Customer Service Collateral Damage

Posted on April 3, 2019 by Jeff Harrop

Good intentions can often lead to unintended consequences. – Tim Walberg

Speed kills.

Retailers with brick and mortar operations are always trying to keep the checkout lines moving and get customers out the door as quickly as possible. Many collect time stamps on their sales transactions in order to measure and reward their cashiers based on how quickly they can scan.

Similarly, being able to receive quickly at the back of the store is seen as critical to customer service – product only sells off the shelf, not from the receiving bay or the back of a truck.

This focus on speed has led to many in-store transactional “efficiencies”:

If a customer puts 12 cans of frozen concentrated juice on the belt, a cashier may scan the first one and use the multiplier key to add the other 11 to the bill all at once.
If a product doesn’t scan properly or is missing the UPC code, just ask the customer for the price and key the sale under a “miscellaneous” SKU or a similar item with the same price, rather than calling for a time consuming code check.
If a shipment arrives in the receiving bay, just scan the waybill instead of each individual case and get the product to the floor.

These time saving measures can certainly delight “the customer of this moment”, but there can also be consequences.

In the “mult key” example, the 12 cans scanned could be across 6 different flavours of juice. The customer may not care since they’re paying the same price, but the inventory records for 6 different SKUs have just been fouled up for the sake of saving a few seconds. To the extent that the system on hand balances are used to make automated replenishment decisions, this one action could be inconveniencing countless customers for several more days, weeks or even months before the lie is exposed.

The smile on a customer’s face because you saved her 5 seconds at the checkout or the cashier speed rankings board in the break room might be tangible signs of “great customer service”, but the not-so-easy-to-see costs of stockouts and lost sales that arise from this practice over time is extremely costly.

Similarly with skipping code checks or “pencil whipping” back door receipts. Is sacrificing accuracy for the sake of speed really good customer service policy?

A recent article published in Canadian Grocer magazine begins with the following sentence:

“A lack of open checkouts and crowded aisles may be annoying to grocery shoppers, but their biggest frustration is finding a desired product is out of stock, according to new research from Field Agent.”

According to the article, out of stocks are costing Canadian grocers $63 billion per year in sales. While better store level planning and replenishment can drive system reported in-stocks close to 100%, the benefits are muted if the replenishment system thinks the store has 5 units when they actually have none.

Not only does this affect the experience of a walk-in customer looking at an empty shelf, but it’s actually even more serious in an omnichannel world where the expectation is that retailers will publish store inventories on their public websites (gulp!). An empty shelf is one thing, but publishing an inaccurate on hand on your website is tantamount to lying right to your customers’ faces.

We’ve seen firsthand that it’s not uncommon for retailers to have a store on hand accuracy percentage in the low 60s (meaning that almost 40% of the time, the system on hand record differs from the counted quantity by more than 5% at item/location level). Furthermore, we’ve found that on the day of an inventory count, the actual in stock is several points lower than the reported in stock on average.

Suffice it to say that inaccurate on hand records are a big part of the out of stocks problem.

Nothing I’ve said above is particularly revolutionary or insightful. The real question is why has it been allowed to continue?

In my view, there are 3 key reasons:

Most retailers conflate shrink with inventory accuracy and make the horribly, horribly mistaken assumption that if their financial shrink is below 1.5%, then their inventory management is under control. Shrink is a measure for accountants, not customers and the responsibility of store inventory management belongs in Store Operations, not Finance.
Nobody measures the accuracy of their on hands. It’s fine to measure the speed of transactions and the efficiency of store labour, but if you’re taking shortcuts to achieve those efficiencies, you should also be measuring the consequence of those actions – especially when the consequence so profoundly impacts the customer experience.
Retailers think that inaccurate store on hands is an intractable problem that’s impossible to economically solve. That was true for every identified problem in human history at one point. However, I do agree that if no action is taken to solve the problem because it is “impossible to solve”, then it will never be solved.

It’s true that overcoming inertia on this will not be easy.

Your customers’ expectations will continue to rise regardless.

Rise of the Machines?

Posted on February 6, 2019 by Jeff Harrop

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. – Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

My doctor told me that I need to reduce the amount of salt, fat and sugar in my diet. So I immediately increased the frequency of oil changes for my car.

Confused?

I don’t blame you. That’s how I felt after I read a recent survey about the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in retail.

Note that I’m not criticizing the survey itself. It’s a summary of collected thoughts and opinions of retail C-level executives (pretty evenly split among hardlines/softlines/grocery on the format dimension and large/medium/small on the size dimension), so by definition it can’t be “wrong”. I just found some of the responses to be revealing – and bewildering.

