Waitwhile’s “Employee Sentiment Survey: Retail” Reveals Common Worker Frustrations and Offers Actionable Insights for Reducing Turnover and Improving Customer Service
San Francisco, March 15, 2023 – Waitwhile, the customizable cloud-based solution that helps retailers create the perfect customer flows, today announced the publication of its Employee Sentiment Survey: Retail, a new study that explores the retail worker experience, including job satisfaction, the rise of incivility in customer-facing roles, and how employees feel about automation as it relates to customer service.
Recognizing that the retail industry in particular has been disproportionately impacted by high turnover and staffing shortages, Waitwhile’s study examines the key factors behind employee satisfaction and offers critical insights for retail organizations to reduce employee turnover, improve customer satisfaction, and increase brand loyalty.
Despite news-grabbing headlines of layoffs in tech and media, retailers continue to face huge workforce challenges amid “The Great Attrition.” In a recent study, McKinsey and Company noted that the quit rate among retail and hospitality workers in the United States outpaces the national average by more than 70 percent. To better understand what’s driving these staffing issues, Waitwhile conducted an online survey of 1,000 adults working in retail in the U.S. to measure employee sentiment in the industry. The survey asked respondents to describe their experience in customer-facing roles and share their opinions about whether the technology available in their workplace enabled them to provide excellent customer service.
Waitwhile’s research found that 68.5% of retail workers regularly deal with customers who are angry or frustrated – and one in five respondents reported having to deal with unhappy customers on a daily basis. Employees point to long wait times as the most common source of customer annoyance, and 73% of retail employees say that long lines or long waits are a problem at work.
“We’ve all seen the videos of frontline workers who’ve been harassed by angry and frustrated customers, and this bad behavior is clearly taking a toll: Waitwhile found that nearly one in two retail employees are unhappy at work,” said Christoffer Klemming, CEO and Co-Founder of Waitwhile. “The high rate of worker dissatisfaction should serve as a wake-up call for retail organizations and our research offers actionable insights for brands seeking to improve customer interactions, as well as the retail work environment overall. Technology has been clearly identified as a key solution for retailers to boost employee morale and productivity. Automation tools that reduce wait times and streamline customer flow improve customer satisfaction while producing much-needed efficiencies that drive positive business results.”
Other key findings include:
- 74% of frontline retail workers report being bored at work
- 40% describe feeling anxious at work, with customer satisfaction ranked as the most common cause of stress
- 40% indicate that they waste time dealing with dated or poorly designed technology at work
- 54% wish that their organization invested more in maintaining, improving, or expanding the technology they have to use at work
To access the research and to learn more about the methodology for Waitwhile’s Employee Sentiment Survey: Retail, please visit https://waitwhile.com/blog/retail-employee-sentiment-report
About Waitwhile
Waitwhile is a customizable cloud-based solution that any retailer can use to create the perfect end-to-end customer flows with waitlists, appointments, messaging, and analytics across any number of locations. Waitwhile lets customers wait from anywhere and track their status in real-time while helping businesses automate customer flows, reduce wait times, and speed up operations with machine learning.
Brands like Best Buy, Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga, Samsung, and Ace Hardware use Waitwhile for queue management, curbside/in-store pickup, clienteling, warehouse management, and more. A flexible design ensures Waitwhile can be customized to how any business runs and a robust API with extensive documentation means that Waitwhile integrates seamlessly into existing workflows.
Used by thousands of companies across every industry around the world, Waitwhile has saved 200+ million people more than 10,000 years of waiting in line.
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