Rick Denton (00:18)
Welcome back, CX Passport Travelers. Today's guest is April Sabral, coming to us from Miami. I was introduced to April by former CX Passport guest, Wes Dudley, episode 132, back there a little bit in the catalog for you. And the connection makes a lot of sense once you hear her background. April spent more than 30 years in retail, leading over 350 stores with hands-on experience across retail and hospitality.

Today she runs a leadership training company, has written multiple books, and focuses on developing frontline leaders who shape customer experience in store. She's also behind the Miami Business Council, a community for business leaders and owners to do ethical business in Miami. When April and I talked earlier, I was intrigued to find out about a well-known Starbucks idea. You'll know it, I guarantee.

It traces back to her time at Miami Beach. We'll talk about that later in the episode and I guarantee you do not want to miss it. April, welcome to CX Passport.

April Sabral (01:19)
⁓ thank you so much, Rick, for having me on the show. I'm excited to be here.

Rick Denton (01:24)
The honor and the excitement is mine as well. I'm looking forward to this April. So we talked about that, or I mentioned in the introduction, you've spent most of your career in physical retail. And there's a reason I'm emphasizing that word. Physical retail and hospitality, frontline, multi-unit, this is real operations. When you hear people talk about CX today, where do you think the conversation most often misses the reality?

of what actually happens inside a store.

April Sabral (01:54)
Yeah, I mean, I think the conversation is all around technology, agentic AI in retail, supply chain, tariffs, product, all of this. And we forget that the people inside the store are the ones that make it happen every day. The frontline leaders and the teams that are, you know, when the customer walks in, they don't know about all this omni-channel and online and all the technology happening.

Rick Denton (02:19)
Right.

April Sabral (02:21)
All they

know is do they walk into a friendly person that gives them a great experience and a warm hello and then is knowledgeable and can guide them through the experience. And I think we forget about that in the world of technology. I'm in technology, but we forget about that is so essential and critical and how to like really focus on people. know, like a lot of money gets invested in the other sides of the business, but we kind of forget about that.

Rick Denton (02:47)
It almost feels like that, and I've spent some time in the retail space as well. We talked about that. I'd had several years working for JCPenney and other physical retailers. And it does seem like in a lot of situations, the technology is the lead and that the people are then there to enable the technology in the store. Like it's something really cool in the store and the people are there to enable the technology rather than the technology to enable the people. Why do you think that ends up happening that way?

April Sabral (03:15)
I mean, I think it's just because technology is evolving fast and furious. I was in retail before Ecom was around and all of that era that came in. And I think everybody's excited and wants to invest in tools that help the stores do better. But a lot of times those decisions are made in a silo in an office.

Rick Denton (03:23)
Mm-hmm.

April Sabral (03:37)
from people that haven't really worked. The Frontlines, I I just got back from the National Retail Federation Javits Center, which is an amazing show. It's a retail technology show. And it's all about retail enabling frontline teams, but there wasn't really anything around training frontline teams, task management, operation schedule, which is important. I'm not saying that's not important, but you can have all of these processes and...

Rick Denton (03:45)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

April Sabral (04:00)
things in place and technologies and platforms. But if the managers do not know how to retain and train a team, it's not going to execute well, right? No matter what you do.

Rick Denton (04:12)
I'm grinning from ear to ear as you talk about that failure to train. I'm reminded of a story of my daughter. She has

a part-time job that she comes and works in a movie theater chain when she comes home for summers and from university. And there are things that are designed by folks in the headquarters that have no bearing in reality to what the on the ground experience is for the employees. And you know what happens? And I'm, that's why I'm not saying the brand, the employees just ignore it. They're like, if we can't do it, if it's hard, if it gets in the way of us serving our customer,

April Sabral (04:40)
Yeah!

Rick Denton (04:47)
we're not going to roll out that fancy new food item that takes seven minutes to cook in a microwave because more people want to come through, get their popcorn and get out into the theater. So that idea of designing it and failing on the training aspect, especially when it's hyper complex like that is frequently seen. It just seems like it's frequently seen in retail. And that's what I like about this story that you have from Starbucks. We are not talking about deep technology with this.

