Exceeded Sales Budgets for 6 Years in a Row Through Staff Education and Training

The challenge

A national company who is part of an international optician chain wanted to attract and keep both customers and employees and become the employer of choice in the category. The end goal was to improve the overall customer experiences and increase sales.

What we did

Torben Soelvsteen worked with the company in-house reporting directly to the CEO, working alongside the directors and over 200 retail store managers.

He started off by looking at the company’s current situation, completing competitor analysis and reviewing market trends around the world.

The customer journey and employee journey from attraction, recruitment to education was a high focus. Torben collaboratively created a new customer journey process focusing on excellent service and what created value for the customers. Through this new journey, the company created experiences and value for its customers where it showed its knowledge in the optician field combined with its high focus on its customers creating more return customers and prevent churn.

The new focus was on the customer with a more holistic view thinking customer needs, value and experience together with glasses, sunglasses and contact lenses.

After creating this he helped to roll this customer journey out and educate store managers and employees across the country.

Alongside this, he helped the company create a whole new staff education and training program together with their HR department. The new program included an introduction day for new interns, an on-boarding process, sales and service training, product knowledge and ‘storytelling’ as well as a whole new leadership education program for the store managers.

In the beginning, Torben ran the courses and educated the internal trainers. Following this the training programs were adopted internally and run by the relevant company departments in person, or as web-based learning.

The results

• The company became the country’s market-leading optician chain and exceeded its sales budget for 6 years in a row.
• It became the employer of choice in its field attracting the best and brightest recruits, making them able to recruit +80 % of is talent and leaders from inside the company.
• The new education and training program meant they scored higher in workplace satisfaction surveys and were able to retain employees for longer.