RetailNext
- Global retail technology company | 250-300 employees | Global footprint
- Relevant Technology Stack: HiBob, Confluence, Slack, Jira
Key outcomes over six months
- Monthly Jira Service Desk tickets reduced by 50%
- Employees default to Kin in Slack for support
- Repetitive HR and IT coordination loops removed
- Support scaled with a flat team
The challenge: employee support that would not scale
RetailNext’s HR and IT team supports employees across multiple countries and time zones. Historically, employees reached out through direct Slack messages or submitted Jira tickets to get help from HR or IT.
The model worked, but it was slow and manual. Simple requests often involved multiple handoffs. In some regions, time zone gaps meant employees could wait days for answers to routine questions.
As the business grew, leadership faced a choice: increase headcount to absorb rising demand, or redesign how employee support worked.
RetailNext wanted to improve the employee experience while building a support model that could scale.
Why RetailNext chose Kinfolk
RetailNext considered extending its existing service desk tooling to design more efficient ticket request submission but quickly discovered the requirement was not a better queue. It was a new operating model that could scale without additional headcount.
Employees needed a single, frictionless entry point in Slack, where they already work. If common requests and workflows could start and finish there with the help of Kin - the AI agent, ticket volume would fall naturally.
The goal was to evolve the operating model on how the employee requests were managed in the first place. Instead of direct messages or tickets being the first step, supported requests should begin in Kin, and where possible resolved by Kin, directly in Slack.
Instead of attempting broad automation from day one, RetailNext focused on behavior change across the entire business. The People team analyzed Jira tickets, identified request types that could be handled through Kin, and ran targeted campaigns to shift employee habits.
Implementation: focus on employee adoption first, then expand from there
RetailNext’s rollout focused on conversion rather than volume.
The team analyzed Jira tickets to identify request types that could be resolved directly in Slack through Kin. They set clear conversion goals and tracked tickets that should have gone to Kin as a leading indicator of behavior change.
To help employees build the habit, RetailNext ran targeted communications centrally through Kinfolk’s platform - consistently pointing people toward Kin. until employees consistently defaulted to Kin.
Impact after rollout
Ticket volume cut in half
Jira ticket volume has dropped to half of what it was, and stayed there. This represents a sustained reduction in inbound workload that has held month after month.
Dozens of repetitive coordination loops have been removed each month, freeing up time that was previously absorbed by requests that never needed human involvement in the first place.
Perhaps the clearest signal of successful adoption is this: early on, some employees still defaulted to raising Jira tickets for requests Kin was built to handle.
That number has now fallen to a small handful each month showing the behaviour has shifted, and employees are starting their support requests with Kin.
Removing HR and IT as the middleman
Many of the most common requests previously required HR or IT to act as an intermediary.
For example, payroll access and payslip issues often involved HR emailing a provider, waiting for a response, and relaying that information back to the employee. Now, Kin guides employees directly through the appropriate path and connects them with the provider via email, reducing multi-step back-and-forth.
PTO submissions similarly shifted into Slack, eliminating unnecessary context switches into HiBob and reducing repetitive coordination.
In each case, the Work Team (HR and IT) is no longer caught in the middle. Employees get answers faster, and the team avoids repetitive manual coordination.
A shift in how the team works
With ticket volume reduced and fewer manual handoffs, the Work Team has redirected time toward higher-value initiatives.
“The mindset shift turned this into a customer experience thing. Instead of reacting to repetitive requests, the team now examines friction points and builds agents to address them.” — Andrew Golden, CHRO at Retail Next.
Kinfolk platform sits at the heart of this HR and IT collaboration and Kin is treated as a teammate that handles baseline workflows, Tier 0-1 requests in particular. The human team focuses on nuance, exceptions, and improving end-to-end experiences.
Scalability without the headcount
By moving supported requests into Slack and removing back-and-forth coordination between HR and IT, RetailNext has built an operating model that can scale with the business.
Headcount no longer needs to grow in step with request volume. The infrastructure is in place, the habits have been formed, and the team has the visibility and capacity to take on more without being stretched thin.
As the company continues to expand, the question has shifted. It is no longer about how to keep up with inbound demand. It is about what to automate next, and RetailNext is well positioned to find out.