It's a story from your time at Miami Beach. You're well known for it. And it's one that everyone listening is going to know what we're talking about. It vitally changed how customers were treated. Can you walk us through how it came about and then the impact it created?

April Sabral (05:30)
Yeah, I mean, back in the day when I was a store manager at Starbucks, and this was pre automation coffee machines. So we were literally pulling shots, you know, timing them out. There was a timer on it. And if it went wrong, you had to redo it. And yeah, it was a thing back then it was a standard. obviously, you know, like productivity, performance, cost control, and all that thing matters, right? And experience and being being

Rick Denton (05:38)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

April Sabral (05:56)
a transplant from the UK and moving to Miami Beach and managing the store on 15th and Ocean Drive, everybody drank Frappuccinos. It was tourist location, people coming in at a great time, wanted a frozen drink, didn't really know what they were ordering. And then we'd get to the end of the bar, having a chitchat with whoever they were on vacation with, and we'd just take the first drink that looked like a frozen milkshake with whipped cream, because it looked good.

Rick Denton (06:05)
Mmm.

That might be mine. Yeah.

April Sabral (06:23)
And they would always just take the wrong drink. And we were measured back then on mystery shoppers scores. And mystery shoppers would come in, we'd have a legendary service score. And we would always miss that point on the survey when somebody was like, did you get the right drink at the end of the bar? Because somebody takes one drink, it's like a chain of, of domino effect, right? It's a chain of reaction. It's like, I take this drink, I took the wrong one. Then the person behind me doesn't get their drink that they wanted. So it all creates a big disaster at the end of the bar.

Rick Denton (06:42)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

April Sabral (06:53)
And then we'd have to remake them. And making cappuccinos, like 50 in 20 minutes, is not fun. Well, it was not fun back then. I'm sure they've made the process better now. But back then, we were just trying to figure out how the customer have a really good experience and get the right drink at the end of the bar instead of being confused about it. And so we got together as a team and decided that we were going to literally pick up a Sharpie pen and just ask them their name at the register.

And that's how the name got put on the cup. We used to call it the name game back then. We just watch your name. Okay. You ordered this rapatino, this fancy thing. You watch your name, write it on the cup. And at the end of the bar, we would just call their name instead of calling the name of the drink. And it's solved the problem overnight. Everybody got their drink. Everybody was happy. Our legendary scores went up. My district manager was happy because there was no complaints. Like, yeah, it was an easy solve to a complex kind of problem.

Rick Denton (07:27)
⁓ yeah?

Yeah. Yeah.

Right.

That's

the part of this is you talked about, and I've been to NRF as well, and there are some phenomenal solutions. I'm not here to disparage the phenomenal solutions, but the simple is so frequently the logical. And those of us that are now well past that moment where that idea was initiated, look back and go, well, yeah, of course you'd put a name on a cup, but it was a novel back then. In addition to the simplicity of it,

Talk to me about the customer engagement element.

April Sabral (08:23)
Yeah, mean, like customers loved it because we were calling their name, not the drink, right? Like, because back in the day, if you remember going to Starbucks, you'd have to like, well, we were trained to call out the name of the drink. So was like double latte, vanilla shot, non, it was like a, it was like five steps to call the name out back then. Yeah. So if you actually think about that from a customer experience, is that a great experience? You know, like, I don't know. So like just saying their name.

Rick Denton (08:28)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

It's a lot of lines to memorize for your show.

April Sabral (08:52)
and made it more personal, right? Like made it more welcoming, more warm. And I think it created a different kind of experience. And then that went on to be, you know, used in different campaigns by many brands. I've seen it over the years and it was just, it was just a way of, I don't know. I think the answers always lie in the field. That's what I have learned by leading stores for so long and even working with teams now. It's like, just go ask somebody on the front line, you know, like how to solve something and they will generally tell you, and it probably won't cost you as much money.

