Survey: Retailers struggle to fill holiday positions

Sharp increases in traffic across channels during the holiday season put a hiring strain on many retailers.

According to the new “Customer Experience Holiday Survival Guide” from customer engagement technology provider Verint, more than 60% of surveyed retailers say they are challenged to find qualified candidates to staff their stores, while 45% are struggling to fill contact center and back-office positions.

While 94% of respondents plan to hire new workers for the holiday season, nearly 30% report not having enough Human Resources (HR) staff to handle the number of vacancies that need to be filled.  

The survey found that a sizable majority of respondents said automation is either in place or planned for workflows such as tracking orders (81%), inventory management (81%), sending customized offers or recommendations (79%), and processing returns (69%).

However, only a little more than half (56%) of respondents currently have automation in place for customer support. Another 21% plan to implement customer support automation, while 23% don't use or plan to use this type of technology.

Only four in 10 (39%) respondents engaging with customers via private messaging, although 81% automate customer engagement at scale via bots. However, only 34% of retailers said that chatbots play a key part in their engagement strategy, which means 66% either don’t use any kind of bot, or they only play a minor role in customer engagement.

Verint recommends that retailers consider the following steps to help mitigate holiday labor shortages:

Automate contact center operations. By automating responses to common queries or deflecting conversations to FAQs or community forums, Verinnt says the pressure on human agents is reduced, leaving them free to handle more complex issues, as well as lowering the cost to serve and creating a more seamless customer experience.

Employ intelligent hiring solutions for streamlined staff acquisition and assessment. A virtual interviewing and hiring process creates an extra layer of evaluation by pre-assessing candidates and reducing the workload on HR and hiring managers, according to Verint.

Lean into private messaging and automation to scale customer communications. Verint advises that bots can automate the use of private messaging channels at scale for customer communications in areas such as customized offers and recommendations and returns.

Meet capacity through conversation containment. Verint recommends that retailers use service bots and virtual assistants to help manage high-volume, low-effort queries. Bots can resolve repetitive, simple issues while human agents are dedicated to high-value interactions, which Verint says creates savings in customer service costs.

Survey: Retailers may limit holiday hiring
According to the 2022 Seasonal Retail Hiring Outlook from global outplacement and business and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, retailers will add 680,000 workers during the 2022 holiday season, down from the 700,000 the company predicted last year. The study cited possibly falling consumer demand for the holidays due to planned rate increases, inflation and potential recession fears as causing retailers to scale back seasonal hiring plans. 

Two surveys were conducted by a third-party research firm for Verint from Sept. 23 through Oct. 5, 2022. Survey respondents were from U.S. organizations with at least 1,000 employees selling retail products and services to consumers in physical stores and/or online. More than 200 organizations participated in each survey.

To learn more, download Verint’s Customer Experience Holiday Survival Guide.