In mid-2015, our retail client (let’s call them “Fabulous Stores”) had more than 85 departmental stores across 50 cities (metro and non-metro) in Europe with a cumulative strength of approximately 3200 staff. They have a variety of brands which have several departments to meet the varied shopping needs of customers. These include menswear, women’s wear, kids’ wear, footwear, cosmetics, perfumes and handbags, household furniture accessories, lingerie, and gifts. Well-designed interiors, sprawling space, prime locations and coffee shops enhance the customers’ shopping experience.
Challenge
Being such a huge brand, Fabulous Stores wanted to expand their territory but they couldn’t as their sales graph was steadily declining. Several points were taken under consideration such as the margins with the vendor, the sales team’s style of working, the discounts and offers, variety in brands, in-store experience, tie-ups with banks and other wallets for further discounts. It was found that one or more of these could be the reasons for the sales drop. The important question here to the management team was that even if the issues came to be known, which issues were causing higher impact to the business and up to what extent? Who is responsible for the issue and at what hierarchy is the glitch? Keeping these things in mind, Klub1 proposed a simple but impactful solution which not only solved the business challenge but also brought transparency within the teams.
We were impressed with how Klub1 was able to find our challenges using their unique solutions.
Solution
After understanding the client in our Discovery Session™, we realized that they needed a system that took feedback from the clients/employees directly into a centralized system and assigned the task to the right person who could take care of that issue. Further analyzing, we found some issues may require immediate attention while others needed time for finding the root cause of it. Hence, Klub1 proposed that every issue will be further divided into 2 parts viz., 1. Immediate Resolution and 2. Root Cause Analysis, and each of it would be assigned to two different persons. Every task would have a pre-decided turnaround time (TAT) and if the issue was not solved within TAT, that task would be escalated to someone higher-up. This would continue until it reaches the topmost level of hierarchy which is defined in the system or the issue is marked as solved. A graphical dashboard was privided to track the number of issues initiated, in-progress and closed for the day, week, month and for the year. Other reports such as department-wise issues, brand-wise issues, store-wise issues and many others were delivered as per business requirement.
Results
After implementing the system, the business’ main challenge of finding out the main reason(s) of sales decline is now solved. The reasons are now clear, well documented and transparent to the management. With a single click on the dashboard, our solution shows the number of issues arriving in a day, week, month and year and the status of each issue is tracked. By providing an immediate resolution and a root cause analysis (so that the issue doesn’t recur) the customers/employees are now happy that their concern is now heard and answered. Even if the issue does recur, it is reassigned with minimal manual intervention and the system takes care of it. The graph of sales vs complaints has grown to be inversely proportional since then. The less the number of issues, more the sales and revenue. Simple but Impactful, isn’t it?