On the “makes sense” side of the ledger, the retail executives surveyed intend to significantly expand customer delivery options for purchases made online over the next 24 months, specifically:

79% plan to offer ship from store
80% plan to offer pick up in store
75% plan to offer delivery using third party services

This supports my (not particularly original) view that the physical store affords traditional brick and mortar retailers a competitive advantage over online retailers like Amazon, at least in the short to medium term.

However, the next part of the survey is where we start to see trouble (the title of this section is “Retailers Everywhere Aren’t Ready for the Anywhere Shelf”):

55% of retailers surveyed don’t have a single view of inventory across channels
78% of retailers surveyed don’t have a real-time view of inventory across channels

What’s worse is that there is no mention at all about inventory accuracy. I submit that the other 45% and 22% respectively may have inventory visibility capabilities, but are they certain that their store level inventory records are accurate? Do they actually measure store on hand accuracy (by item by location in units, which is what a customer sees) as a KPI?

The title of the next slide is “Customer Experience and Supply Chain Maturity Demands Edge Technologies”. Okay… Sure… I guess.

The slide after that concludes that retail C-suite executives believe that the top technologies “having the broadest business impact on productivity, operational efficiency and customer experience” are as follows:

#1 – Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
#2 – Connected Devices
#3 – Voice Recognition

Towards the end, it was revealed that “The C-suite is planning a 5X increase in artificial intelligence adoption over the next 2 years”. And that 50% of those executives see AI as an emerging technology that will have a significant impact on “sharpening inventory levels” (whatever that actually means).

So just to recap:

Over the next 2 years, retailers will be aggressively pursuing customer delivery options that place ever increasing importance on visibility and accuracy of store inventory.
A majority of retailers haven’t even met the visibility criteria and it’s highly unlikely that the ones who have are meeting the accuracy criteria (the second part is my assumption and I welcome being proved wrong on that).
Over the next 2 years, retailers intend to increase their investment in artificial intelligence technologies fivefold.

I’m reminded of the scene in Die Hard 2 (careful before you click – the language is not suitable for a work environment or if small children are nearby) where terrorists take over Dulles International Airport during a zero visibility snowstorm and crash a passenger jet simply by transmitting a false altitude reading to the cockpit of the plane.

Even in 1990, passenger aircraft were quite technologically advanced and loaded with systems that could meet the definition of “artificial intelligence“. What happens when one piece of critical data fed into the system is wrong? Catastrophe.

I need some help understanding the thought process here. How exactly will AI solve the inventory visibility/accuracy problem? Are we talking about every retailer having shelf scanning robots running around in every store 2 years from now? What does “sharpen inventory levels” mean and how is AI expected to achieve that (very nebulous sounding) goal?

I’m seriously asking.

Concealing Your Shame

Posted on December 5, 2018 by Jeff Harrop

There is no shame in not knowing; the shame lies in not finding out. – Russian Proverb

Customer expectations of brick & mortar retailers are changing.

Most retailers are failing miserably at meeting those expectations with regard to providing information about stock availability at their stores online.

I’m not talking about whether or not they have sufficient stock to meet customer demand – it’s even more basic than that. When a customer is looking to visit your store can you even properly tell him/her what your stock status actually is?

Recently, I decided to anecdotally put one particular store to the test on this. I chose this store for the following reasons:

They actually publish their store on hand balances online for all the world to see in real time.
They offer a “buy online, pick up in store” option.
I visit the store fairly frequently and it’s about 1 kilometre from my house.

On the day of my “study”, I only had 2 items I needed. Before leaving, I called up the pages for those items on my iPhone and went to the store. When I got there, I refreshed the pages to retrieve the most up-to-date stock information and compared that number to what I actually found on the shelf. After that, I wandered around the aisles and picked a few other items at random and did the same thing.

Now before I share the results, there are some rather significant caveats that I need to mention:

The inventory is updated in real time, but obviously it’s based on POS transactions. When I did the “physical count” on the shelf, it’s certainly possible that some other customer had picked the item off the shelf but had not yet paid for it.
The study was performed on a busy Saturday afternoon about 4 weeks before Christmas. Not exactly ideal timing for ensuring that the store was stocked neatly or that there wasn’t a lot of product floating around in customer baskets as per point 1 above.
I know that this store has a very large back room and doesn’t keep separate on hand balances for shelf stock and backroom stock. In cases where my count is short, it’s certainly possible that the product was in the back room or displayed elsewhere in the store.
When I got a count discrepancy, I did not ask the staff for help in locating the “missing” items. As I mentioned, we are only weeks away from Christmas and I wasn’t about to waste people’s time finding items that I had no intention of purchasing.

The first item on my list was a carbon dioxide cylinder for our SodaStream. Note that I’ve attempted to crop out any information that would reveal who the retailer is (logos, shelf tags, product identifiers, etc.). This won’t stop some of you from recognizing them, but I can’t do much about that.

