Grocery retail is a tough business, so it is important to give your customers reasons to return.
Understanding customer expectations and evaluating real-time compliance against predetermined service levels which reflect these, can make all the difference to continuing success. Combine this with benchmarking against industry best practice – and you will see the results.
This leading supermarket chain did just that, with the result that wait times went down, lines went down and customer satisfaction went up – all at no additional labour cost!
Industry sector: retail, grocery
Geography: USA
Service solution: intelligent queue management
Project size: mid-sized scale, unionised grocer
The supermarket wanted to improve the delivery of key performance indicators - specifically increasing sales and improving customer satisfaction - by reducing customer wait times at the checkout.
A sluggish economy and increased regional competition drove our client to seek new strategies that would:
Differentiate its brand within the marketplace
Help it establish a competitive edge; and
Improve delivery of key performance indicators - specifically increasing sales and improving customer satisfaction - by reducing customer wait times at the checkout.
Irisys’ Intelligent Queue Management solution was selected to help ensure associate hours were optimized and strategically allocated to provide customers a quick, efficient checkout, without additional labor investment.
Early trial results from a four-store pilot established an operational goal of 1+1 service delivery 85% of the time, would make a significant customer difference and align with industry best practice; 1+1 means 1 person is in transaction and no more than 1 person is waiting to be served.
Team members during the preliminary pilot included the Store Directors, District Managers, Labor Management, Information Systems and Training personnel, along with sponsorship from the Operations Director and Vice President.
Weekly calls were held to review the stores’ progress. By the end of the pilot period, the stores:
All of these improvements were made without increasing labor dollars. Based on these results, the decision was made to deploy the solution across most of the store estate as a first phase. As part of full implementation, a web-based enterprise tool - in addition to daily reporting - rolled up store metrics to regions, divisions and corporate to include:
Irisys’ Intelligent Queue Management solution was selected to help ensure associate hours were optimized and strategically allocated to provide customers a quick, efficient checkout, without additional labor investment.
Cashier labor schedules were adjusted to better align with customer traffic; after identifying periods of over and understaffing, existing cashier hours were reallocated to align with true customer demand.
Based upon opportunities identified during the course of the project, the following changes and best practices were implemented: