Up Leveling the Employee Experience During Transformation

The Call

A major coffee chain was entering a transformational period aimed at reducing operational bottlenecks and renewing baristas’ ability to make human connections with customers. Among many back-of-house innovations, the brand’s equipment team created a system intended to automate production of a popular beverage to streamline a traditionally burdensome task. The team partnered with Catapult Insights to meet with store staff to better understand the functional and emotional impact the innovation had on their work.

Our Response

We worked closely with the client’s operations and insights teams to design a research program spanning multiple test stores where the new equipment was installed. Our qualitative team conducted a combination of observational research paired with scheduled interviews among store employees to explore topics of perception, functional and emotional impact, and brand fit resulting from new processes and new equipment. Our conversations also touched on the broader context of the company’s on-going transformation and the relative effect of this specific change within that state.

The Celebration

Our work identified key benefits of the equipment innovation that provided store staff with measurable gains in efficiency in addition to reductions of mental burdens associated with legacy equipment and processes. We were also able to identify several reliability and equipment maintenance optimizations to further strengthen the employee experience. Our client was “thrilled” by the level of insight and direction the research provided, directly informing their next steps and setting up the team for a successful, expanded pilot program.