Rick Denton (09:48)
⁓ my good, we could truly stop right there. Like the answers lie in the field. End of message. Nothing else matters right there, which is not true. Listeners hang on. There's a lot of nuggets that April's got for us here. It is so true and yet so overlooked. And I think I have worked at companies that required that the headquarter, the home office, whatever the label is, work in the field. Some are little bungee ones. Hey, go in for a day and you get no experience.

Others, there's a particular convenience brand that is known for its executives spend six to nine months in the store. You're definitely going to be in and working the graveyard shift. You're going to understand what it means at 3 a.m. from a store experience that you would never get from a conference room. When you have worked with companies that have not had that sort of approach to it, how have you helped them open their eyes to.

April Sabral (10:30)
Yeah.

Rick Denton (10:41)
Hey, you need to get out into the field and not just a bungee where, here's the executive, let's look pretty, but a real authentic, you are going to see what the field is.

April Sabral (10:50)
Yes, sometimes, and I understand it's difficult a lot of times because people in the support office or head office, and I realized this when I transferred from being just in the field to being in that executive role and being part of that team, have a lot to do in a day, support the amount of store counts. So sometimes it's like we think that they don't care, but it's not that. It's really like, how many hours do they have in the day? So what we would do, specifically when I was at David's Tea,

Rick Denton (11:01)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

April Sabral (11:15)
We created a program where when anybody was coming into the office to literally start work, we would do a training, like a store field training at the office, like every month. when people were on board, we would take them through that training so that at least they knew what the training entailed for people

the field exercises, the onboarding and training to really understand what that training looked like and the intensity. We were selling 150 tees. There was a lot of knowledge that needed to be learned. Yeah. ⁓

Rick Denton (11:43)
Holy crap. I'm sorry. Sorry.

That's maybe a little too expressive, but as a guy who just drinks Texas unsweet tea, I didn't even know there were 150 teas. Wow.

April Sabral (11:51)
Yeah, there

is. Yeah. So a lot of knowledge, right? To be able to pass on to a customer. So that was a big part of it. So we created training programs. I also brought a lot of the leaders to the office. Like I did this program once where I brought like the top 30 managers from the field, brought them to the office, to the leaders in the office and had them go through and basically do a deep dive into every area of the business and all the things that they did and how much time it took them to do it in the store and took them away from the floor with the customers.

Rick Denton (12:13)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

April Sabral (12:21)
and then had them present that to each head of different departments. That was very eye opening. Like marketing teams were like, we sent you that through email and it takes you like an hour to print off price tags for the store. What? And like just silly things like that. So we then created this kind of wall and it was like every time we, you know, reduced a process time, we would turn it over and flip it and like we made it into a fun activity. So I kind of bridged the field.

Rick Denton (12:38)
love it.

I like that.

Yeah.

April Sabral (12:49)
Yeah, bridge the field and the head office team and just bringing the field to the office if they couldn't come. But also just taking them on store visits all the time. Like I really took them on store visits and made sure that, you know, it wasn't just a fly by because there's those visits where you do like five in a day and it's like, you don't really know what's going on. Yeah. But I remember. Yeah. And I remember specifically with the CEO at David's Tea, I feel like, okay, we're to go do Saturday, Saturday visits because it's more relaxed.

Rick Denton (13:06)
Yeah. look, here's the executive. Yeah. Let's all look pretty, you know, that kind of thing. Make everything looks. Yeah.

April Sabral (13:18)
experiences, more customers in the store. So he was always up for that. And we would go and visit a store and like work in a store on an afternoon for a Saturday. And that was really, really fun because it would give us a good perspective to go back into the office and like talk about sales on the Monday because we'd actually seen it live. Right. So there's many things you can do, which just, you know, yeah, it has to be part of how you're building solutions for the stores.

Rick Denton (13:27)
you

Yeah.

