheduling a priority?

FARQUHAR: That they have it covered with their current methods. That is, they believe that their current workforce management and scheduling tools are only there to manage down costs. This is the old mindset. Or that they think the integration effort is too complicated (likely an opinion colored by past, negative experiences), or that their operations are too structured to need it. Smart Scheduling helps control costs, of course, but it does it in a way that doesn’t sacrifice customer experience, employee engagement or leave money on the table.

In those conversations, we continue to take a pragmatic approach that has immediate value for the retailer. We share stories about our clients who were doing things the same way as those who haven’t yet made the change, and what their experience was in making that change as well as the outcomes they achieved.

We love data and believe deeply in telling stories that are based on facts, not political opinion or social persuasion. Employee-friendly scheduling that also maximizes sales simply makes business sense in a concrete way that you can measure and know that it’s working. What better reason to change?