Piggly Wiggly improves customer service with Irisys Queue Intelligence

Business Issue

The JTM Corporation is known for their low prices and friendly, hometown service. In order to compete, they needed to deliver not only friendly service but fast service; the challenge was delivering this great service while keeping prices low.

Chief Financial Officer Keith Milligan said:

We were looking for a way to differentiate us from the other stores in town. We felt if we could excel in faster customer service we would have an advantage over our low-price competitors.

- Keith Milligan, Chief Financial Officer, JTM Corp.

Solution

JTM installed the Irisys Queue Management System in one Columbus, GA store in October 2014.

After piloting the system for 12 weeks and seeing the benefits of improved customer service and easier cashier scheduling, Keith decided to implement the system in all 19 stores.

Business Benefits

Since implementing the system, the JTM Corporation has seen the following benefits:

• Faster checkout service
  Customer wait time was reduced from 2 minutes to 1 minute, saving customers 150,000 minutes of waiting each week.

• Reduced competitor impact
  Over the past 6 months 7 competitors have opened in the JTM market area. The improved customer service and satisfaction has reduced the potential negative sales impact to their stores.

• Improved Customer Satisfaction
  District Manager Gil Milligan said that before the system was implemented, they would get customer complaints about “not having enough lanes open or enough cashiers available.” Since the Irisys system was implemented, they haven’t received a single complaint about speed of checkout.

• Optimized labor scheduling
  With the guidance of the Irisys Lane Scheduler, the stores are now scheduling Cashiers to coincide with customer demand.

The Milligan family was so excited about the benefits they’ve seen with the system that they invited Irisys to participate in their recent franchisee conference. Over 260 stores were represented at the conference. Keith told his fellow franchise owners that:

This system has helped customer service better than anything we’ve ever tried.

- Keith Milligan, Chief Financial Officer, JTM Corp.

As a result of the improved customer service, the JTM Corporation will be launching a new marketing tag line – “At Piggly Wiggly, every register is an express lane”.