Operations

Higher sales with better customer service

Are these expectations beyond your reach?

Improving each store’s year-over-year performance is challenging. Shrink and high return rates are cutting into profits just as consumer expectations are increasing. You may feel that you have tried everything.

Consumer expectations continue to rise—new paths to purchase, new expectations for the store experience, simpler returns from any channel–meanwhile, stores are staffed with fewer people. You cannot afford to have a manager hovering over clerks all day, the software you deploy needs to allow associates function independently while still allowing insight into their activities and performance. Managers need systems to help them be proactive and remediate sales reducing activities before they become habits.

Inventory shrinkage is about 1.62 percent in the US according to the National Retail Federation’s NRSS report, and about 1.42 percent worldwide as reported in the Checkpoint Global Retail Theft Barometer. With shrink on the rise, all departments need to take steps to keep bring it back under control. For Operations, this often means changing some established processes that inadvertently cause loss. The problem is, without the right software, the causes of shrink remain a mystery.

Achieve sales goals, improve the customer experience, and create a positive work environment

With our help, the pleasant store environment you create through merchandising and décor is supported by an environment that welcomes customer interactions and provides a collaborative atmosphere for employees.

Your store environment can put consumers at ease whether they are asking for help finding merchandise, making a purchase, or requesting a refund. While most of the store experience centers on stimulating the first purchase, with the right approach consumers can be persuaded to increase basket size that day or to turn a trip to the store for a refund into a new shopping experience.

One of the signals consumers look for to decide if you really care about them is your return policy. If the policy is generous, then consumers spend freely. When the procedure is fast and fair, consumers will remember the positive experience. You can ensure that your stores meet or exceed their expectations.

Outstanding Results, Fast

There are three ways to lift store performance: sell more, cut costs, and stop loss. Our solutions can help you with all three. You can offer targeted incentives to increase attachment sales (complementary items) and replacement sales after a return.

You can offer friendlier return policies and simultaneously process fewer returns. You can identify operational and employee sources of loss and take steps to solve those problems. Our solutions are easier to implement than projects of similar size, and they reach full ROI in six months or less.

operations solutions

Incent™ lifts the store revenue by increasing conversions from the existing foot traffic. These are people already in your store; they are best positioned to buy today. Incent stimulates additional purchases from this group while at the same time helping you sell through seasonal or slow-moving merchandise. Retailers using the solution see an increase of about 1% in sales. Incent does not issue an incentive at every sale or return. As a result, consumers enjoy the surprise and respond with urgency. The incentives also offer your associates an opportunity to personally extend a kindness to a customer—the kind of connection that builds loyalty.

Verify® helps to improve the customer experience by ensuring fast, fair returns for good customers. It enables the retailer to offer the generous return policies consumers crave without opening the door to return fraud. Retailers using Verify see overall return volume drop by about 8 percent even with a lenient return policy. That automatically saves on labor, storage, and refurbishment costs. Finally, in the one percent of the returns that are denied due to fraud/abuse, any confrontation is directed away from the sales clerk and toward Appriss Retail. You store image is not tarnished.

Secure™ Store is valuable in addressing the operational causes of shrink and the overall drain on total revenue. It can uncover equipment malfunctions, slipshod vendors, and other issues that can be dealt with as an organization. It uncovers store-by-store problems as well, such as employee fraud, noncompliance, and other sales reducing activities. It is not all bad news—exception reports can also highlight top performing stores and personnel.

Higher profits and a positive customer experience

Our solutions help you attract and retain good customers while reducing the number of dishonest customers and employees acting against your company. Our retail technology uses data analytics not available through any other source (including your in-house team).

We have a team of statisticians with MS and PhD educations, a statistical criminologist, and a Certified Fraud Examiner on staff. They are dedicated to monitoring the billions of transactions we receive to from retailers around the world to create predictive models that uncover new up-sell opportunities and that keep retail fraud in check without harming good customers.

If you are looking for solutions that make an impact, then you have found your resource.

case studies

How we’ve helped, and how we continue to help

PUT THE BRAKES ON SHRINK!

Shrink can easily run your store off the road. This video explains how to tune up your approach in a way that not only identifies current problems, but also indicates where future issues may occur.

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