The Secret to Improving Your Customer Experience: Prioritizing the Front-Line Associate

Alex Tallman, director of retail experience & education, Fleet Feet

It’s easy to think that the most important moments within a company are the ones that happen within the four walls of the head office. While the decisions and strategies created in board rooms are important, your customers will likely never step foot in your headquarters.

Instead, their relationship with your brand is almost entirely based on their experience with a single person: the front-line sales associate.

I started in retail as a part-timer in one of our stores almost a decade ago. Today, I’m Fleet Feet’s Director of Retail Experience & Education, leading the team responsible for enhancing our customer experience. Last year, Fleet Feet maintained a Net Promoter Score of 93 across all 250+ company-owned and franchised stores nationwide.

How do we do it?

Our strategy starts with our front-line associates – or as we call them – Outfitters.

Put yourself in their shoes.

Fleet Feet is a run specialty retailer, but this is more than just wordplay. Being intimately familiar with what it takes to be a front-line associate is a key reason we have scaled our best-in-class experience.

Whenever possible, we look to promote from within. More than 25% of our corporate employees had experience working in our stores before joining the Store Support Team – our corporate office. Having first-hand knowledge of life within our stores and thoroughly understanding the challenges our Outfitters's face allows our team to deliver support better.

That said, we recognize that retail is constantly changing. To stay connected, our retail experience team continues to dedicate time to working on the sales floor at least every other week. And I don’t mean just visiting stores, and I mean actually working shoulder-to-shoulder with our Outfitters. Regularly seeing the customer experience from their perspective has helped to remove friction points that otherwise would have gone unaddressed.

For example, we quickly noticed the excessive number of times we were asking the customer for their email address - which wasn’t enjoyable for the customer or the associate. Working with our marketing team, we made some simple changes to our process, informed by our observations. These changes eliminated some clunkiness from our processes and resulted in an email capture of 86% for 2022.

Improve the customer experience by improving the employee experience.

Fleet Feet offers state-of-the-art foot scanning technology, but the technology is only as good as the person who interprets the data, making our Outfitters the real reason customers shop with us. Anything we can do to support them better is our best path to better serving our customers.

Despite making an effort to stay connected to the sales floor, we recognize that nobody knows it better than the actual front-line associates. By serving our customers day in and day out, they’re a wealth of knowledge on opportunities to enhance the experience.

With that, we’re always looking for ways to give our store employees opportunities to share what is and isn’t working. We do this via regular employee engagement surveys, hosting live virtual training sessions with open Q&A sessions, and facilitating peer-to-peer discussions for managers every month. Giving them a voice and genuinely listening to their challenges makes them more engaged in their work and more empowered to serve the customer.

Your front-line associates want to deliver amazing experiences. All you have to do is remove the obstacles and give them the tools to do it.