How IKEA transformed both customer experience and employee satisfaction

IKEA, part of Ingka Group and a brand synonymous with affordable and stylish home furnishings, is famous for a unique in-store experience that allows millions of customers to explore its wide range of products in a fun and interactive way across 31 countries worldwide.

However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a lockdown-induced surge in online shopping placed pressure on aftersales care. IKEA’s famously customer-centric in-store experience was not being replicated online, and shoppers were taking note, for example, customer satisfaction and customer experience pulse surveys showed only 60% of customers happy with service and support.

IKEA has over 170,000 employees who are highly invested in delivering good service to all customers. “Togetherness” is at the heart of Ingka Group culture, and empowering employees to grow, develop and contribute on an individual level is one of their main values. But the customer support systems made it difficult to part from the traditional ways of working to a new, modern approach. In fact, the systems were so disjointed and unscalable that growth in online sales was being offset by growth in costs, with every 1% of sales growth resulting in a 4% increase in customer contact center costs.

Addressing disjointed customer support tech and processes was one major piece of the transformation puzzle. And supporting the people who use it was another.

Enter the vision of a modernized IKEA Customer Support Center, reimagined as a Remote Customer Meeting Point aimed at not just maintaining, but enhancing the unique IKEA experience in a digital landscape. The transformation was underpinned by a simple, yet important question posed by EY teams: How can we put both co-workers and customers at the center of better transformations?

IKEA’s objective was to support customers throughout their shopping journey by creating an experience that is so convenient and easy to use that customers rarely need assistance. However, when customers do require support, IKEA was also determined to make customers feel valued and cared for.

In pursuit of these goals, the EY teams and Ingka Group worked together on a transformation structure and governance that would help IKEA to deliver exceptional customer service while also driving business growth. By leveraging the EY team’s knowledge in customer experience and business transformation and by working closely with Ingka Group’s team, the combined transformation teams were able to create a compelling roadmap for success in close collaboration.

People were placed at the center of the transformation. The EY teams adopted a customer-first approach, re-imagining experiences that had the greatest impact on the customer and the business. This guided the ideation, direction and implementation of a group of transformation programs.

The EY teams created a Project Management Office (PMO) and a governance setup that was embedded within IKEA, making the total transformation team capable of delivering programs which included:

• Foundation: the EY teams helped create a consistent digital landscape, with a unified contact platform and standard global tools, including knowledge and quality management.
• Digital self-service suite: IKEA wanted customers to be empowered to do easy transactional things like change a delivery date. New self-service solutions such as chatbots were created from scratch, and proven local solutions were scaled globally.
  
• Value creation: co-workers had extensive knowledge about product ranges but didn’t have a channel to build value with that knowledge. The transformation team helped in creating new remote sales opportunities, for example with a remote kitchen design tool, and empowered co-workers with new skills and the confidence to sell to customers.
• New organization design and implementation: the transformation team redefined the remit of co-workers and upskilled and reskilled them in their enhanced roles; helped create new centers of excellence in areas such as remote experience design; embedded new analytics and demand and capacity planning; and collaborated with Ingka Group’s internal future of work function to build a remote work system and decouple customer service hours from store opening hours.
• Innovation capability building: the teams elevated customer support with an incubation hub to develop and test new customer support concepts including digital tools and talent development and retention initiatives.

Putting humans at the center also shaped the approach to listening, communicating and helping to deliver the transformation.

“Our customers and co-workers have been at the heart, throughout the entire transformation,” said one Market Support Manager at the Ingka Group.

For example, to thrive in the new environment and set IKEA’s customer support transformation up for success, it was crucial to gain a deep understanding of the needs of all stakeholders, including the transformation team, co-workers and customers. The leadership team had to focus on finding ways to sustain the energy of their stakeholders, listen to their teams and educate, engage, and equip everyone involved with the right tools to make the transformation successful.

To build better communication throughout the transformation, the team established a recurring event called Retro Week every four months. This week-long event served as a pause from the transformation, allowing teams to reflect on what had been achieved and how they had worked together. During Retro Weeks, the teams focused on creating and refining long- and mid-term plans, while also taking time to learn and grow together. This included inviting guest speakers for inspiration and learning, setting up lessons-learned sessions, and emphasizing the importance of health and wellbeing.

Overall, the transformation team created an environment of psychological safety where open feedback, including disagreement, was encouraged, heard and managed respectfully.

The transformation also put a strong emphasis on gathering insights from co-workers. To achieve this, internal surveys were conducted three times a year, asking specific questions related to the transformational topics such as the quality of deployed products, efficiency of work processes, and the co-worker experience of being impacted by the work completed through the transformation.

These insights provided opportunities for the team to more rapidly course-correct elements of the transformation. For example, there was direct feedback from some co-workers that a new system had overloaded the underlying technology stack, meaning that it took far too long for them to login at the start of a shift. This gave the prompt to IT teams to address the issue immediately and was a learning for the wider transformation to incorporate.

By listening to its employees and taking their feedback seriously, the transformation demonstrated a commitment to creating a change that was grounded in the needs of its co-workers supporting the customers every day.

Ingka Group’s board described the transformation as the most successful in recent memory. The transformation’s accomplishments have demonstrated that attaining business growth objectives, improving customer service and building a better workforce experience are all achievable in a single cohesive transformation program.

Customers feel cared for and acknowledged, which was Ingka Group’s main objective and a core brand value at IKEA. “This Customer Support Transformation has been the best-executed transformation at Ingka,” said a Retail Operations Manager at the Ingka Group.

The transformation has delivered on this objective, measured against five tangible KPIs:

• Happy customer score has increased by 22 points since the start, and continues to rise year-on-year
• Remote sales growth of over €1bn
• Self-service and digital channel utilization including web chat and increased social media customer service interactions have created savings of tens of millions of euros
• Co-worker engagement and satisfaction score is up 5 points for remote sales teams, and for the first time is now higher than in-store colleagues’ scores

Ingka Group rarely enters awards, but this transformation picked up three Golds and one Silver award plus a Best In Class at the European Customer Experience Awards 2023.

Internally, the transformation has driven some major shifts too. It is now used as a blueprint for how to run a successful transformation, and new programs are being asked to adopt the same ways of working.

The transformation has created many new opportunities for people to grow into new and higher roles and has also provided access to more training and development than co-workers have had for years. New remote working practices and extended opening hours, with new early morning and evening shifts, are attracting more talent. In fact, for the first time, co-workers are moving from in-store roles to customer support.

Overall, the engagement has, as planned, significantly transformed customer and co-worker experience. But it has also transformed the profile and perception of customer support within the Ingka Group. With new capabilities embedded across the entire organization, Ingka Group and IKEA are positioned for ongoing improvement well into the future.