Yeah. And that, that is something that I think those that have worked inside of retail sort of have an eye for and an understanding for those that are outside of retail often think that retail CX is just simply, Hey, make sure your employees are friendly. Have them smile. Have them say, have them say some incredibly awkward greeting when they, when a customer walks in the store and barely has even temperature adjusted inside the door. So you've got actual experience. What

actually has to come inside a physical store beyond just be friendly for the overall customer experience to really work.

April Sabral (14:17)
Yeah, I mean, first of all, the store has to look great. It has to feel great. It has to be presented well. That's a whole skill in itself. You can send a store a picture of what something needs to look like, but then executing that is a whole other. Right. So that's really important. Looking good, feeling good and cleanliness, all of those things that go into it. So that's that's a given when you walk into a store. But beyond being friendly, being knowledgeable.

Rick Denton (14:20)
Right.

Ooh, yeah, yeah.

April Sabral (14:43)
you know, knowing how to connect with somebody that you do not know that is automatically on the defense. Because they're like, these people are trying to sell me something, right? So trying to teach those skills. And so I think skill building is underrated. It's not just about friendliness. It's literally about skill building and knowledge. And I think the biggest impact I saw when I was running stores is if I had a manager.

And this is why I'm so passionate about leadership training is if I had a manager that knew how to coach and train that skill, like coaching the football field, right? Like coaching performance, the store would do exceptionally well. And if the manager didn't have those skills or lack those skills, didn't know how to follow up, didn't know how to coach, didn't know how to hold somebody accountable to the memo that came out or, you know, all of that training content that was delivered, it all went flat. And so that manager needs to know how to train and coach.

Rick Denton (15:18)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

April Sabral (15:39)
100 % because otherwise, you know, people are going to get demotivated, people are going to not know what's expected of them. so that's, that's, think is really, really important. And I think that again, gets forgotten about. I talked to a lot of people, like I just told them what to do. Why can't they do it? I'm like, yeah, it doesn't really work like that with people.

Rick Denton (15:58)
hehe

I chuckle at the idea of, know, Hey, look, I told them therefore, why aren't they doing it? And there's so much more that goes into that April. want to take a little break here though. You mentioned David's tea. You're there in Miami. There's places across the world that you certainly have been. And I know that you then can appreciate the value of a first-class lounge. It's nice to take a little break. That's what we're going to do here. We're going to take a little break. We'll move quickly and have a little bit of fun. What is a dream travel location from your past?

April Sabral (16:35)
Singapore, I loved Singapore. ⁓ Yeah, well, it's very, first of all, it feels very familiar to somebody from England because it's very British there. Everybody speaks the language and science and everything. It feels like you're in England. It's very clean. It's like a tropical Toronto. That's how I kind of remembered it. I lived in Toronto for 16 years. So very clean, very organized. People are lovely. Lots of tea. It was great. ⁓

Rick Denton (16:37)
Why? I've never been. I've heard great things.

Mmm, yeah.

my gosh.

I love the phrasing. I've never heard a tropical Toronto. Not only is it immediately. know exactly what you're saying, but the alliteration well done. You've got some retail branding experience in your past. can tell what is a dream travel location you've not been to yet.

April Sabral (17:17)
⁓ Italy, for sure.

Yeah.

Rick Denton (17:20)
I'm amazed. So you've been to Singapore, but you've not been to Italy. That blows my mind.

April Sabral (17:26)
I know, I moved to America a long time ago before that train existed to get us to France. I've missed out on the whole Europe experience, I'm doing it more now.

Rick Denton (17:31)
Hahaha

I like

it. Yeah, it's a little further from Miami to Italy than say the UK there, but I'm sure you'll get there at some point. One of the things that I loved when I was in Italy, duh, right? When you hear me say this is the food, what is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

April Sabral (17:48)
Avocados.

Rick Denton (17:50)
Okay,

I like it. Not a typical answer to that question. Has it always been that way? Like as a kid, where you loved your avocados or is that something you developed into?

April Sabral (17:53)
What?

No, develop. Like when I lived in Miami back in 2000, I had an avocado tree in my backyard. so, yeah, and I just think it's such a, it goes with everything. You can eat it every time of the day. It's just super yummy. Yeah. Healthy too.

