Taking the Fear Out of Seasonal Hiring in the Warehouse

You may have seen a recent advertisement in DC Velocity about ModCloth, the fast-growing e-tail apparel company.  ModCloth is a recognized trend-setter, both in fashion for 20-30 year old women and in successful social engagement with customers.

The back-story at ModCloth is how their distribution operations have had to scale to keep pace with tremendous sales growth.  A key element of that story is how Jennifer voice applications have improved employee training and retention.  This is an especially relevant topic this time of year, as many retailers and distributors grapple with the very scary prospect of bringing on seasonal workers to help meet peak shipping rates. 

ModCloth didn’t invest in voice primarily to address HR issues. They chose Jennifer multi-modal voice applications because Jennifer could adapt to evolving DC processes and help boost productivity in picking and pre-pack sorting.  In the end, Jennifer was an integral part of redesigning ModCloth’s picking process to drive a 100 percent increase in picking rates, and to improve the sorting process to eliminate errors and keep pace with picking.  But Scott Casciato, VP of Service at ModCloth, says the training and employee retention benefits of Jennifer were “a really big deal for us:” there is less training time, new workers meet standard in days (versus a month or more before Jennifer), and turnover has declined.

This is not a unique story. At Do it Best’s Montgomery, NY, DC, it takes up to four weeks less time to train seasonal workers using Jennifer.  Depending on where your facility is located, that could translate into cost savings of $2,000 or more per seasonal employee.  And seasonal workers using voice are more productive and accurate from day one, addressing the other fear-inducing element of temporary labor: increased errors and customer service problems during the most critical time of the year.  Taken together, the cost savings and quality advantages underscore why Casciato and other operations executives value the tremendous HR benefits of voice.