Retail Management's role in Customer Service

Retail Customer Service

On a recent driving trip through Arizona and New Mexico I found myself in a number of very small towns with few restaurant choices. While I typically try to avoid fast food I decided that one national franchise chain would have to do for breakfast, as they were found in almost every small town in that region of the country. The food served was actually decent and made for a reasonable start to the day, particularly while driving through the high plains of northern New Mexico.

During my stops I did notice, however, a particularly interesting response to the dollar-off coupons that corporate had distributed to the franchisees to push sales - they were being distributed with each transaction, but nobody had been trained to accept them. Repeatedly when the coupons were presented with an order, the entire transaction stopped, while associate after associate took turns giving their ideas on how to ring them in to the POS system. 

I literally sat at the drive-up window while cars waited behind me long enough for them to drive off. On one occasion all the associates came out of the restaurant to serve the cars behind me by walking the food out to the cars, taking money and having to make a second trip out to make change. As somewhat of a type A personality, I didn't like being made to wait like that, but I did recognize the chance to learn from this situation and I made it worth the anxiety. 

I think this situation was a very clear example of how a retail management department (Marketing) can do an admirable job of creating a sales stimulating promotion, but the field staff must be trained to handle the promotion. Likewise, the IT department must insure that the POS system is ready to process  the transaction with the promotional coupon in a very simple manner. How many other times have we been in stores and had to wait while an associate is unable complete a transaction? 

This very basic situation presented an extremely clear example to me of how important it is for all of our retail activities to have a customer service focus (not just sales promotions). We need to be continually asking ourselves .... "How do all my procedures effect my customer service? Should they be improved? Am I driving more sales or am I driving my customers away? In this instance, despite the best intentions of the marketing department, I observed the coupons were costing the retailer approximately ten times the value of my transaction - on sales lost while other customers literally drove away due to the excessively long transaction wait time. I have seen the same end result occur in line in numerous stores when the sales associate could not complete a transaction, due to different types of complications ranging from no price shown to register problems. 

Do you know what your customers are experiencing??

Contact www.AtlantaRetailConsulting.com for more information.

How to Determine How Many Store Hours to Schedule

Store Labor Scheduling

Large retailers utilize very complex and very expensive software programs to calculate their staffing needs. Many utilize the programs effectively, some do not. The concept of calculating store staffing levels is actually rather basic and can be done by a small retail organization on a store by store basis by utilizing a few key concepts.

First, the retailer needs to think about their store tasks in groupings of similar functions. An example might be all selling tasks on the sales-floor. Second, the retailer needs to create productivity benchmarks for each of the function groups, making sure to include all of their employees in a group. Examples of possible function groupings might be as follows (yours may vary):


- All selling tasks (including returns and adjustments)
- All receiving, processing, merchandising tasks
- All maintenance, housekeeping and cleaning tasks
- All recovery tasks (neatening up after your customers)
- All pricing and signage tasks
- All clearance merchandise tasks

For each grouping, like above, you should then select one key task or type of work for each group that can be easily measured and calculate an overall productivity benchmark for that group. See the article on developing productivity benchmarks for more information. Using the benchmarks, if you then project what your workload may be next week or the week after you can calculate how many hours of employee time you will need to get that amount of work done. See below for an example:



Having this detail will tell you that you may need 43.5 hours to run your store for the period you are looking at based upon your forecast of the workload coming up and the time it takes to do the work. Sophisticated retailers use this type of logic to develop staffing guidelines for the week then schedule the hours by day based upon their knowledge of when the work will happen. For example, if most of your sales occur on Saturday, then you should make sure you schedule most of your selling time when your customer traffic will be heaviest.

For more information on this very important topic, contact us at WWW.AtlantaRetailConsulting.com.

How to Develop Your Own Performance Benchmarks

Retail Performance Benchmarks

One of the simplest tools that you can create for use in managing your retail organization is a list of business benchmarks (or often called, business metrics) that can be used as productivity goals. Few small retailers take this step; however, if done properly, the data you will create can be used for performance goals to help your employees attain higher levels of performance.

The “business metrics” concept is very basic. Essentially, it suggests that you identify each unique task that is performed in your firm. Let us take merchandise receiving, processing, and merchandising as examples of three tasks we must perform to run our retail operation. These tasks are often composed of the following key steps:

• Prepare the area where the merchandise will be received and processed
• Meet the inbound truck and place the incoming merchandise in an appropriate area for either immediate or later processing
• Count and sign for the received cartons
• Open the cartons and remove the goods, placing them on either a processing table (if more steps are required like removing packing material) or place the items directly onto either wheeled carts or wheeled hanging racks
• Mark the goods with the correct price
• Stage (store for later movement) the merchandise or move it directly to the sales-floor
• Move the goods to the sales-floor and place the merchandise in the correct location on the sales-floor in an attractive fashion to attract customer attention

The time it takes to perform those tasks can be measured easily. Assume it took 3 hours in total and you used three people to perform the work for those three hours. That means your team used nine total hours (or 540 minutes) to perform those tasks. Now, divide the number of items that were received, processed, and merchandised (let us assume 2000) by the 540 minutes used in order to calculate your productivity ratio for those tasks 2000/540 = 3.7 . That means your team averaged receiving, processing and merchandising 3.7 items per minute (for each person).

Now that you know that productivity number, you can do a few things with it. First, use it to calculate the amount of time you will need for future receipts and the related processing /merchandising. If you have been scheduling too much time for your team to get the job done, then consider scheduling less time. Second, look for ways to improve the efficiency of the tasks and measure it again. You may be able to reduce the total time needed by implementing improvements and then you would be able to calculate how much time you were able to save by doing so.

Your team may wish to consider creating productivity benchmarks for the following tasks in your business by tracking the following :

• Receiving - using cartons received per minute (or hour for large shipments)
• Processing - using units per minute
• Merchandising - using racks or carts moved/unloaded per minute
• Price changes - using process changed per minute
• Floor recovery - using aisles or store zones (areas) recovered (neatened up) per minute
• Cashiering - using items sold (or number of transactions) per minute

For more information, contact us at www.AtlantaRetailConsulting.com.