NEW YORK — Circle K is fueling better experiences through a messaging app that connects the entire company, Jennifer Karras, director of operations excellence for North America at Circle K, said during a session at National Retail Federation’s Big Show conference on Monday.
Circle K is part of Alimentation Couche-Tard, a global convenience retailer with around 149,000 employees that operates more than 16,800 stores worldwide.
The mobile app, which is powered by communication software vendor WorkJam, has 51,000 active users in North America, and another 71,000 across Europe, according to Karras.
“It's been a rigorous journey, but we are leveraging communications where even our CEO will post messages that get to the front line,” Karras said. This allows associates to feel like part of the larger company.
While primarily an employee tool, the app improves CX by enabling better in-store experiences. In addition to helping managers assign daily tasks, leaders can use it to collect feedback about in-store initiatives and customers can notify teams about potential problems through in-store QR codes.
The investment in the employee experience, and by extension customer experience, carries business benefits.
Circle K has found that good CX has a direct impact on the bottom line, according to Karras.
“We're really focused on the customer-centric journey and looking at our net promoter score and promoters versus detractors,” Karras said. “We found that our promoters visit our stores two times more than the detractors.”
Employees know whether initiatives work
No one knows the customer experience as well as frontline employees. They’re the ones customers contact if an experience is particularly good or bad, which can make their feedback valuable for refining experience investments.
However, leaders can’t meet with tens of thousands of employees, and convenience store associates don’t have easy access to email. Circle K has surmounted that challenge by using its communication app to gather workers’ opinions after it makes changes to its stores.
“If you're testing a new cleaning supply or toilet paper in the bathroom, you're able to get that input,” Steve Kramer, co-founder and CEO of WorkJam, said during the session. “What we've seen … is that empowerment and giving the employee a voice has such a tremendous impact on the organization.”
Circle K takes special care in how it uses the solution so that employees don’t feel like they’re being watched, according to Karras. The retailer wants the app to feel like a one-stop -shop for managing tasks and feedback, not an always active monitoring tool.
“We want them to realize it's a benefit and not a burden,” Karras said.
Connecting customers to the frontline
Circle K employees aren’t the only ones who can report feedback up the chain. The communication app can also detect issues reported by customers and determine next steps to resolve store-level problems.
A solution created in partnership with Qualtrics lets shoppers scan a QR code to access a customer survey, according to Kramer. AI then analyzes the feedback and turns it into actionable insights including tasks for in-store associates in real time.
“An employee that's working the register may not realize that a spill is there, so we don't know how many customers are experiencing that bad experience,” Karras said. “With this, the employee is notified, immediately runs over and cleans it up.”
The software records and shares positive feedback as well. When a customer praises the in-store experience, a task is generated for the district manager so they can recognize the associates responsible.
“What we're finding is we're actually getting much more recognition than we are dissatisfaction, which has really been an eye opener for us,” Karras said. “We thought we'd probably get more customer complaints, but our customers are taking the time to log the experience that they've had.”
