By
Gary Bockhold, President, Waterview Corporation
Does
this sound familiar? Your customers walk into your national retail chain
stores to make a “need-it now” purchase and as they walk the
aisles to the desired department they pick a couple of impulse items
that are merchandised on your store’s end caps, power wings or floor displays.
But, when your customers arrive at the location of their “need-it-now” product(s)
they discover it’s OUT OF STOCK!
Disappointment
and frustration kicks-in. The customer drops the impulse items and walk out of
the store empty-handed and race to your retail competitor’s location. There
they find their “need-it-now”
product and likely additional impulse purchases. Is there anything worse than losing the revenue from your frustrated customers?
You bet there is. You also lose the customer loyalty to your store brand
to your competitor.
Unfortunately this ‘out-of-stock” (OOS) scenario remains an
all-too-common costly occurrence for the retail industry. The national average
OOS at retail chain stores is estimated at 7% which results in lost sales and
more importantly dissatisfied customers.
The Top Ten National Retail Chains
have annual sales in excess of $1 Trillion which translates to $70 Billion in
lost sales due to out of stocks. The overhead and time consuming burden on
in-store personnel to quickly, frequently and accurately perform inventory and
cycle counts has yet to reduce OOS outages. At the store level retailers run a complete inventory about twice a year, just prior to peak season, and prior to the spring season. Otherwise interim weekly inventories counts seldom account for all SKUs, resulting a year round accuracy rate of 70% or less, with accuracy degrading by 2% to 3% each month. What a task... hundreds of thousands of SKUs, across hundreds of store locations.
How
can retailers curtail these ongoing and excessive OOS losses? Mobile
innovation has delivered a new-to-retail and cost efficient solution to speed the
execution of more periodic and more accurate inventory counts,
while avoiding increases in new personnel and related overhead costs.
One such
innovation is the AccuSpeech Mobile Voice Solution for Existing In-Store MobileApplications, when installed on your existing mobile in-store devices can
reduce OOS outages and related losses by allowing your personnel to run
inventory counts with faster and more accurate voice commands and confirmations.
By leveraging voice technology OOS outages can be reduced by at least 20% or
more. What does 20% translate in savings for your retail operation? For
an industry still reeling from a 7% OOS, improving retail stores OOSs by
as much as 1% can result in annual incremental sales of $10 Billion based on
the above scenario…simply by ensuring more stock availability.
For more information, call AccuSpeechMobile at 949-435-1001 Ext. 222, Waterview Corporation at 912-236-3295 or click here to join me and AccuSpeechMobile staff in a personal Web Briefing at your convenience. I would be glad to discuss and examine with you practical solutions for improving in-stock positions and most importantly approaches to keeping your customers coming back.
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| R.G. Bockhold Waterview Corporation |
About
Waterview Corporation
Mr.
Gary Bockhold is a seasoned professional with over 40 years of distinguished
leadership in Sales, Marketing, Management and Executive Experience in the
Consumer Packaged Goods Industry with both National and Store Brands. As
president and CEO of Waterview Corporation he has developed over $200 Million
in new business at manufacturing selling prices since 1996 while working with
and supplying products to every national and regional retail chain.
The post is quite informative. Thanks.
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