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DECREASING EMAILS BY 40% AND UNCOVERING SURPRISING TACTICS: HOW HACKETT AND THE
WHITE COMPANY TRANSFORMED RETAIL OPERATIONS WITH CEGID RETAIL STORE EXCELLENCE

Back to the list of articles

Retail & Distribution

25 October 2023

When it comes to detailed metrics of customer interaction and ensuring visual
cohesion with the brand, online stores have traditionally had a distinct
advantage over their brick-and-mortar counterparts. But, as technology has
evolved, so too has the retail operations piece.

7 min


7 min
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THE IMPORTANCE OF PHYSICAL RETAIL: INSIGHTS FROM THE WHITE COMPANY AND HACKETT

In a recent Drapers webinar moderated by Graeme Moran, which also featured
Cegid’s Amy Bastow, Hackett’s Ramon Zevallos, and The White Company’s Debbie
Kitchen discussed why physical retail is still important for their customers and
what surprised them most when implementing Cegid Retail Store Excellence.

While the debate about the future of the High Street still lingers, in a number
of cases, online isn’t always better, as Kitchen explained: “The key thing about
The White Company, is we do such a wide range of products, that we’re very much
about the touch, the smell and people want to experience that. So, while online
is still huge for us, people want to come in and touch the fabrics of the
bedlinen that they’re purchasing, smell the candles etc. Whilst we do a
brilliant job of bringing it to life, there’s nothing like walking into one of
our stores and smelling the latest fragrance.”

Zevallos agreed “post-pandemic we saw a big influx. We saw that it was all about
the experiences in store. Our Regent Street location we actually have a bar on
the first floor.”

 


CHALLENGES IN THE RETAIL LANDSCAPE: BREXIT, TRAINING, AND RISING COSTS

Yet despite the larger impact of the pandemic largely behind us, challenges
still exist for retail, with Brexit meaning staff leaving and new employees
needing to be trained, while energy and payroll costs have also increased.

Employees are also one of the biggest and often underutilised assets in the
retail operations piece as Bastow explained: “Everyone talks about customer
experience. But you can’t deliver a great customer experience if you haven’t got
your team lined up and able to do it. I did a talk with Robert Newstead who
works for PVH. He was talking about how they have really focussed on the store
associate experience on the basis that if you don’t get that right, then your
customer experience is never going to work because your people aren’t effective
and aren’t going to deliver.”

 


STREAMLINING TECHNOLOGY FOR EFFICIENCY: INSIGHTS FROM CEGID RETAIL STORE
EXCELLENCE

Bastow also spoke about how over the years many retailers had experimented with
lots of different tech solutions in a fragmented way and that now was the time
to reduce and consolidate technology investments to improve efficiency. From The
White Company’s perspective, Kitchen added “We did go down a journey of using
some other technology but found it was just too complicated and it didn’t work
for us.”

On the benefits of a streamlined platform like Cegid Retail Excellence, Kitchen
added: “We knew we needed something really simple.”

Kitchen continued “Before we had lots of different ways of asking stores to do
things from different tasks. So, whether it was a health and safety compliance,
daily, monthly or weekly check they need to do. But lots of it was just reliant
on the stores remembering that it was a monthly check or whatever. So, what this
has allowed us to do, which was really important for us, was to get some
structure and some consistency, and rather than everybody remembering to do
things at different times, what we’ve been able to do is really go through and
look at what is the rhythm and routine throughout a day, a week, a month, a year
and schedule things in which has been absolutely brilliant for us. We’re seeing
some really fantastic results, particularly with anything compliance-driven
because it is set up as part of their daily activity. They can’t complete it the
next day retrospectively. But what it also does for us, is it tells us
immediately on our dashboard who has done what and when. While it’s about
driving efficiencies for the stores it was about driving efficiency for myself
and my team, so we weren’t having to spend ages chasing stores. It’s all really
visible and easy to track.”

 


BENEFITS OF CEGID RETAIL EXCELLENCE: INSIGHTS FROM THE WHITE COMPANY AND HACKETT

Using Cegid Retail Excellence for compliance was also an important factor for
Zevallos but he also explained how technology can be more engaging for staff
through using gamification or surveys to test product knowledge. “We do little
pieces like that to boost engagement to use the tool but also use it to
incentivise too.”