Okay, back to the SodaStream cylinder. When I reached the shelf and refreshed the page on my phone, here’s what I got:

Wow, 337 units in stock! (As an aside, this retailer almost always shows the aisle number in the store where the product can be found, which is stellar – not sure why it’s not shown in this case, but it’s a product I buy often, so I knew exactly where to go).

Now here’s the shelf:

You can’t see them all in this image, but the actual count was 18 units, far short of 337. Obviously this is either a massive inventory record error or there’s a pallet of them on a secondary display or in the back room. So long as they sell fewer than 18 per day, buyers of this item will be happy.

RESULT: INCONCLUSIVE

The second item on my list was a large, bark deterring dog collar for my mother-in-law’s dog (it uses vibration or noise to deter barking, not electric shocks, so don’t judge me!). As you’ll see below, my phone told me to go to aisle 56 to find 1 unit:

Unfortunately when I got to the aisle, there was none to be found. I spent a few minutes searching all of the overheads, pegs and bins in this aisle and one aisle over in each direction and couldn’t find it.

RESULT: FAIL

While in aisle 56, I picked another random item (mulberry scented dog shampoo) and looked it up on my phone:

And here is the shelf:

6 units – right on the nose.

RESULT: SUCCESS

Now, how about this Bissell Little Green pet stain remover?

This item is on promotion for $25.00 off and I found an end aisle display with 12 units:

…and one more unit in the home in aisle 60:

So that’s 13 on the shelf vs 32 units reported on hand. But because this item is promoted, there is almost certainly more in the back room to replenish the shelves.

RESULT: INCONCLUSIVE

On to aisle 17 to check out the Stanley chalk line reels.

Hoping to find 5…

…and 5 it is.

RESULT: SUCCESS

You get the picture (no pun intended). I also documented a few other items in the same way, but I’ll spare you the photographic evidence:

Richard Self Adhesive Drywall Tape: 3 online, 4 on the shelf (RESULT: PRETTY CLOSE)
T.S.P. Heavy Duty Cleaner (400g): 10 online, 4 on the shelf (RESULT: FAIL)
Soft Glide Cabinet Hinge: 12 online, none to be found anywhere (RESULT: EPIC FAIL)
OOK Picture Hanging Kit: 14 online, 13 on the peg (RESULT: PRETTY CLOSE)

In summary:

There were 3 failures out of 9 (I’m counting “Pretty Close” and “Inconclusive” in the success column for fairness)
2 of those 3 failures could have resulted in a lost sale on that day (i.e. the reported on hand was > 0, but there was no stock to be found on the sales floor).
With regard to the bark deterrent collar (one of the items I actually wanted to buy), there’s more to the story:
- When I got home, I ordered the item for in store pickup and the on hand immediately dropped to zero
- Later that day, I received an email notification and a phone call informing me that the item wouldn’t be available for pickup until the next day
- From this, I’m surmising that they couldn’t find it in the store and had one delivered from a nearby store overnight
- The next day, I picked up the item at my home store – lost sale averted

So what was the point of all this and why did I choose “Concealing Your Shame” as the title? Am I trying to shame this retailer for what (anecdotally and with all of my previous caveats applied) looks like imperfect performance?

Au contraire!

Store on hand accuracy is not easy to achieve and this retailer is to be highly commended for their confidence and willingness to be as transparent to customers as possible.

No, the shame is reserved for those retailers who have on hand balances readily available in their systems but choose not to share it. I guess the thinking is that you can’t fail if you don’t try.

I say it again: customer expectations are changing.

If you’re afraid to share your on hand balances with your customers, I have 2 questions:

Why? (you already know why)
What are you doing about it?

Last Mile Delivery: Really Folks?

Posted on December 6, 2017 by Jeff Harrop

One way to boost our will power and focus is to manage our distractions instead of letting them manage us. – Daniel Goleman

Okay, first a confession out of the gate. The title, quote and image above might lead you to believe that I’m judging last mile delivery (and the broader omni-channel retailing discussion that goes along with it) as a ‘shiny object’ distraction.

I know that’s not entirely true. But I believe it is at least partially true.

To be sure, retail is changing and it’s changing rapidly. Customers want more choices in terms of how they make purchases and how they get those purchases to their homes – and they aren’t super keen on paying a lot more for these choices.

Retailers who put their heads in the sand and don’t actively address these challenges will (and in some cases already do) find themselves in serious peril.

Where is last mile delivery headed? It’s still evolving – but getting into those details is not the point of this discussion. I’m going to stay in my lane. At the risk of oversimplifying things, a sale is a sale and the supply chain planning challenge is to have the product available where the sale will be fulfilled.

The beef I have is that all of the discussion about last mile delivery seems to be making the blanket assumption that retailers have everything aced right up to the last mile.

