Project Snapshot
Timeline: Less than 1 year
Scale: 45,000 stores, 360,000 employees, 18M daily customers
Key Techniques & Tools:
Management: Cross-Functional Team Coordination, A/B Testing, Sales Dashboards
Research: Surveys, Focus Groups, Employee Exit Analysis, Mystery Shopping, Employee Engagement Analysis
Design: Customer Service Standards, Corporate Values Revision, Gamification
In 2017, I joined Magnit, Russia’s largest retail chain, as an external expert to lead a major initiative: improving customer service quality across the company. With over 360,000 employees and 45,000 stores serving 18 million customers daily, Magnit faced stiff competition in an oversaturated market.
Despite its dominance in scale and logistics, the company’s service standards lagged behind competitors. Historical conservatism in management and a strong operational focus meant that frontline staff were primarily tasked with replenishment, inventory, and loss prevention, with little emphasis on customer interaction.
Strategic Mission: Redefining Service for Competitive Advantage
The leadership recognized that in a market where price competition was becoming increasingly unsustainable, customer experience was the new battleground. My role was to design and implement a customer-friendly service strategy tailored to Magnit’s unique operational context, focusing on two critical pillars:
- Improving customer service standards.
- Elevating employee working conditions to support the delivery of excellent service.
Through research and collaboration, we quickly realized that improving customer service was inseparable from addressing the working conditions, motivation, and engagement of employees.
Approach: Combining Research, Collaboration, and Iterative Testing
To tackle these challenges, I proposed a portfolio of 10 interconnected projects, targeting service quality through the lens of employee experience.
Key Actions:
- Establishing a Research Hub:
- Created a centralized research and analytics unit within the HR department to study employee behavior, satisfaction, engagement, and retention.
- Conducted extensive surveys, interviews, and focus groups with over 30,000 employees and customers to identify pain points, barriers, irritants, and opportunities.
- Advocating for Employee-Driven Service Improvements:
- Presented data-driven insights to company leadership, demonstrating how exhausted, unmotivated staff negatively impacted customer satisfaction and sales.
- Secured leadership buy-in for projects that prioritized employee well-being as a foundation for customer service excellence.
- Iterative Testing and Implementation:
- Leveraged A/B testing to rapidly validate hypotheses and measure the impact of proposed changes.
- Deployed cross-functional teams of over 250 employees to pilot and scale successful initiatives across the chain’s diverse formats (supermarkets, hypermarkets, drugstores, and pharmacies).
Project Portfolio
- Service Standards: Developed a customer-friendly service framework, tested its effectiveness, and trained staff across all store formats.
- Corporate Values: Revised company values and employer branding to reflect a renewed focus on customer experience.
- Monetary Motivation: Aligned compensation with customer service priorities, reducing the emphasis on loss prevention.
- Employee Satisfaction: Introduced tools for ongoing measurement of workplace satisfaction and integrated results into store management.
- Retention Programs: Analyzed turnover data and implemented strategies to reduce attrition by 40% in hard-to-fill roles, saving substantial recruitment costs.
- Service Evaluation: Deployed monitoring tools like mystery shopping and exit surveys to measure customer satisfaction.
- Employee Support: Launched a dedicated hotline for staff feedback and concerns.
- Sales Monitoring: Built dashboards to provide daily, weekly, and monthly sales data, increasing transparency and aligning KPIs.
- Gamification: Created digital gamification tools to incentivize sales improvements.
- Internal SLAs: Introduced internal service-level agreements to minimize disruptions from technical issues, logistics delays, and pricing changes.
Outcomes and Achievements
- Established a centralized HR research hub to drive in-house studies and develop actionable insights.
- Designed and tested a comprehensive friendly service standard, transforming the employee-customer interaction paradigm.
- Reduced staff turnover in key roles by 40%, generating significant cost savings.
- Developed a supplier-funded training program, securing up to $750,000 annually for materials.
- Conducted all research and development internally, minimizing external consultancy costs.
- Unified a cross-functional team of 250+ people across Magnit’s vast geography without external hiring.
Reflections
This project stands out as one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my career. It allowed me to impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of employees and millions of customers. While the eventual sale of Magnit in 2018 marked the end of this chapter, I take pride in knowing that the tools, strategies, and cultural shifts we introduced laid the groundwork for long-term improvements.