Teams have also responded well to embracing Cegid Retail Excellence at The White
Company too as Kitchen added “the engagement from day one was outstanding. In
our first six months we had over 12 and a half thousand photos shared from our
stores back to us because they were so excited about sharing them. From doing
simple things like the compliance checklists, you could see that they were
actually doing it. But we ran surveys to see how they felt about it, what we
could do better, we still do that. It was just having it all in one place and
somewhere really simple for them to look. Rather than having to run off the shop
floor and go and log into a computer or check a phone or do this. It’s really
simple, it’s on their iPad, it’s in front of them. It’s just made their lives
easy. ”

For Zevallos, embracing technology in stores was about simplifying and reducing
missed communications and getting rid of unsuitable practices. “I used to go
into stores and see post-it notes everywhere and I’d be like why are we doing
this? If that falls down, I’m not going to be able to communicate from that
closing manager to maybe the next day’s opening manager.”

“We have a lot of communications between different store brands and from the
office to the store teams. That’s where we saw a lot of the messaging getting
lost in translation because maybe it was only via email. There is WhatsApp,
there is phone calls, text messages out there etc. And we really needed to
streamline to make sure the stores’ team knew what was happening as a group, as
a brand.”

 


TECH-DRIVEN ENGAGEMENT: GAMIFICATION, SURVEYS, AND STREAMLINED COMMUNICATION

But technology can also highlight if managers are overwhelming their staff as
Kitchen explained: “Cegid will help us and give us a deep dive into the data.
You can have this gut feel that you think you’re doing a really brilliant job of
what you’re sending out but actually, the numbers and statistics might tell you
otherwise. That was one of the things that we saw very early on. We didn’t want
to send comms to stores on a Friday and we thought we were brilliant at doing
that and actually as soon as we saw the first round of statistics, we thought
crikey there’s 15% going out on a Friday – what is it? And we were able to
unpick that which really helped with the engagement with stores. The engagement
with the teams is huge and invaluable.”

 


REDUCING EMAIL OVERLOAD: TANGIBLE BENEFITS OF CEGID RETAIL EXCELLENCE

Reducing the volume of emails that staff were receiving was also important for
Zevallos: “That was one thing I was asking my IT. Can we see what is the comms
from email? We had about a 40% decrease in our emails, and it was all through
the help of this tool.”

Bastow added that she’d had similar feedback from other customers: “We have a
customer that went live last year who sent me an email this week saying they’ve
saved 25% of their field teams time just by being able to make things neater and
clearer. For your field teams that’s a huge increase in productivity. Most store
estates are run very tightly so you’re not going to save any payroll but it’s
about what you do with the time that you save. And then of course you can take
out a lot of paper. We’ve had someone who’s saved £80,000 a year of paper. The
big benefits are around making life easier for store teams, the engagement,
brand consistency, and ultimately driving sales.”

 


BEYOND ROI: AESTHETICS AND BRAND CONSISTENCY IN RETAIL TECHNOLOGY

Aside from the tangible ROI, the aesthetics of the platform also had a huge
impact on engagement as Kitchen explained: “The platform feels like us, it’s
ours. Everything from the wording, the tone of voice, the photography, the fonts
that we use on the platform – it’s the White Company through and through. When
you can log into a platform and see beautiful photography or things that feel
familiar to them, it makes such a difference.”

A point Zevallos agreed with: “The tool really felt like it was a Hackett tool
and it provided not only just the imagery or the product videos etc but it
really fit the DNA. And that was one of the probably trickier things. As
launching this tool as a group, we have Pepe Jeans, we wanted it to look and
feel like Pepe Jeans. When a Hackett store logs into their link, they’ll see the
Hackett images.”

Ultimately, technology can transform retail operations but as Bastow
acknowledged earlier on it’s about empowering store associates with technology
so they can deliver the best customer experience possible. “It’s about giving
people clarity about what’s expected. And giving people the information so it’s
easy for them to do what they’re being asked to do.”

A point echoed by Zevallos “We’ve seen efficiencies and less times on email and
WhatsApp etc and gave the store teams more time to focus on what we needed which
was the customers.”


WATCH THE DRAPERS WEBINAR REPLAY NOW

Discover the insights, strategies, and success stories directly from industry
leaders in the Drapers webinar featuring Cegid’s Amy Bastow, Hackett’s Ramon
Zevallos, and The White Company’s Debbie Kitchen. Gain valuable perspectives on
how technology can revolutionise your retail experience.

Watch now

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