Who’d want to work weekends? When there are sales to be made, it’s crucial to ensure there’s enough staff on the shopfloor to handle high-traffic periods – and you might be surprised by how many are willing to grasp the nettle, writes Steve Pickering, the ‘unorthodox’ CEO of fast-growing South East independent bed retail chain Sussex Beds …
We measure ‘reasons for not purchasing’ to gain insight into our consumers’ buying behaviour, even if it’s somewhat assumptive in the recording.
During the final quarter last year, we noticed a reason trending upward, peaking at over 7% in October – ‘Couldn’t get to, busy serving’. This alert prompted further investigation.
The results revealed this increase was driven by four of our higher-foot traffic stores, especially on weekends. We calculated that these lost opportunities were potentially losing us over £500k in revenue annually.
The obvious solution was increasing weekend staffing in these stores to reduce missed opportunities. One suggestion was recruiting part-time team for Saturdays and Sundays. My response – how many people want weekend-only work? We’d only ever hired full-time.
We agreed to test this proposal, first offering shifts internally.
Shock one – a valued full-timer immediately applied, excited to work weekends, which would allow them to attend university during the week.
Then, advertising the remaining openings externally, shock two – we received over 75 applicants, far exceeding our normal full-time openings.
How little I knew! I was wrong. Surprised is an understatement – we hired three great part-timers. After three months, the ‘Couldn’t get to, busy serving’ metric dropped to 4.2%, and conversions rose +14%.
Do you measure why customers don’t buy? How do you use data or KPIs to drive performance?
Discover more of Steve’s thoughts on his blog.