Rick Denton (18:11)
it does.

Boy,

I could eat me some chips and guac all the time. And I know there's a lot of that that's because of the chips, but the guac itself is great. And then it's certainly a good avocado. What is something when you were a kid that you were forced to eat growing up, but you absolutely hated? Amen. Amen. They are the devil's cabbage. I am with you on that one 100%.

April Sabral (18:17)
Right.

Brussels sprouts.

I mean, when they're boiled and you're a kid,

yeah, but now this fancy restaurant is that make them taste amazing.

Rick Denton (18:43)
Yeah,

I still have not bought into that hype. am on the anti-Brussels Sprout movement and will continue to stay there until I am six feet under. Sadly, April, it is time for us to leave the First Class Lounge. What is one travel item not including your phone and not including your passport that you will not leave home?

April Sabral (18:51)
Okay.

debit card or credit card.

Rick Denton (19:10)
April, that is a spectacularly wise choice. I have found myself when I'm stressed about packing, like if it's a long trip, when I was working for JCPenney, there were times that we'd be traveling overseas for two and two weeks and longer. And I'd get kind of anxious about, I have everything I needed? And then I realized actually fundamentally the only thing I truly need, this was before cell phones, I need my passport and a credit card. And then I'm good no matter in most places, wherever I am in the world. So I am totally with you right there. I want to talk about, we've, we've danced around it a little bit.

April Sabral (19:33)
Yeah.

Rick Denton (19:41)
But in retail, feels like even more so than even in some other spaces, customer experience and then process, process excellence, process discipline are tightly connected. How have you seen leaders, you mentioned the ones that are really good at equipping and training, overall, how have you seen leaders successfully weave that experience and the operational discipline together on the store floor?

April Sabral (20:06)
Yeah, I mean, I've seen leaders do exceptionally well when it comes to like when you think about a store and you think about the amount of product that comes into a store on daily basis, like you're dealing with shipments, you're dealing with all of that inventory stuff that, you know, you have to make sure from a front end, the customer doesn't see all the boxes and the craziness that's happening in the back area. I remember being in stores doing overnight back in the day with Gap.

Rick Denton (20:14)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

April Sabral (20:32)
I don't even know if they do that anymore, but like unpacking boxes, flipping the whole store around and things like that. And I think that if I've seen what leaders that do it really well, it's just really assigned clear responsibilities again, like making sure everybody knows exactly what needs to be done and scheduling really well and making sure that those, ⁓ you know, those tasks and everything's get done outside of store hours. can't tell you how many times I walk into a store still and see boxes at the front door and things being packed out if you see it, but like, I'm like, really?

Rick Denton (20:45)
Mm-hmm.

April Sabral (21:01)
what is going on here? It just tells me something about the leader in the building that they're not operationally organized, they don't have a schedule that's right, they haven't set up, you know, like expectations, timestamps on things. And it's, you know, a customer doesn't need to see all of that, right? Like, if that happens in the background. So I think if you're not organizing that, and you don't have a great system in process for that, it's going to trickle into the experience on the store.

Rick Denton (21:12)
Mm-hmm.

Right, right.

Mm-hmm.

could see that. that's, and that makes sense to me, like if someone's, let's just, let me just assume positive intent, that they're just so focused on the customer side of the experience that they've let some of the operational discipline slip. What about the other way? Have you worked with leaders that really focus on process and the process is what matters in retail to the detriment of the customer's experience and how have you helped solve that dilemma?

April Sabral (21:51)
Oh yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. there is, I mean, the thing about leadership that is really key to understand and know it's not a one and done situation. It's not like training somebody on a document of an onboarding document and like, this is how you complete this form. It's not like that. It's an ongoing everyday experience. And I think the, leaders that are really, really strong operationally and really strong can sometimes come across as like taskmasters and forgetting that

you know, no matter what you ask somebody to do, if they feel resentment towards you or feel that you're not showing support or caring for them, they're going to do it, but they're going to do it begrudgingly. And you're going to have turnover no matter what, right? Because people don't leave companies. Generally, they leave the people that they work for. I mean, how many times do you have a conversation on a daily basis with people that are like, oh my God, my boss.

