“I didn’t expect customer advice to be such a great experience”
At Mister Spex, hundreds of store employees work every day to provide customers with a great experience in our 68 shops. From eye exams and style advice to the sale of different products, the store specialists keep our brick-and-mortar business running from Monday to Saturday (in some countries even on Sundays). With increasing retail growth (20 new stores in Germany, Austria, Sweden and Switzerland in 2022 alone), the challenges and tasks in the stores are not becoming any less. For this reason, there was an important item in our Objectives & Key Results for the last quarter of the year that was exclusively intended for our management team: a one-day internship as a sales advisor in a Mister Spex store!
Our ten-strong management team visited various stores in Berlin and Leipzig in November and December, and literally lent a hand. For our Vice President Retail Nils, the experience and direct contact with the customers was particularly important and informative, as he is responsible for retail growth. “The view through the glasses of our employees on the floor helps the leadership of Mister Spex to make better decisions for our important sales channel. For example, it’s about the deployment of systems or the design of processes,” says Nils and adds: “In the management team, we talk a lot about our customers based on analyses and surveys, most of which is based on numbers. However, it is completely different to meet them on the floor and talk to them, for example to find out which glasses are the perfect match for them. The latter component is a super addition and helps enormously to bring both on top of each other for good decisions later.”
Nils would not have thought beforehand that the temp day would bring him so much joy: “Meeting people in the store and understanding why they come to our stores and possibly clearing up doubts is fun, but also hard work. I even managed to sell three pairs of glasses to a customer who actually only wanted to pick up contact lenses. Well, I started the conversation and pointed out our great selection. The professionals, i.e. our store staff, did the closing. I didn’t expect customer advice to be such a great experience.”
Our CHRO Maren felt the same way as Nils. For her, the direct feedback from the team on site was very valuable. “Talking to the store staff during the day, it became clear which things were going very well and where there was a need for optimisation,” says Maren: “I gained a lot of insights and got to know new processes. It was simply fun to be involved!”
One thing is clear: our management team can highly recommend all Spexies who do not work in a store to also do a temp day on site. “My view of our shop business has sharpened considerably. It was great to be able to look behind the scenes in the back office, for example,” says our board officer Sina. Nils adds: “Our strategy is clear: retail is a big growth area for Mister Spex. A store works much differently than our online business. Understanding that helps all of us.”
A special thank you to all our store specialists who took such wonderful care of the management team on the temp days!
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