For manufacturers, customer retention is often treated as a sales problem. Ashley Deknes-Razevich argues that the real causes can sit much deeper inside the organization—in communication gaps, unclear ownership, disconnected processes and the employee experience. After 17 years spanning customer service, operations and manufacturing, Deknes-Razevich has launched Sunshine Consulting to help companies address those internal workforce and operational issues before they reach the customer.

Customer retention rarely begins with a customer-facing team.

A delayed order may originate in production. A missed commitment may trace back to poor information sharing between sales and operations. A billing issue can expose a disconnect between finance and customer service. By the time a customer notices the problem, the underlying organizational failure has already happened.

That is the operating problem Ashley Deknes-Razevich is taking into her new consulting venture, Sunshine Consulting.

With 17 years of experience across customer service, manufacturing and operations, Deknes-Razevich is positioning the business around a straightforward idea: organizations cannot consistently deliver a strong customer experience if employees lack the processes, communication and accountability required to deliver it.

Her approach puts customer retention at the intersection of employee experience, workforce management and operational execution—areas increasingly important to manufacturers dealing with labor shortages, changing customer expectations and pressure to improve productivity.

“Customer retention isn’t just about what happens when you have a customer,” Deknes-Razevich says. “It is about everything you do after you win the business.”

From Manufacturing Operations to Workforce Strategy

Deknes-Razevich began her career in the injection molding industry and moved into leadership roles overseeing customer service operations. She later developed broader experience working across sales, finance, operations and manufacturing.

She currently holds a management position at SOR Controls Group, where she leads a team of eight to 10 professionals while working with executive leadership and multiple departments.

That cross-functional experience is central to her consulting philosophy.

Instead of treating customer service as a standalone function, Sunshine Consulting looks at the employee workflows surrounding the customer journey. The premise is that when responsibilities are ambiguous or information does not move effectively between teams, employees spend more time resolving preventable problems—and customers ultimately absorb the consequences.

This is increasingly relevant for manufacturing organizations.

Deloitte reported that nearly 60% of manufacturers surveyed in the third quarter of 2024 identified attracting and retaining employees as their top challenge. A separate Deloitte and Manufacturing Institute analysis estimated that as many as 1.9 million U.S. manufacturing jobs could go unfilled over the next decade if talent challenges are not addressed.

The workforce issue therefore is not simply about recruiting more people. It is also about creating operating environments in which existing employees can perform effectively and remain with the organization.

Why Employee Experience Is Becoming a Retention Issue

For HR leaders, the connection between internal workforce conditions and customer outcomes is becoming harder to ignore.

Gallup’s latest global research found that only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025. Its large-scale engagement meta-analysis, covering more than 183,000 business and work units and more than 3.3 million employees, found relationships between engagement and outcomes including customer loyalty, productivity, quality, safety and turnover.

The implication for manufacturing is practical: employee experience is not merely an HR metric.

If employees do not know who owns a problem, cannot access the information they need or routinely compensate for broken processes, operational friction can become customer friction.

McKinsey’s work on frontline manufacturing similarly emphasizes the cost of attrition, absenteeism, skill gaps and weak engagement, arguing that companies increasingly need HR, operations and finance to manage frontline talent as an integrated business issue.

That is the gap Deknes-Razevich wants Sunshine Consulting to address.

Fixing the Process Behind the Customer

The consulting model focuses on identifying where internal processes break down, understanding why they break down and creating solutions that employees can actually use.

That could mean clarifying responsibilities between departments, improving communication routines, examining customer handoffs or redesigning processes that force employees to repeatedly solve the same problems manually.

The distinction matters.

Technology can automate a poorly designed process, but automation does not necessarily fix the underlying organizational problem. For HR and operations leaders, the more durable question is whether employees have the clarity, tools and authority needed to perform their roles consistently.

Deknes-Razevich describes her approach as asking questions, gathering perspectives and identifying the disconnect before proposing a solution.

That places Sunshine Consulting closer to organizational effectiveness consulting than traditional customer-service training.

The Human Side of Manufacturing Transformation

Manufacturing companies are increasingly investing in automation, analytics and workforce technology. Yet digital transformation also changes how employees interact with processes and with one another.

Deloitte notes that manufacturers are turning to digital workforce-management tools not only for operational efficiency but also to improve worker experience, workforce planning and communication with hourly employees.

For HR teams, that creates an opportunity to connect workforce technology with broader business outcomes.

A workforce-management platform can improve scheduling. An HR system can surface turnover patterns. Collaboration tools can improve information flow. But the technology still depends on organizational behavior, leadership and process design.

That is where Deknes-Razevich’s experience becomes relevant: the problem she is targeting is often the space between systems and people.

Leadership Lessons From an Unconventional Career

Deknes-Razevich’s own career has shaped that perspective.

She began professionally in the restaurant industry before moving into manufacturing, an industry she initially knew little about. A willingness to accept unfamiliar opportunities eventually led to a long career working alongside executive and finance leadership.

One of her enduring lessons came from a former mentor, whose phrase “Make the magic happen” became a personal reminder that solving organizational problems requires action, not just identification.

That philosophy also informs her views on leadership development.

She encourages women entering manufacturing to remain curious, ask questions and avoid waiting until they feel completely prepared before accepting new responsibilities. Experience, she argues, accumulates across roles and can become a significant leadership asset.

What Sunshine Consulting Signals for HR Leaders

Sunshine Consulting is a small new entrant, so its significance is less about disrupting the HR technology market and more about reflecting a broader shift in how organizations think about retention.

Employee retention, customer retention and operational performance increasingly overlap.

For manufacturing HR leaders, that means retention strategies cannot stop at compensation, benefits or recruiting. The everyday employee experience—communication, workload, accountability, process quality and leadership—can influence whether workers stay and how effectively they serve customers.

Deknes-Razevich’s model starts from that premise.

Her message to businesses is ultimately simple: before asking employees to deliver a better customer experience, organizations need to examine whether they have built an internal environment that makes that experience possible.

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4. Market Landscape

Manufacturing employers are facing a dual retention challenge: keeping skilled workers while keeping customers. Deloitte’s research estimates that 1.9 million manufacturing jobs could remain unfilled over the next decade, while 60% of surveyed manufacturing HR leaders reported skilled-frontline-worker replacement costs of $10,000 to $40,000.

That environment is accelerating interest in employee experience platforms, workforce management software, frontline engagement tools, HR analytics and operational workflow technology.

However, technology is only one part of the equation. Gallup’s research shows that highly engaged business units have materially better outcomes across customer loyalty, productivity, profitability, turnover, safety and quality.

Sunshine Consulting therefore sits in an increasingly important space between HR, operations and customer experience. Its proposition is not an HR software replacement; it is a process and organizational effectiveness approach aimed at helping companies make existing people, systems and workflows work together more effectively.

For enterprise teams, the broader lesson is that customer retention can be an employee-experience metric as much as a CRM metric.

Top Insights

• Ashley Deknes-Razevich launched Sunshine Consulting to address process, communication and workforce issues that can undermine customer retention in manufacturing organizations.
• Her approach connects employee experience with customer outcomes, emphasizing clearer accountability, cross-functional communication, operational consistency and stronger frontline workflows.
• Manufacturing faces persistent talent shortages, with Deloitte estimating 1.9 million jobs could go unfilled over the next decade without stronger workforce strategies.
• Gallup research links employee engagement with customer loyalty, productivity, quality, safety and turnover, strengthening the business case for workforce-focused retention strategies.

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