As if to prove my point, I received an unsolicited email today (God only knows how many supply chain related online publications have my email address at this point) asking for my participation in a survey with the title: “Can we solve the last mile?” The opening two sentences read as follows:

“The last mile is bearing the brunt of the eCommerce boom. Yet, it represents a great source of angst and expense for retailers and last mile providers alike.”

After that is a ‘sneak preview’ of survey topics that focus solely on last mile problems – the implication (likely unintended) is that the challenges in the last mile are completely independent of all the activities that precede them.

Retail out-of-stocks have been a major problem since they started measuring it (8% on average and double that during promotions). The most prevalent cause cited by all of the major studies is inventory management and replenishment practices at store level. Not surprisingly, the lack of attention on solving for these causes means that they haven’t yet magically vanished. Perhaps someday, if we keep wishing really hard…

It’s pretty clear that ‘non Amazon retailers’ will need to make use of their bricks and mortar store network to enable whatever last mile delivery options they intend to pursue. How will they be successful in that regard with such abysmal out-of-stock performance and no idea what the accuracy of their electronic on hand records are (if they even have them at all)?

The day is coming when customers will expect to see store on hand balances on your web page before they submit a ‘click and collect’ order – what happens when the website says you have 3 in stock, but there isn’t any to be found when the customer goes in to collect?

Finally, we can’t lose sight of the fact that the ‘omni’ in ‘omnichannel’ is a latin prefix meaning ‘all’ or ‘every’. One of those ‘every’ channels is customers walking into a store, getting a cart, selecting products and paying for them at the checkout – kickin’ it old school to the tune of 91.5% of total retail sales.

Yes, e-commerce is growing like crazy, but it’s going to be awhile yet before online selling is truly dominant in retail as a whole.

And if (when) that day comes?

Again, I’m not suggesting that working out the last mile won’t be critically important. I’m just saying that retailers still have some work to do in getting basics right (like being in stock and knowing how much is on hand) in order to make it all work.

We Can All Agree

Posted on August 2, 2017 by Jeff Harrop

We rarely think people have good sense unless they agree with us. – Francois de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

My family has a history of heart problems.

Although my blood pressure and cholesterol are both fine, I’m 47 years old, carrying 15-20 extra pounds and I don’t get enough exercise, which compounds that risk.

Family History + Being Middle Aged + Being Overweight + Not Enough Cardio = Increased Risk of Heart Problems

It’s hardly a mystery. Everybody knows this. I agree.

I can do nothing about my family history or my age, but I’ve been about the same weight for the last several years and have not meaningfully or sustainably increased the amount of daily exercise I get on a daily basis.

Ask any smoker if they are aware of all of the various health risks from smoking. They too will agree that smoking is bad. But they still do it.

Clearly, there isn’t a binary choice (i.e. agree or disagree), rather different ‘levels’ of agreement:

I agree with what you’re saying.
I agree that something needs to change.
I agree to change my behaviour.

In business in general (and supply chain in particular), significant improvement in results can only be achieved with process-driven changes to people’s behaviour.

We can all agree that the quality of a retailer’s customer service is directly tied to the accuracy of their store-item level inventory records – especially in an omnichannel world where a customer can demand product from a website and expect to pick it up in their neighbourhood store a couple hours later. It’s not a stretch to further agree that processes, procedures and measurement systems need to be in place to improve and maintain store level on hand accuracy.

And yet many retailers (40% of grocery stores according to a recent study) don’t even use a system on hand balance and those that do are not attacking their accuracy problems.

We can all agree that retail supply chains should be consumer driven to be efficient and profitable. And yet most retailers are using the same ‘old school’ processes for promotions, new product introductions and seasonal sales – ‘buy a ton, push it out to the stores and pray that it sells’.

While ‘agreement in principle’ is certainly necessary, it is clearly far from sufficient. So what is the secret ingredient?

I’ve seen it many times throughout my career in retail. I visit one store and the aisles are uncluttered, the shelves are faced out beautifully and the back room is organized and tidy. Then I visit another store with the same retailer and it looks like it was recently hit by a cyclone – even though both stores have the same systems, processes and training manuals.

The difference is that you have to care.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the store manager with the messy store has no passion. I’m just saying that he doesn’t have passion for retailing.

It’s the same reason I’m a supply chain consultant and not a fitness instructor (at least for now). I agree in principle that I need to exercise and lose weight, but I care deeply about order, organization and process discipline in the retail supply chain.

So where does this passion come from and how can it be cultivated and spread throughout an organization?

God, I really wish I knew. I believe that everyone is born with passion, but not everybody is in a job they’re passionate about.

That said, I know that passion can be infectious enough that a very small group of uber-passionate people can change organizations – not necessarily by making everyone as passionate as they are, but by generating just enough force to overcome the organizational inertia.

And once the boulder starts rolling down the hillside, we can all agree that it’s very difficult to stop.