For decades, a national retailer built its business around a clearly defined customer. What began as a practical, utility-driven brand grew into a major player in its category by serving customers who valued reliability over refinement. Its identity was rooted in product assortment and operational consistency rather than in brand experience or emotional connection.
That model proved durable. But over time, shifts in consumer behavior began to change the shape of the business. Suburban growth, lifestyle purchasing, and digital access expanded the customer base well beyond its original core. By the late 2010s, the company was serving customers who expected more than functional retail. Convenience, digital access, and brand connection were becoming part of the value proposition.
Then came COVID.
As an essential retailer, the company remained open while many competitors closed. It reached new customers at the same moment in-store shopping was disrupted and digital engagement surged. Curbside pickup, online ordering, and loyalty participation became central to revenue. The business did not simply grow; it fundamentally changed.
Internally, however, much of the work that supported customer engagement still lived outside the company. Digital marketing, loyalty initiatives, and promotional efforts were largely handled by third-party agencies. These relationships kept operations moving, but they were not designed to build internal knowledge or long-term capability.
It was during this period that the company began working more closely with IDR to rethink how customer experience should live inside the organization.
“The business was transforming,” said Allison Layman, Principal Account Executive at IDR, a strategic staffing partner. “We were gaining a better understanding of who they were becoming and what kinds of internal capabilities would support that future.”
Leadership began to recognize that customer experience was no longer an accessory to the business. It was becoming part of the business model itself. The question was no longer whether the company should improve customer experience. It was whether it could do so while continuing to rely primarily on outsourced execution.
Bringing customer experience in-house was not a tactical shift. It was a structural one.
“This wasn’t about plugging in job descriptions and finding talent,” Layman said. “It was about stepping back and asking what they were trying to accomplish — not just today, but three years down the road.”
The company was not simply trying to hire marketers. It was attempting to build something it had never had before: an internal organization capable of owning and evolving how customers interacted with the brand across channels. That meant integrating digital strategy, user experience, content, and marketing operations into a cohesive function rather than a collection of vendor relationships.
This kind of change is often misunderstood as a staffing initiative. In practice, it is an organizational design challenge.
There was no existing blueprint. The company was not replacing one agency with another. It was replacing an external system with an internal one. Leadership first had to determine what that system should look like.
What does “customer experience” mean operationally?
Which capabilities must live inside the company?
How should roles relate to one another over time?
How would this function grow as the strategy evolved?
These were fundamental questions that needed to be answered before any hiring decisions could be made. The organization did not need a staffing solution; it needed to formulate a strategy for how an internal team would operate.
In most organizations, workforce planning begins with job descriptions. In this case, that approach would have failed.
The ambition crossed traditional boundaries. Customer experience touched product design, research, content, digital platforms, and marketing operations. These functions rarely sit in one department, particularly in legacy retail environments. Treating them as isolated hires would have produced fragmented roles rather than a coherent system.
Instead, the work shifted from positions to outcomes.
Rather than asking, “Who should we hire?” the more fundamental question became, “What must this organization be able to do that it cannot do today?”
This was where IDR’s role evolved from staffing provider to workforce design partner. The early work centered on discovery rather than requisitions — understanding near-term priorities, mapping longer-term strategy, and identifying where institutional knowledge needed to live inside the organization rather than with outside vendors.
“We had to understand their goals before we could even talk about roles,” Layman said. “They were building something they hadn’t built before. You can’t staff that without first designing it.”
From that foundation, an internal customer experience capability began to take shape. Over time, this included product managers and product owners, UX researchers and strategists, content and digital specialists, and marketing and creative operations professionals. Each role was tied to a business objective rather than simply replacing outsourced labor.
The emphasis was continuity. Knowledge needed to accumulate inside the organization. The strategy needed to be refined by people embedded in the business. Leadership needed to emerge internally rather than through agencies.
More than 50 professionals eventually became part of this function, with several advancing into management roles. What began as a response to market pressure evolved into a durable operating model.
One constraint shaped how this transformation unfolded: time.
Approving large numbers of permanent positions inside a mature enterprise is intentionally slow. Governance protects the organization, but it also limits speed. Yet the move toward in-house ownership could not wait for a multi-year reorganization cycle.
Flexible talent became the bridge between design and execution.
Working with IDR, the company used contract professionals as embedded members of the organization rather than as short-term coverage. This allowed teams to form quickly while still being shaped intentionally. Roles could be refined as needs became clearer. Capability could grow alongside understanding.
“Contract talent gave them room to move,” Layman said. “They didn’t have to wait for every structure to be finalized before they could start building the team.”
Many of these professionals remained in place for years, becoming part of the institutional fabric rather than rotating through projects. In this context, contingent labor was not a workaround. It was the infrastructure that allowed change to happen without stalling the organization.
The value of the partnership was not speed alone. It was alignment. Workforce decisions were tied directly to business strategy rather than driven by short-term vacancies.
What began as a response to market conditions eventually became part of how the organization operated.
As the business expanded into new initiatives and product categories, its internal customer experience function expanded with it. The organization was no longer reacting to change; it was absorbing it. Customer insight, channel strategy, and operational learning stayed inside the enterprise rather than cycling through vendors.
This shift created durability. Strategy could evolve without rebuilding the organization each time. Knowledge is compounded rather than reset. Workforce design became inseparable from business design.
Over time, the effects of this shift became visible beyond internal operations. What began as a structural change in how customer experience was owned inside the organization started to register externally as well, reshaping how the brand was perceived in a crowded retail landscape. The company built a growing reputation for service and engagement, helping differentiate it from larger, more established consumer brands whose scale often makes personalization difficult.
That evolution has been reflected in third-party recognition and in the company’s own strategic direction. Industry publications and retail organizations have highlighted the company’s customer service and engagement, while leadership has articulated a long-term strategy focused on expanding market reach and deepening relationships with customers — a signal that customer experience is now embedded in how the business plans for growth, not treated as a secondary function.
The business results mirror that shift. Revenue has climbed steadily since 2020, reflecting both pandemic-era acceleration and sustained performance in the years that followed. Digital commerce has become a meaningful contributor to that growth as the company broadened its online footprint and more tightly integrated digital fulfillment with physical stores. At the same time, the organization has continued to expand its brick-and-mortar presence, reinforcing the connection between digital and in-person experience.
Together, these signals point to the same underlying outcome: a retailer once defined primarily by utility and assortment has increasingly come to be associated with service, accessibility, and customer experience. Industry observers have taken note of the company’s scale and engagement metrics, reinforcing what internal changes had already set in motion. Recognition did not drive the transformation, but it has helped make visible the results of a strategic decision to bring customer experience inside the organization and allow it to mature as a core business capability.
When companies bring critical work in-house, they are redefining more than their vendor relationships. They are redefining how they learn, how they adapt, and how they compete.
In this case, the move from outsourced marketing to internal customer experience ownership marked a shift toward becoming a more intentional consumer brand while preserving the values that built the business in the first place.
“They weren’t just hiring people,” Layman said. “They were building a new way of operating.”
The broader lesson is clear. Transformation does not begin with hiring. It begins with understanding what the organization is trying to become — and then designing the workforce to support that future.