A leading non-profit organization specializing in providing benchmarking services to global companies wanted to deliver more strategic, industry-specific insights for its retail clients, to capture the sector’s distinct nuances and complexities.
Objective
The company wanted to develop a standardized process framework to deliver specific insights into their retail clients’ operations, processes and performance, and provide clients with access benchmarks and metrics, including:
- Meaningful comparisons across processes within their value chain.
- Assessment of performance and identification of areas for improvement
- Drive operational excellence across all customer channels, including brick-and-mortar and online, and functions including marketing, merchandising and supply chain.
Why Phronesis
Over the past 9 years, we have developed a strong and enduring partnership with the company, successfully conducting a range of studies including supply chain, HR, pricing and marketing spend benchmarking.
We specialize in delivering quantitative benchmarking studies using large-scale primary data including business models, financial performance, capital market indicators and perception studies, and core business processes such as compliance, sales, HR, IT, finance, legal and procurement.
Our dedicated benchmarking team is composed of subject matter experts, functional experts and analysts with a deep understanding of industry dynamics, trends and challenges, and focus on industry nuances during the primary data collection phase. Our team works as an extension of our clients’ teams to facilitate data collection and analysis and provide seamless support.
Approach
Using primary research, we systematically collected data-driven intelligence, reviewing questionnaires and creating web scripts. We then conducted interviews with senior decision-makers across retail businesses including durable and non-durable goods, and food retailers, including Marketing Directors, Heads of Customer Experience, Heads of Supply Chain, HR Directors and Heads of Customer Service, gathering comprehensive information on:
- Firmographics: including type of retailer, location and employee size (FTEs or temporary) across various channels and functions.
- Financial insights: including revenue, cost of goods sold (COGS), sales, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses, and cost of continuing operations (CCO).
- Business performance insights: including total sales, sales growth, sales per square foot, sales via e-commerce, average transaction value and sales conversion rates.
- Customer service insights: including customer satisfaction scores, Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer feedback and complaints.
- Online performance insights: including website visits, average time spent on the website and cost per click (CPC).
- Offline performance insights: including real estate expenses, availability of retail space new stores in operation and disposal of existing stores.
- Marketing insights: including total marketing spend, marketing return on investment (ROI), like-for-like (LFL) sales growth, spend on sales promotions (discounts, events, etc.) and customer lifetime value (CLV).
- Operational insights: including employee engagement, attrition and the cost of employees by function.
Outcome
The survey results obtained through our research provided a wealth of granular insights into processes, functions and customer channels within the retail sector.
These insights have helped the company develop a tailored process framework that serves as a baseline for performance comparison, providing a deeper understanding of the competitive landscape. This also empowers the company’s retail customers to identify optimization opportunities, streamline processes and implement targeted improvements, thereby driving significant enhancements to their overall performance.
