Our World, My Wow!

Communication teams around the world have had to rework their strategy since the unwelcoming presence of COVID-19. WOW! mobile boutique is no different. With the shutdown of our office over a year ago and minimal in person field visits to our 83 locations across Canada, we needed to find a new way to bring our sense of WOW! brand and community back to our sales floor. To do this, we brought in the “Experts” to discuss Associate mindshare; our people.

Early in 2021, our Communications and Marketing team connected with Managers across Districts to discuss how 2020 went from a support perspective and took the time to get feedback on what we could do better.  Out of the three major buckets, one stood out the most, which was having one source of truth for business news and updates. In a pre-COVID world, we connected with our people via email and WhatsApp notifications.  This worked because it was coupled with an in-person meeting to ask questions and provide additional communication on the sales floor.  With the in-person experience gone, our people were asking us for a new way to engage with the Support Team.  With that in mind, our team thought “out of the box” and created our internal site, My WOW!

My WOW! was created with passion and through the perspective of our associates in order to bring a user experience that was taken away from them.  Our mission was to create an online user experience for our people as both the one source of truth and a place of community in our new world. With its Phase One launch in April, we saw adoption to the site instantly with over 200 associates going into the site every single day! Feedback we have received since its launch has been consistently positive. Associates feel more connected to the Support Team and have a better sense of understanding the “why” behind what we do.  Transparency is the key to creating a positive user experience, and My WOW! nurtures the environment for transparency to thrive.

This also brought a new level of data analysis our business never had before. With the analytics built into the dashboard, we are now able to see how long an associate stays on the site, where they navigate to, and how often they are logging in. We are now able to export the data to take a deep dive into how we can improve areas of our communications on the site. For example, we have built new areas on the site from this data for different functional teams. Our inventory management team now has dedicated area to show backordered, end of life, or allocated products.  This allows preparation to pivot to other products on the sales floor.  We have also integrated our New Hire Training program on the site, titled WOW 101.  New associates become familiar with the site, use it during training and look at it again in the future if needed. Productivity increases by giving our people more time to learn outside of their scheduled shifts. In time, this will allow people to learn at their own pace once the mandatory training is complete.

At WOW! mobile boutique, we look forward to continuing our growth on the site to provide a truly unique experience for our audience.  My WOW! will continue to grow with our people, our business and our brand in order to foster an authentic community in our new world.

Jennifer Barr, Pricing & Communications Manager, Match Retail