Ahead of Ragtrader's annual Women In Fashion Edition, we asked retail leaders to discuss how their leadership style has changed during the pandemic. Here, Kathmandu's first CCO, Eva Barrett details how she has managed her teams during the pandemic.
This year is the first time that a chief customer officer has been appointed to Kathmandu.
My role is to ensure that our customers have an incredible experience right across all of our touchpoints, because often in many organisations different elements are siloed.
For example, customer service will report into one area and marketing reports into another area, but any element that is attached to the customer, I'm now responsible for.
That's everything from brand to customer to loyalty, marketing, customer service and eCommerce right across the whole business.
How has COVID impacted your teams and the way you lead?
I actually think [COVID] has driven even more productivity and coming into this I had no concerns at all about how people work.
I think that having come from Europe and being in a global role – I had teams based all around the world, I had a team based in Portland in the US I had a team a team based in Carlsbad near San Diego, I had a team in Germany – I think that if you trust your people then they will absolutely deliver.
I think what's important though, is making sure that you have those regular check-ins, so that people feel connected.
I think that there is still a place for the office, because that's where people get that connection, they get that social element and I also think that you're able to then get teams together to collaborate further.
But certainly having to do this [remote work] now for six months now, our team have really stepped up to do that via Zoom.
I also think that COVID has accelerated of a lot of decisions.
In the past it might have taken quite some time to update the website or to implement a lot of those key decisions.
I think that COVID has accelerated that because of the expectation from the customer and the consumer.
Being very customer-first during the pandemic, of course we've been all been looking at what's been happening with traditional post supplies and, 'why does it take so long for it to be delivered?'
That's when we came up with the Uber partnership.
When we looked at our customers [during that time, it was] winter, it was cold, if a customer wants to get a jacket in a couple of hours, why do they need to wait a week or two because of the delays that were happening?
So we decided that we could be the first Australasian retailer to partner with Uber to get customers their goods to them within 2 hours, so for me that was a very fast innovation.
And all of that came about by looking at some customer insights.
So I think certainly there will be more and more of that in the future; 'how do we make the experience better for customers? How do we accelerate and keep on accelerating some of those decisions?'