Jade M. on Medium published a thoughtful perspective highlighting the pressure cashiers face to sign up in-person customers for company loyalty programs when management doesn’t effectively communicate to the front line the importance of the loyalty/CRM program.
As a customer, Jade was frustrated that everywhere she went retail clerks more or less demanded that she sign up for the loyalty programs in order to complete a purchase.
Later, as a cashier, she was surprised to learn that cashiers were accountable for getting some number of customers to sign up for the program each day, and that they could lose shifts (and even their jobs) if they failed to do so.
The implication of the article is that it is unreasonable and unfair for retailers to hold cashiers accountable for loyalty program signups. As if collecting email addresses was an optional activity that wasn’t really the responsibility of cashiers, who are really just supposed to be checking people out as quickly and efficiently as possible.
I think it’s easy to have this perspective if management has never effectively shared the purpose/importance of the loyalty program with team members. More training/communication should have gone into communicating:
- Why it’s important to the company that people sign up
- What the benefits are to the customer
- What’s the carrot that serves as motivation for getting people to sign up
And then — one last thing — from the get-go it should have been made clear that helping to grow the loyalty program was part of the job. It’s not a promotion. It’s not an annoyance from corporate marketing. It’s a critical cashier responsibility that they will be held accountable for.
The best possible scenario is to make it a win-win-win: customers clearly understand why they should join the program, and cashiers get some tangible benefit for strongly encouraging them to do so (marketers win because more people sign up)
