-
Essay / Retail Store Execution: An Empirical Study
This study will help the retailer identify action steps that can increase sales and customer satisfaction and demonstrate the methodology using proprietary data from a large retailer with more than 500 stores. Interestingly, for many years, retailers have been conducting customer surveys to measure both their overall level of satisfaction and their opinions on various details of their in-store experience. Most of the detailed questions are about store execution. For example: “Did you find what you were looking for?” is a frequently asked question directly related to the missing stock issue mentioned above. It is therefore natural to consider using this data to better understand issues related to in-store fulfillment, including what factors influence fulfillment quality and how fulfillment impacts output variables. of interest to the retailer, such as sales and overall customer satisfaction. This article reports on an effort to accomplish this using proprietary data obtained from a large retail chain with more than 500 stores. Data is tracked monthly at the store level for a 17-month period and includes “Say No to Plagiarism.” Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay 1) Financial store performance data, including sales, number of transactions, and number of units sold, 2) results of an ongoing customer satisfaction survey that uses a variety of questions to measure, during a particular store visit, a customer's overall satisfaction as well as their perception of the various aspects of their experience that may have influenced their overall satisfaction? They analyzed this data to discern 1) sales 2) overall customer satisfaction and 3) the percentage of customers who answered "yes" to the question "Did you find everything you were looking for?" Overall customer satisfaction depends primarily on customer-perceived visual merchandise, pay level, customer rating of employee knowledge, and checkout efficiency; and sales depend primarily on actual inventory, overall satisfaction, and pay level.Retailer Strategy and ModernizationRetailer G/S strategy refers to the number and variety of product categories a retailer chooses to offer to its customers and is also known as assortment decision width. This differs from decisions about retail assortment depth, which refers to the number of individual items offered in each category. The G/S decision is an important strategic element of a retail concept and helps position a retail store in the mental space of consumers' retail alternatives. General retailers offer a diverse assortment of different product categories. Their outlets serve as a one-stop shop and provide shoppers with corresponding savings in time and effort. This is especially important for “cart shoppers” who are looking to purchase items across multiple product categories. Gagliano, Hathcote227 assert that these specialty retailers typically offer a uniquely positioned retail brand in a well-defined specific product category "space", supported by curated items, retail service and professional information. They further state that retailers' higher sales margins"are likely to result in providing new and different merchandise and providing a more pleasant shopping environment." These differences between generalists and specialists imply that each retail format is best served by a different set of internal organizational skills and operational know-how. In particular, this study proposes that the two differ in terms of the degree of operational flexibility and diversity, coordination skills, and degree of internal decentralization of decision-making. Because generalists offer several unrelated product categories, they can contract or expand different product lines while continuing to operate their core retail business.concepts. Specialty retailers that rely on specific product lines may put their overall retail concept at risk when their specific product lines cannot survive profitably. This implies that general retailing embodies a lower risk strategy in terms of strategic survival than specialist retailing. Kinsey and Senauer228 highlighted that to maintain the diversity of their product categories, general retailers must seamlessly and efficiently manage and coordinate multiple supply channels, and have strong logistics and marketing capabilities to support this. Smith and Agrawal229 explained that specialists carrying only one or a few product categories need to manage fewer, simpler supply channels and channel flows and do not need as extensive coordination skills . Gates and Egelhoff 230 highlight the fact that organizational research has shown that increasing the complexity of an organization leads to decentralization of decision making within the organization. General retailing, which involves the management of multiple product categories, can be expected to be more complex than specialty retailing of similar size and with similar global distribution. Individual managers in general retail organizations must make decisions about many different product lines and consider their potential interactions. Therefore, they must be autonomous and able to make independent decisions, which requires decentralization of decision-making within the organization. Sully De Luque231 believes that the aforementioned differences in organizational cultures and skills requiring retail generalists versus specialists imply that if national cultural values affect organizational cultures and skills, then different national cultures can also influence the choice of different retail format strategies. Uncertainty avoidance is a major national cultural value. This dimension describes the extent to which ambiguous situations are perceived as threatening for individuals. Societies characterized by strong uncertainty avoidance feel threatened by uncertain, ambiguous and unstructured situations. In the 21st century, many large distributors operate outside of their home countries. The Uppsala School of Progressive Learning suggests that as companies' international experience increases, they gain more information and confidence and their organizational culture and practices can be expected to change. This can influence the effect of the cultural values of a retailer's country of origin on the retail strategy.Findings and suggestionsRecommendationsØ Regular follow-ups of a.