Turn your workforce into your most effective customer experience initiative.
Hey, we’re CATO, an employee performance and experience consultancy that helps retail companies boost customer loyalty by connecting what matters to your employees and your business.
Unlike other firms that focus entirely on employer branding to attract new talent, we’re all about improving the experience of the folks who already work for you. Because when they want to be there, your customers will too.
BOOK A CALLWho is this for?
Are your stores burning out for basis points?
Are you constantly re-merchandising and reprioritizing for incremental results?
Have values and culture initiatives come and go?
Did attempts to improve morale feel like box-checking campaigns as opposed to meaningful change?
Are employee engagement surveys stagnant?
Are you rolling out programs and communications that aren’t landing with your employees?
Not a day goes by that Bekki does not come up.
Thank you for helping us raise the bar, we are excited to continue our partnerships in 2023. I know having you by their side really encourages the team to think differently and alleviates so much of their day to day stress as well as they have such a great support network around them with you and your team.
Jackie U., Director, Talent Planning & Development, Empire | Sobeys Inc.
Most retailers think if their profitability is dipping, they have a customer experience problem.
They over-focus on incremental improvements like re-merchandising or scripted greetings.
But the reality is, customer experience isn’t the problem.
It’s a downstream symptom of the biggest problem hiding in plain sight.
Employee Disengagement.
Disengaged employees have material ramifications on your profit and customer loyalty.
17% of a retailer’s sales are lost to employee disengagement.
Your customer experience issue? It’s actually an employee disengagement problem, and addressing it is the easiest and most effective way to add real revenue back to your bottom line.
We believe you can create a win-win-win situation where:
you’re getting the passion and performance you need from your employees
they’re getting the fulfilling experience they need from you and
customers are getting the best experience in the industry
(so your shareholders are getting maximum life-time value, so there’s a fourth win).
We consult progressive companies on how to create that virtuous cycle.
Employee disengagement creates 3 profit-eroding issues:
Lost Revenue
The difference between highly engaged teams, and disengaged ones within a typical organization is 17% higher sales on average. Wild right? Just have a look at how companies who get this right compare to the S&P 500.
Suffering Customer Experience
Disengaged employees create disengaged customers, leading to 10% lower customer loyalty and shrinking lifetime value. You’ve experience this as a customer—just think about the last time you walked into a store where the employees were… less than helpful.
High Employee Turnover
Employee turnover costs between 1x-2x and employee’s annual salary depending on their experience. Plus when turnover rates increase, Manager burnout follows, destabilizing your revenue and costing you both financially and culturally.
Bekki has phenomenal questions
This is something I've been trying to describe/communicate for years, and was only able to be this succinct because Bekki has phenomenal questions and, more so than anyone I've ever talked to about these things, is really listening and able to excavate ideas I know I have but up until now haven't been able to explore.
Matthew Copeland, 12+ year Retail Leader, including Old Navy, Starbucks, Whole Foods, William Sonoma
READ CASE STUDYEmployee disengagement creates 3 profit-eroding issues:
Stop leaking revenue and start protecting it.
The most costly mistake companies make is missing lucrative opportunities that don’t show up on traditional P&Ls. Highly engaged employees earn their organizations 17% higher sales and 23% higher profitability on average, but they also protect that revenue through these often overlooked, risk-reducing, revenue stabilizers:
13% higher productivity
10% higher customer loyalty
78% lower absenteeism
68% higher employee wellbeing
26% lower shrinkage
63% fewer safety accidents
30% lower quality defects
22% higher organizational citizenship
Earn customer loyalty.
What your employees feel, your customers will too. Especially the desire to return to, and spend time in your store. Your employee experience and customer experience are directly connected, and can mean the difference of + or - 10% customer loyalty.
Employee retention—keep the people that keep the customers.
I probably don’t need to tell you that retention / turnover / understaffing is THE top concern for both corporate leaders and frontline managers, and for good reason. Turnover is expensive, and can have hefty negative impacts on operations, customer experience, team morale, and burnout to name a few. The good news is, employees are telling you what they want. You just need a strategy to deliver it in sustainable and scalable way.
Improve The “C-Word.” That’s right, Culture.
Words don’t get more ambiguous or overused than “culture.” We know it’s critical, but don’t know how to shape it. And the truth is, you don’t. Because your culture isn’t what you say it is, it’s what your employees say (and feel) it is. What we can shape is employee experience. A winning experience = a winning culture.
A built to last legacy.
An experienced, motivated workforce becomes your greatest asset in a competitive marketplace, and your greatest contribution to our society, collective quality of life, and GDP.* Gallup estimates low employee engagement costs the global economy 8.9 trillion U.S. dollars, or 9% of global GDP.
Build your Employee Experience Advantage
How the program works
Experience Strategy
Experience Strategy is dedicated to articulating your unique Organizational Identity. This is a critical, foundational step that sets expectations, trust, and invites employees to self-identify as a member of your team, which is a recipe for engaged and passionate employees that deliver a killer customer experience. We’ll uncover the narrative of your company’s: origin story, vision for the future, and strengths as an employer.
Experience Execution
This is where too many employee engagement strategies die in PowerPoint decks, and where we make our biggest impact. That’s why we’ve designed this system.The employee experience made up of foundational moments that matter. We prioritize these moments from highest to lowest potential impact and optimize each one through your employees’ day-to-day social, physical, and digital environment—because environment dictates performance.
Listen & Respond
A huge (often missing) pillar of employee experience is ensuring employees know they have a voice and that it matters—especially regarding decisions that affect them and their work.Here we hold space for them to give us valuable feedback, and show them they’re heard by implementing or addressing that feedback.
Repeat & Expand
Finally, we repeat phases 2 & 3 to modernize the rest of the employee lifecycle (ex. onboarding and performance management), while prioritizing the most impactful stages. In product design, this is like making a product (ie. your employee experience) amazing before spending time and money marketing it (ie. talent attraction campaigns).
What an engagement looks like:
Weekly 45-minute done-with-you implementation
About Cato Creative
Everyone here at CATO has experienced an employer that made them shrink instead of grow, and so we are united by a vision of a world in which work contributes to a sense of fulfillment and identity – not loneliness and mental health struggles.
As Abraham Maslow said: “Proper management of the work lives of human beings, of the way in which they earn their living, can improve them and improve the world and in this sense be a utopian or revolutionary technique.”
We also know that a dedicated and diverse group of humans is the best advantage you could possibly have in the competitive market. So we are elated to have found a calling that facilitates the true win/win results.
Collaborative brand strategy and design is our vehicle.
Our Values
We have no doubt that we can change the world – together.
We see people – not clients, users or employees. We are allies who believe in unity in diversity.
Few things are black and white. We keep an open mind and navigate the grey with curiosity.
We are passionate, relentless high-achievers, because we believe our work matters.
Let's Connect
Book a no commitment call.
The impact is incredible.
I see this collaboration as an extension of our team that knows our business, and is able to challenge certain things – always with respect and for the benefit of the team. We can sometimes be biased in some of our interventions and having an external person who questions us, allows us to see certain things differently; which is a good thing.”
- Isabelle Huot, Talent Development Manager, Sobeys Inc.
READ CASE STUDY© 2023 CATO Creative Inc.