John Lewis Partnership has completed the deployment of a Customer Flow Management (CFM) solution into the children's footwear departments of 21 of its stores as part of its strategy to deliver exceptional customer service.
The retailer has rolled out the Matchmaker solution from leading CFM specialist Q-Matic following a pilot conducted in the company's Southampton store in 2006.
The deployment was undertaken to help John Lewis Partnership improve customer service, reduce waiting time and manage down stock outs at the peak sales periods in children's footwear, the all important back to school periods.
Q-Matic conducted a major study as part of its Customer Flow Management mapping to understand customer flow in the footwear department. The study identified that customers could be waiting for up to two hours because of the volume of people buying new shoes for their children before the end of school holidays.
As Terry Green of Q-Matic highlights, "Parents tend to leave shoe shopping for children until the last minute because they believe if they buy shoes early kids will have grown out of them by the time they get back to school. This means you get parents descending on the store at the same time and this puts a major strain on the retailer's resources. The issue is further complicated because the sales process for children's shoes involves specialist measuring and fitting.
The Q-Matic team identified that simply putting more people into the department to cope with demand was not the answer and also identified that the system of giving customers pagers or calling them on their mobile phones when it was their turn for service was fraught with problems and was resulting in lost sales as customers went to another store.
The study also identified that the system in place prior to the installation of the Q-Matic's Matchmaker solution resulted in large numbers of families loitering for service in the department and this was further slowing service. The solution to these issues was a combination of process changes and the installation of the Matchmaker solution.
Matchmaker allows a retailer to capture information about the customer and feed it to staff and give the customer a service promise – for example 'your appointment will be in twenty minutes time'. This means the customer can go away and browse the store for twenty minutes confident in the knowledge that when they return they will be served.
Applying Q-Matic's Customer Flow Management process methodology and installing Matchmaker has ensured that qualified measuring and fitting staff are focused on delivering a great customer service as productively as possible and this has generated significant efficiency gains and reductions in customer waiting times.
With Matchmaker, customers arriving at the department are guided to a self service touch screen kiosk which allows them to enter details on their requirements such as the child's age, sex and current shoe size as well as the number of children to be served.
The system then allocates the customer a time slot, and notifies the nominated staff member of the appointment via a pager. The allocation of customer to staff member is managed through a software algorithm which contains productivity data on each staff member and it therefore knows the average service time for every staff member. The customer's appointment time is then printed out on a ticket for the customer.
The customer is free to browse the store until the appointment is due. Following the process change involving measuring and fitting staff, the system is generally able to set an appointment with a maximum wait time of twenty minutes but at peaks in demand, when the wait time is longer than twenty minutes, the kiosk has the capability to print out complimentary vouchers for the customer to use in the in-store restaurant. Adopting this process also eliminated the problem of customers loitering around the department for appointments.
As Terry Green points out, "We had to develop a really simple to use kiosk and ensure clear signage and instructions are available. The result of both of these actions is that people actually use the kiosk to gain service as opposed to approaching staff members.
When the customer returns at the appointed time, the staff member can use the pager to record whether a sale was actually made, what the customer choice was and whether the product was either out of stock or not stocked if a sale was not achieved. This data is being used by John Lewis Partnership to inform the range and assortment planning process thereby reducing stock outs.
Following the Southampton store pilot, the solution was deployed across twelve stores in the summer 2007, before the roll out to a further nine stores was completed by early summer 2008.
The impact made by the deployment has been significant with customer waiting times reduced by in excess of 166%. The solution also meant the footwear department was able to re-deploy the meeter greeter who was previously required to manage customer flow.
Commenting on the impact of the deployment, Kerry McCulloch (Manager, Selling Services) from John Lewis Partnership said, "This roll out has helped us gain a real competitive edge in children's footwear and has helped improve the customer experience at the same time. The team at Q-Matic have developed and deployed a solution that made an immediate impact and in the long term the data we capture will help us refine our range and assortment planning process in this area."
Terry Green adds, "This is a prime example of how the application of Customer Flow Management processes and solutions can make a real and measurable impact on a retailer's operations and the quality of customer service and it shows that improved sales and productivity need not be at the expense of the overall customer experience."
For further information please contact:
Jennie Madden / Abi Whitfield
McCann Erickson PR
T: 01625 822581 / 01625 822438
E :jennie.madden@europe.mccann.com
E :abi.whitfield@euroep.mccann.com