A global coffee chain heavily relied on employee surveys to guide store testing decisions. However, response rates were critically low, with one pilot survey achieving only 5% completion. This limited the organization’s ability to gather meaningful insights at scale to implement new innovations nationwide.

The challenge was to identify the root cause of the low engagement rate and design interventions to facilitate the collection of invaluable insights for organizational decision-making.

Instead of a survey design issue, we identified eight system-level barriers that hindered store employees’ participation.

We reframed these barriers into eight opportunity areas and developed a three-phased innovation roadmap. This roadmap outlines strategic interventions guided by a framework and targeting these opportunity areas. These interventions aim to enhance various aspects and trajectories of the store testing survey experience in the future.

Our initial intervention prototypes underwent pilot tests, resulting in a 55% improvement in participation. This validated our hypothesis and revealed store employees’ willingness to provide feedback and demand transparency in post-feedback actions.