Cultivating Culture through developing service
Client Name: Benjamin Barker
Sector: Retail
Type of Project: Culture Training and Development
Grant Support: Enterprise Development Grant (EDG)
Grant Agency: Enterprise Singapore
Prior to 2019, Benjamin Barker lacked service consistency. New hires, called "Fashion Advisors," relied solely on on-the-job learning due to a lack of formal training. The existing, outdated, and text-heavy manual offered little support. This resulted in low confidence among advisors, unsure of providing accurate information to customers. To address this, Benjamin Barker partnered with Ideactio to revamp their onboarding and training program and elevate overall service quality.
Project Objective
This project focused on increasing sales through improving in-store customer experience by creating a service culture through a structured staff training programme driven by brand values and customer centricity.
One of multiple co-creation sessions with members of the Benjamin Barker team.
Our Approach
The project was structured in 3 phases. In practice, these phases may overlap, and are iterative in nature.
Research to understand ground situation - Attending product training conducted for managers and field observations to understand current service.
Synthesis and service design through agile co-design - Organising insight synthesis and co-design sessions to distill insights and run through the content for the card contents.
Develop training programme and artefacts - Internal discussion around the customer journey map prototype that is used through a role-play activity.
Checkpoint sessions and interviews with client project team.
Key Deliverables
Benjamin Barker has always been a touch-and-feel brand. Through the co-design process, we found that physical training artefacts would work well, and additionally would make the staff feel very valued. Each training material is described in detail below.
Service Principle Cards - To bridge the gap between Benjamin Barker's brand values and staff behavior, we created 5 Service Principles. These principles translate the brand's values into actionable behaviours, with three specific actions listed on each principle for role-play exercises and daily practice.
Training Manuals - We created detailed, day-by-day training manuals for new staff to use during their first 2 months of coming onboard.
Customer cards- We developed a set of customer cards, with 12 common customer profiles, each detailing what the customer looks out for, requires, and prefers.
Service Situation Cards - Describes the difficult situations that staff need to learn to deal with, and are used as role-play scenarios.
These artefacts is provided physically.
