Rostering to improve the customer experience: Getting the right people on the floor

In customer-facing industries like Retail, the way staff are rostered often makes or breaks the customer experience. You can have a beautifully designed store, the best products, or enticing promotions — but if customers are waiting too long at the checkout, if staff are rushed off their feet, or if the right expertise isn’t available on the floor, satisfaction quickly drops.

The challenge? Rostering is rarely straightforward. Managers juggle fluctuating demand, staff availability, compliance requirements and budget constraints — often with little more than instinct or spreadsheets to guide them. The result is inconsistent service delivery, stressed employees, and missed opportunities to delight customers.

The good news is that rostering doesn’t have to be reactive or guesswork. With the right approach — and the right tools — it can become one of your strongest levers for improving the customer experience.

Why rostering matters for customer experience

Every customer interaction is shaped by whether the right people are in the right place at the right time. Rostering directly influences this in three ways.

Coverage and responsiveness
Shoppers expect prompt service. Understaffing means slower response times, longer queues, and frustrated customers — which can manifest itself in aggressive or abusive behaviour. Overstaffing, meanwhile, eats into margins and blows staffing budgets. Effective rostering finds the balance, matching labour supply to demand peaks without waste.

Consistency and quality
Customers value reliability. Whether it’s getting help to find a product or moving quickly through the checkout, they want the same quality of service each time. Rostering teams consistently, ensuring the right blend of senior and junior staff, and aligning shifts to employee strengths all help preserve that consistency.

Employee wellbeing and engagement
The customer experience is only as good as the employee delivering it. Fatigue, resentment over unfair schedules, or constant last-minute changes all drain morale. Engaged staff who feel supported are far more likely to go the extra mile — and that energy flows directly to customers.

How workforce management solutions improve rostering for Retailers

Traditional rostering methods leave too much to chance. Manual processes take hours, are prone to error, and rarely account for the full mix of demand, costs, compliance and employee wellbeing. That’s where modern workforce management (WFM) solutions, like Humanforce, make the difference.

1. Demand-driven rostering
Humanforce Rostering & Scheduling allows managers to build intelligent rosters using historical sales, seasonal data, or local event insights. By forecasting demand, managers can ensure staffing levels match busy and quiet periods. Real-time cost calculations during roster creation provide visibility of labour costs before shifts are even published.

2. Smarter allocation of skills and qualifications
Not every shift is interchangeable. Some require specific experience or product knowledge. Roster Manager automatically surfaces the most qualified and shift-appropriate employees, reducing the risk of compliance breaches and ensuring service quality remains high.

3. Employee empowerment through the Work App
Unexpected changes will always arise, but they don’t need to disrupt operations. With the Humanforce Work App, employees can swap or bid for shifts directly from their phones. They can also set preferences for when and how they want to work. This transparency makes rostering fairer, reduces the burden on managers, and helps staff feel more in control.

4. Real-time communication with SMS
Getting information to staff quickly is critical when rosters change. With the SMS functionality available through the Humanforce Work App, managers can send urgent updates or shift offers instantly, with 90% of messages read within 90 seconds. This dramatically increases the speed of filling roster gaps, reducing the hours managers spend chasing staff by phone.

5. Automated compliance and pay accuracy
One of the biggest risks in rostering is breaching employment regulations or applying the wrong pay conditions according to the industrial instrument (award or EBA). Humanforce’s Awards & Compliance solution interprets awards, agreements and entitlements automatically, so even last-minute changes remain compliant. Overtime, penalty rates and allowances are applied instantly, and data flows directly into payroll.

6. Time and attendance accuracy
On the shop floor, it’s vital to know who has turned up, where they are, and when they clocked in. Humanforce Time & Attendance captures this in real time, helping managers stay on top of labour costs, identify no-shows, and redeploy staff as needed. Advanced QR Clocking, facial recognition and finger vein scanning features reduce timesheet fraud, reduces human error, and speeds up payroll processing, even in high-volume environments.

7. Workforce analytics for continuous improvement
Finally, Humanforce Workforce Analytics provides managers with insights into actual versus forecast labour costs, shift acceptance rates, and patterns of absenteeism. These insights feed back into future roster planning, enabling continuous improvement and smarter decision-making.

Accurate rosters equals better customer experience

Rostering isn’t just about filling shifts — it’s about creating the conditions for outstanding customer experiences. When customers are served quickly, consistently and by engaged staff, they are more likely to return, spend more, and recommend your business to others.

By moving away from manual, reactive processes and embracing modern workforce management, retailers can transform rostering into a strategic tool. Humanforce provides the forecasting, compliance, communication and analytics capabilities to get the right people on the floor, at the right time, every time.

About Humanforce

Humanforce is the all-in-one platform for frontline and flexible workforces, offering a truly employee centred, intelligent and compliant human capital management (HCM) suite – without compromise. Founded in 2002, Humanforce has a 2300+ customer base and over half a million users worldwide. Today, we have offices across Australia, New Zealand, the US, and the UK.

Our vision is to make work easier and life better by focusing on the needs and fulfilment of frontline workers, and the efficiency and optimisation of businesses.

To learn more about how Humanforce’s solution can help automate people processes in your business, please contact us.