Last week I had the opportunity to talk with John Thrailkill, the Vice President of Store Metrics and Systems, Customer Support, and Business Development at The Container Store. My intention was to learn about his company’s work around store communications, and specifically how the use of Theatro’s employee communication solution is transforming the way that store employees communicate and collaborate.

What I got instead was something more. Since the beginning of the year RSR has fielded quite a few inquiries from vendors who are interested in co-development with retailers: they have an idea, they want to search out some retailers who might be interested in their idea, and they’re ultimately looking for one or two retailers who will help fund the development of that idea.

Retailers generally are a very risk-averse lot. And a few of them have become very savvy about what they can get out of a co-development project. What typically happens is they either aren’t open to designing solutions that can easily be taken to a broader market (private development, rather than participating in solution development), or they stumble onto something that provides such a competitive advantage that they don’t want anyone else to know about it, let alone use it. So when we advise vendors, we typically tell them “Sure, go for it. Just make sure you structure the relationship in a way that ensures your own company’s long term success. “

With The Container Store and Theatro, nothing “typical ” about co-development happened at all. It was the best of both worlds. The Container Store got something that has so changed the nature of operations at their pilot store in Austin that the entire store team howls if the system is taken down for any reason (it’s moved from alpha testing to beta testing to full-on pilot). And Theatro got a solution that is elegant, marketable, and actively supported by its co-development partner.

The Container Store/Theatro relationship literally began with a PowerPoint presentation of an idea. It developed over the course of eighteen months into a pilot at a single store, and is now in the initial stages of rollout.

What does the solution do? It enables voice-driven communication between employees. Mr. Thrailkill described it as “Siri without the phone. ” Store employees can use it to communicate with each other within a store, or across stores through expert groups. It does require WiFi to make it happen, but the solution is run and managed over a ridiculously simple device, armed with a couple of buttons and a jack for a headset.

So, for example, if a customer asks a question an employee can’t answer, that person can send a request for help within the store, or could ask, for example, all employees across the chain that have identified themselves as “travel storage experts “. That capability can also be extended to include customer service reps within the call center, or even buyers in the corporate office. “The idea that an employee in Miami could help an employee and a customer in Seattle is really exciting, ” Thrailkill said.

Perhaps not coincidentally, The Container Store had identified the problem they were trying to solve long before Theatro came along. In a very familiar refrain, Thrailkill described the challenge of trying to keep up with smartphone-enabled consumers: “Our initial reaction was to buy a bunch of devices. But the reality is, we needed to look at employee communication holistically. Some of the phone systems in our stores were fifteen years or older, and even the newer IP phones aren’t ideal. What we really wanted was something that would pull together phones, walkie talkies, and mobile devices for employees. “

But it had to be simple – easy and intuitive to use, and not something that would get in the way of helping customers. They wanted something that enabled “heads up conversations, not heads down at screens. “

While The Container Store was excited at the opportunity that Theatro represented – the right solution at the right time – Thrailkill said it wasn’t until they tested the solution in a store that they knew they had something: “Our expectation with the pilot store was that it would take them about a month to get used to the solution. I expected the store team to be happy with the idea overall and supportive of the project, but maybe struggling individually with how it worked. Instead, they were over the learning curve within two days – they got it almost immediately. “

Before Theatro, the pilot store relied primarily on walkie talkies to communicate. This meant that if one employee was looking for another employee within the store, he or she broadcast the request to all employees. Everyone had to listen no matter what, even though the majority of messages weren’t for you individually. With Theatro, the pilot store found that the overall messages that any single employee heard dropped by 60%, while overall communication between employees increased 30%. There were a few times during the initial test when the store managers would ask if the solution was working, because they didn’t hear all of the messages going back and forth among employees.

It was definitely working, though, and store employees reported an interesting side benefit. Having messages constantly in your ear, and having to filter out all of the messages that aren’t relevant to you, requires a lot of focused attention. Employees at the pilot store reported ending the day more energized – no one realized how draining it was to listen to all that noise the whole day while actively tuning out irrelevant messages.

The Container Store currently runs Theatro only in the pilot store, but that is changing soon. And as soon as they add a quorum of stores, they plan to implement the group communications that will allow employees to connect with each other across stores. They’re also excited about the opportunity for dynamic groups – the opportunity to create communication groups on the fly.

The company also sees a lot of advantages in some of the messaging capabilities inherent in the solution. The Container Store tends to rely very heavily on voice mail as a way to disseminate information, especially from corporate to stores. But with the large number of part time employees often found in the retail environment, setting up every employee on voice mail is very challenging. In the pilot store, store managers are already using the messaging capability to create broadcast messages related to “the morning huddle “, where employees learn about important things going on in the store that day. The store team is creating messages for the morning crew, and then setting those messages to expire at noon, to be replaced with a mid-day update. An employee arriving at work at 2pm would receive only the mid-day message when she logged in, keeping her up to date without clogging her inbox.

Most important, The Container Store is paying attention to metrics and predictive analytics. Thrailkill stressed the importance of providing feedback to stores about not just how communication patterns are evolving within stores – identifying employees that are not connecting well beyond one or two other team members, or identifying employees that are central resources, for example. But as the retailer adds the cross-store communication function, the company will also be interested in making sure that stores understand the wider impact their employees have – in the time they spend helping not just customers, and not just other employees in their own store, but how they contribute to the retailer as a whole.

At a time when retailers are struggling to redefine the role of the store employee as consumers become better armed with information, being able to make every store employee as well-informed as your best employee on any topic is going to be an important differentiator. I’m excited to see both a retailer and a solution provider work to make that happen.