Rick Denton (22:35)
Mm.

April Sabral (22:46)
did this or my boss said this way or my boss did that. And like, then somebody gets upset because they said it the wrong way or they didn't say it in a way that that person appreciated. So it all comes back to communication and language skills. So when it's people like that, it's really about coaching their people skills, those communication connection skills. We teach that in the positive effect now. It's like how to truly connect with people and not just communicate at them, right? Like working with them. So that's just ongoing.

Rick Denton (22:47)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

April Sabral (23:16)
leadership skills, but I always say like you only get answers to the questions you ask. So as a leader, you can make a lot of assumptions that people are happy. People are doing well. People know what you asked them to do. People are just going to follow you. if you try and I think I heard something the other day, Simon Sinek said, it's like, if you leave your job and you go start your own company, would your team follow you and go with you? Or if you're asking people to join you on a volunteer expedition?

Rick Denton (23:40)
ooo

April Sabral (23:45)
Would they actually do it for you for nothing? Like, would they volunteer and be on your team? And so that's a good question to ask people. Would they leave? if they would, why? What are you doing, right? What can you do differently?

Rick Denton (23:47)
ooo

Boy that is... That is...

I'm sitting here thinking there are moments in my career that the answer would have been yes. And there's definitely moments in my career that the answer would have been no. I had a lot to learn and to grow into. And I think that's something that companies also struggle with too because, and we talk about companies, companies are just collection of humans. But I know that you spend a lot of time human to human developing frontline leaders. Well, when you're in there, what are the disconnects that you see about companies, which are those collection of humans?

and what they think about frontline leadership and how it actually works, and then compare that to, well, actually how it really plays out day to day. Where's that disconnect?

April Sabral (24:35)
Yeah, mean,

yeah, they promote a lot of people, especially in retail, you get promoted usually in retail because you're driving results, right? Because results driven, so you can get promoted really, really fast if your store's doing well, if you're doing really good, great at sales. And then just because you were really great at sales or driving results does not mean that you're going to be really good at leading 10 people. Yeah, completely different skill. Yeah.

Rick Denton (24:56)
Hallelujah. Amen.

April Sabral (25:01)
And even going from one store to 10 store, if I go back to when I went from one store to 10 store and I was trying to manage 10 stores like I managed one store, I was like, ⁓ that wasn't working because obviously the managers want to run the store their way. They're not going to do it my way. So how do I influence? So I think there's a big disconnect on that, prepping people in advance and supporting them to be successful in that next role. I just think a lot of people get promoted really, really early and really soon. And there's no program for them when they get there.

Rick Denton (25:07)
Mm-hmm.

huh.

So how, and I realized that it's not necessarily magic wand-ish, but how would you help a company do better at that? Because I think what you're saying is certainly you and I both can chuckle about both how we've seen managers in our careers that got promoted a little too early or just un-equipped to do so. And I mentioned, you know, it happened to me where I was that leader that I looked back and I'm like, man, I really wasn't a great manager. What do companies need to do to get better at recognizing that reality and then fixing that reality?

April Sabral (26:00)
mean, have better programs, honestly, like ⁓ succession planning, training, development programs that are skilled based on management. When I worked at Gap back in the day and Starbucks back in the day, like way before Ecom, that was, I felt really blessed to be there at that time. That was a training ground for management skills. I literally felt like I was in university because the money went into people. And so because of that, I know what that feels like and I know the outcome of it. And there's a lot of us.

Rick Denton (26:02)
Okay.

