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Case Studies
Matching staff to traffic to drive sales
performance  Download
A mid-sized, general merchandise chain rolled-out with HeadCount to, among other
things, provide store managers with better information about customer
visitation and customer conversion. Head office hoped that if they armed their
managers with insights into traffic and customer conversion they could make
better decisions and ultimately deliver better sales results.
Senior management of the chain was realistic in their expectations for what traffic
and customer conversion could do. Across a 50+ store chain they realized that
some store managers are going to ‘get it’ immediately and start to use the
insights while others will take time. Senior management understood that using
these new metrics represented a ‘cultural shift’ and it may take time to
realize the full benefit.
At a recent Store Managers training session, it was noted that one particular store
had exceptionally high year-over-year comparable customer conversion rates –
customer conversion rates were up between 2 points and 4.5 points for the past
several months. The HeadCount trainer
noted the great performance of the store, and in the training session asked the
Store Manager what she did to deliver the great results. Her answer: “I used
the HeadCount reports to match my staff scheduling to when customers were
visiting the store.”
The HeadCount service includes a unique briefing program that provides not only
formal group training, but also one-on-one briefings with each store manager.
During these individual briefings, store managers have an opportunity to
discuss questions and issues about their own stores – this is powerful because
it’s very specific. Also, because the briefings are conducted one-on-one, store
managers are uninhibited and freely discuss the real issues in their stores –
in a way that they might feel less comfortable with even to their own District
Managers.
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Resolving the ‘I don’t work on Sundays’ dilemmaDownload
Working on Sundays is part of life for those who work in retail. While staff doesn’t
usually like doing it, it’s a necessary evil.
When it comes to scheduling staff to work on Sundays, very often the
best, most experienced salespeople don’t work Sundays because they have earned
the right not to. A hard goods retailer suspected that he was missing important
sales opportunities on Sundays, but he had a hard time convincing his senior
salespeople that they should work on Sundays.
After signing onto the HeadCount service, the retailer’s suspicions about Sundays
were confirmed: not only were Sundays among the busiest traffic days of the
month (in fact at some stores Sundays were even busier than Saturdays), he also
realized that customer conversion rates (i.e. the percentage of buyers as a
ratio of customer counts) were also consistently low on Sundays.
Using traffic and conversion analysis provided by HeadCount, the retailer presented
the analysis to his senior sales people. After seeing the results, the senior
salespeople themselves concluded that the stores were missing important sales
opportunities and that given the importance of Sundays they should work on
Sundays more often themselves.
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Setting store hours – did extending store hours pay off?Download
There is no magic to setting stores hours. Many retailers struggle setting store
hours and especially with whether they should alter store hours during
different times of the year. One general merchandiser was wondering this very
question. During the summer months when his store is usually busier, he decided
to extend his store hours by 1 full hour – instead of closing at 9 PM he would
keep the store open until 10 PM.
After several months of the extended hours, the store manager concluded that the
extended hours were paying off because there were plenty of customers in the
store between 9 PM and 10 PM – the newly extended hour. The problem was,
however, overall sales hadn’t improved. The retailer was very confused.
Working with HeadCount, the retailer discovered that the while there was customer
traffic during this extended hour, what he failed to appreciate was that these
shoppers were not necessarily new, incremental visitors, but rather shoppers
who shopped early prior to the extended hours. Comparing total traffic before
and after the store hour extension revealed that total traffic volume had not
changed, but what did happen was that some customers who shopped at earlier
hours ‘shifted’ to the extended hour. This retailer was paying extra labor cost
to keep the store open, but there was not actually a gain in sales. Without
HeadCount he could not have discovered this.
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Does your advertising work?Download
Many retailers erroneously believe that there is a direct relationship between
advertising and sales results. They use sales as the primary measure of whether
or not their advertising is effective. While advertising and sales are related,
they are not perfectly correlated. For example, if a retailer successfully
drives lots of new prospects into his store but is understaffed and can’t convert
the traffic into a sale, the overall sales results may appear lackluster, and
from this, they may wrongly conclude that the advertising didn’t work.
Understanding traffic volume can tell retailers much about the effectiveness of
their advertising. HeadCount helps make this clear.
An auto dealer was perplexed about his advertising spending. His advertising
spending was up over the prior year, but sales were about flat. He wondered if
his advertising was doing the job. He reasoned that his advertising wasn’t
working because his sales hadn’t increased even though his ad spend did.
Working with HeadCount the dealer set out to try to find the answer. After tracking
showroom traffic for several months and through several advertising campaigns,
the trends were clear – the advertising was not driving additional prospects
into the showroom. Traffic remained flat throughout the several campaign
segments. Instead of focusing solely on the sales results, the dealer is now
focused on driving traffic as the key objective for his advertising. As a
result of using the HeadCount analysis, the dealer changed his advertising
approach and now focuses on driving traffic.
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When the Cat’s away… Maintaining sales performance even when managers aren’t aroundDownload
Retail is people and people are human. No matter how great your salespeople are, from
time to time, they will let their performance slip, it’s only natural. This is
a tough issue to spot and for the most part retail managers are powerless to do
anything about it.
A large specialty chain had started using HeadCount and was in the early stages
of understanding how to best use the traffic and customer conversion insights.
As they started to review the traffic reporting month-after-month, a number of
interesting patterns immerged. One item that particularly caught the eye of the
regional manager was the fact that every third Wednesday, conversion rates
across the stores in his region ‘sagged’ between the hours of 2 PM and 4 PM. At
first he thought this was some kind of anomaly, but after seeing it
consistently, he started to wonder if there was more to it.
After discussing the issue with his store managers, the answer became very clear:
every third Wednesday all the department managers held their monthly meeting –
all the department managers were off the sales floor for two hours – exactly
the two hours when customer conversion dropped. Armed with HeadCount results,
the managers made a few “adjustments” and the mystery of the ‘sagging’ customer
conversion was soon solved.
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