’Tis the season for Sarah Casalan.
“I’ll be working in our stores tomorrow and then out visiting stores on Wednesday,” the president of The UPS Store tells me from Chicago the Monday before Christmas. “Why go at the end of the season versus the beginning of the season? Because your customers aren’t as holly-jolly happy this week as they were maybe last week.”
Casalan, who joined UPS in 2021 and oversees some 5,300 franchise locations, is no stranger to building trust with customers.
“I come from customer-obsessed brands,” says the veteran retail exec, who previously served as a VP at Crate and Barrel, J.Crew, and Club Monaco.
How has that translated? “We’ve really doubled down on…the voice of the customer and listening every day and then taking that feedback and applying it,” Casalan says. “And enabling and empowering our franchisees with that visibility into how they can impact their customer experience.”
Although many customers begin their journey online, they often finish in-store. In fact, every year, people make 700 million trips to The UPS Store, Casalan notes. “There’s not a lot of reason for you to walk into a store anymore,” she says. “So when you’re coming in, there’s a lot of life, there’s a lot of meaning in each and every one of those trips.”
The UPS Store, which offers shipping, postal, print, and business services, is a needs-based operation, Casalan observes. Someone might come in for notary service to buy a home, to rent a mailbox as their first step in launching a small business—or, at this time of year, to send gifts to a new grandchild they haven’t met.
“We want to make sure that our say-do ratio is so high, that we are consistently approaching those transactions with a great deal of care and expertise, and that we’re going to fulfill on the promise that we’ve made to you as a premium service,” Casalan says.
To that end, The UPS Store has made customer listening tools and dashboards available to its franchisees. By drawing on that real-time feedback, they can follow up with detractors and potentially turn them into promoters, Casalan says.
That approach appears to be working. Over the past three years, Casalan says, customer satisfaction scores have improved every quarter.
But in her view, the most impactful change was rethinking how to support franchisees in the field. “We have historically been very concerned with compliance and imaging and all of the things that are very important for brand standards,” Casalan says. “But we’ve added in a new layer, and that layer supersedes everything, which is the commitment to the customer.”
As part of that shift, The UPS Store has reoriented its field team to provide support focused on the customer experience. As for the corporate team, it used to be called HQ but is now known as the solution and support campus.
Change is one thing, but when it comes to trust, Casalan is also mindful that The UPS Store has been around since 1980. Franchisees typically live where they operate, giving them a stake in the community, and customers feel a sense of ownership.
“I truly think we could probably change the name of the brand to My UPS Store and we wouldn’t miss a beat, because that’s how customers refer to it.”
During the holiday season, Casalan and her team hear stories of customers bringing treats to their local UPS Store. “To have that level of emotional connection across our customers really speaks to, again, that 44-year-old legacy of providing essential services for our customers, creating value, doing it with expertise and care.”
Those clients include small-business owners whose mailbox is their street address, Casalan says. “We love to think of ourselves as an extension of our small-business owners in their communities, but also the facilitators, to some degree, of their goals and objectives.”
For Casalan, who describes herself as an old-school retailer, building trust comes back to looking after the customer—not just during a transaction but after it, too.
“We retailers get really focused on the promotional schedule, we get focused on the operational efficiencies in the store,” she says. “But I believe that if we follow the customer and we maintain that relevancy and drive that experience, the success is going to follow.”
Handled with care.
This is the final issue of The Trust Factor, which it’s been my privilege to write each week for almost a year. A big thank-you to all the executives and other experts who shared their insights into trust—and to their comms folks for making those interviews happen. My editor, Hillary Hoffower, and her fellow editors deserve a shout-out, too.
Finally, heartfelt thanks to everyone who took time to read The Trust Factor, share feedback, and offer support.
Happy Holidays, and I wish you and yours all the best in 2025!
Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com