April Sabral (26:28)
like we call ourselves like GAP alumni or whatever, we came from that world of being trained that way. So a lot of times when I go into companies, they spend a lot of time focused on training product knowledge. The product, you know, if it's fashion, if it's tea, if it's technology, whatever it is, all of their training resources go on training product knowledge,

But a lot of times there is no management training program, right? Like how to problem solve, how to deal with conflict, how to communicate, how to build a team going from storming, norming to performing. So it's like these skills, that's why we built the Retail You program because I knew that those programs weren't being built in many companies. like, unless you're an Apple and you can afford to have like, you know, a massive university.

Rick Denton (27:17)
Right, right.

April Sabral (27:19)
Like let's say they use corn ferry and low-budget competency, which in my view are the best in the world at leadership competency development. And unless you're a big company like that, you don't have it. And I've worked with some big companies that do not have management training. Like they just don't have it. It's just focused on operations, operations, how to open and close a store, but not how to interview, how to hire, how to fire somebody. They don't train them on that.

Rick Denton (27:30)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah. And you used a word earlier when you were talking about going from one store to 10 stores, an influence. And I think a lot of that goes into change management and some of those wider categories and that sort of stuff. The idea of how helping leaders recognize that their ability to achieve results through the efforts of their team isn't always going to be dictatorial. In fact, it probably shouldn't be dictatorial.

it's going to be through influence and how do you motivate somebody might be compliant, but they're not really committed. And how does one do that? And through the training that you're describing there, April, I've enjoyed this. We're coming to the close here, unfortunately, because of the clock. think I could talk to you for like another hour. There's so many things I want to ask you. It's probably just cause of retail experience and you and I have the symbiotic spirit there, but I want to close with one other. And it is that when you look at customer experience,

A lot of those conversations tend to ignore physical retail. just feels overlooked as a category. And some of it may, you maybe, hey, because it's going to all go online, which we now know is bunk. When you look at the next few years, what do you think retail, and I'm specifically talking about physical retail leaders need to think most about when they're thinking about the in-store experience.

April Sabral (29:03)
Yeah, I think what they need to think most about in the in-store experience is the teams that work in them and the people that make that come to life every day. You when I was at the NRF, it was all about agentic AI, which absolutely love because you know what, we're building agents every day. It's helping us do our business really much faster and taking those administration tasks off. But if you're building technology, think about the things that can make the stores life easier and just don't neglect

training of people, don't neglect training of managers. That's never going to go away. I just can't see like leadership and people leadership ever being replaced by agentic AI, because it just doesn't have the context. It doesn't have the emotions that it needs to like inspire and motivate a team. I say like double down on that, because I think the ones that are going to be successful are the ones that create.

Rick Denton (29:38)
right.

Mm-hmm.

April Sabral (29:59)
those teams in the stores that make the magic happen.

I think there's definitely a desire for people to have a human experience in a store. I work with an amazing, beautiful, independent florist boutique in Treveca, and they send flowers out all day to people with personalized love notes. And it is a beautiful business, and it is the human touch and the personalization of the notes and everything that goes into making that an experience.

Rick Denton (30:08)
Yes.

Love it.

April Sabral (30:30)
why they've been successful for 10 years and why they're growing. So you can't negate that.

Rick Denton (30:35)
Yeah, we're gonna, that's it. We're gonna end right there, April, because I love that idea of it's almost a back to the past. Like, hey, let's focus on humans. And with the idea of, and the depth of experience, the depth of personalization that sure, agentic AI can make you faster at doing something, but how do you then build that human connection? April.

If folks wanted to get to know a little bit more about you, your approach to customer experience, working with you, maybe getting better in their own physical in-store experience, what's the best way for them to learn more about you?

April Sabral (31:09)
Definitely head to aprilsabral.com and you can find out everything there. Contact us through the website and we'd love to talk to you about that.

Rick Denton (31:18)
Awesome. I will definitely get that on the show notes. Folks scroll down, click and get to know April and working with her. April, it was an absolute delight today. am, I'm, you there's a lot that I'm actually taking away and kind of learning personally, not just entertainment and educational, but we're actually kind of learning personal. And I really value that. April, thank you for being on CX Passport.

April Sabral (31:39)
Thank you so much, Rick, for having me.