'We leant into the EX and HR side to use what we know we're good at, to try and improve the things we weren't,' says head of people
It may not be a traditional pairing, but for successful online rug retailer Miss Amara, employee and customer experience go hand in hand.
And in a unique role, head of people, Lydia Bertini, also oversees customer experience.
“I really do have a bird’s eye view over both sides of the experience — both internally for our teams but also looking closely at what that experience is like for our customer — and I believe the two are very closely intertwined,” said Bertini.
“If you have a happy, engaged team, then that engagement is going to flow through to customer experience; and vice versa, if your team is constantly battling upset, stressed customers, that has an impact on your team.”
Joking that selling rugs isn’t particularly sexy, Bertini explained, “We really pride ourselves on our customer experience, so one of our unique selling points is to provide a best-in-class customer experience.”
But when COVID hit, like many online retailers, Miss Amara was plagued with significant shipment and supply chain delays that had a huge effect on the company’s customer experience.
“We didn’t handle it as well as we could have,” said Bertini, who is based in Sydney. “We’d been measuring our NPS [net promoter score] and we were starting to see a real decline. We knew we had to change something, so we really leant into the power of our team.”
Engaging key stakeholders and long-serving employees who had been part of the company’s evolution, the company asked the question “What is a pivotal change that we could make?” she said.
“On the HR and EX side of things, when we were looking to make a change and really increase our focus on NPS, we did look at it really holistically and engaging with the team was key,” said Bertini.
“We leant into the EX and HR side to use what we know we’re good at to try and improve the things we weren’t,” said Bertini.
Once feedback was collected, Bertini began the huge exercise of mapping out every step of the customer journey and identifying the department that influenced each journey point.
“Journey mapping was definitely a part of helping everyone in the business understand how they impacted NPS,” she said. “It’s really easy to think that NPS is the customer experience teams problem, but when you start peeling back the layers and listen to the customer feedback, it’s about the product, the website user-experience, the communication they receive post-purchase.”
While it was a huge exercise, journey mapping was pivotal in getting buy-in from the team when the organisation made the decision to make NPS part of everyone’s KPIs.
“It was big exercise but journey mapping was definitely a part of bringing everyone along on that journey so they could actually say, ‘OK, I’m responsible for making changes,’” said Bertini.
Miss Amara has an almost fully remote workforce, so Bertini had to look to technology to immerse the team in the companies NPS.
“We live on Slack and Zoom, so we really looked to those digital platforms and started creating channels where we talked about customer feedback,” said Bertini.
Starting out posting once a day, the channel now has all-day, everyday activity, and three years on, Miss Amara has an NPS of +58 — a 60% increase leaving Bertini free to build on the company’s fun and engaged culture.
“We’re fortunate enough to have such a highly engaged team at Miss Amara, we really saw the whole team put their energy into it and their weight behind it. Everyone really jumped on it in a really engaged and innovative way, and I definitely believe that was the factor that helped us improve our NPS so exponentially.”
