Earlier this week, I stood waiting to use a supermarket self-checkout. There were six self-checkouts, and four were out of service. Not because the technology had failed, but because each customer needed a staff member to authorise a transaction before they could continue.
The familiar red lights were flashing above the tills. Customers waited, and waited. There wasn't a colleague in sight. Eventually, I walked over to the customer service desk to ask whether anyone could help. The answer surprised me: "I'm responsible for the self-checkouts as well." Unfortunately, they were already dealing with a customer at the service desk, and there was nobody else available.
Everyone waited, and after a couple of minutes, one customer quietly left their shopping basket and walked out of the store. Nobody seemed to notice.
These were self-checkouts, and customers were already doing much of the work themselves. The retailer had already shifted part of the shopping process from colleagues to customers. However, when the technology inevitably required human intervention, the one colleague responsible couldn't be in two places at once. It wasn't a failure of the technology or the colleague. It was a design failure.
This week, Asda announced changes to give store colleagues greater flexibility to work across different parts of the business. On the surface, it makes perfect sense. Customers don't think in departments; they want the person in front of them to help.
Retailers have been trying for years to eliminate the phrase "That's not my department". Done well, cross-training can produce exactly that outcome, but it also raises an important question.
Are retailers developing more capable colleagues, or simply asking fewer colleagues to take on more responsibilities?
They're often treated as though they mean the same thing, but they don't. A multi-skilled colleague has been trained, coached and given the confidence to solve more customer problems. A multi-tasked colleague is expected to juggle more responsibilities simultaneously. These are completely different experiences. One fosters ownership, while the other causes constant interruption. One improves the customer experience, while the other merely spreads the workload more thinly.
The customer standing beside me didn't know how many people were scheduled that morning. They didn't know wage budgets or operating models. They knew only that they couldn't pay for their shopping. Eventually, they decided it wasn't worth waiting. That abandoned basket wasn't caused by a self-checkout but by a retailer asking one colleague to do two jobs at once.
As retailers continue to automate routine transactions, colleagues become even more valuable. Their role evolves. They become problem-solvers, coaches, decision-makers and service-recovery specialists. Paradoxically, the more technology retailers introduce, the more important those human moments become. If those colleagues are constantly pulled between competing priorities, customers feel the consequences immediately.
Before expanding colleagues' responsibilities, leaders should ask one simple question. Are we increasing colleagues' capability, or just increasing their workload? Flexibility only improves the customer experience when colleagues have the time, confidence and capacity to use it. Otherwise, "multi-skilled" becomes a polite way of saying: "We've asked fewer people to do more."
One customer left their basket behind this week, and the supermarket likely recorded it as an abandoned transaction. I think it was something else. It was a customer who decided that waiting for help wasn't worth the effort, and that may be the real lesson from Asda's announcement. The future of retail isn't about replacing colleagues; it's about ensuring the colleagues that customers do need are available when it matters most.
Technology reduces routine work. It doesn't reduce the need for people. It changes the moments when people matter most.
This is part of the RetailCX Blueprint – a growing collection of practical ideas, frameworks and real-world examples to help organisations create better customer and colleague experiences.
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