Many retailers had hoped for a bumper Christmas, but the final figures show a clear split between the big four – Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Marks & Spencer’s – with Sainsbury claiming record day sales and Tesco reporting its strongest growth in UK Christmas sales for three years.
These results conclude a tough year for UK retailers, with a number of big High Street names going into administration, including Peacocks, Game, Aquascutum, Clinton Cards Comet and most recently Jessops. According to the British Retail Consortium (BRC) the retail segment has stagnated since the beginning of 2011, with few signs that the sector will improve in 2013.
So what differentiates Tesco and Sainsbury’s? The latter saw customer transactions exceed 27 million during the seven days prior to Christmas, partly on the back of six new supermarkets and 19 new convenience stores, bring the total to 500 stores across the UK. Tesco also saw its online food sales increase by 18% on the run up to Christmas.
It is a trend the BRC recognises: “For the more established retailers, it seems that much of the growth is now coming from online orders, while shop sales are stagnant at best. Many retailers have invested a lot in making their websites easier to use across devices and also increasing confidence in their online security.”
This seems to be borne out by Morrisons, with like-for-like sales in the six weeks to 30 December being down 2.5% from a year earlier, this is one retailer that as yet has failed to embrace online shopping.
The drive to increase traditional bricks and mortar stores, with the resulting staff increases, and the move towards online shopping means retailers of all sizes have to deal with ever greater amounts of unstructured data. Gaining control of this data and then deriving value from it to improve the customer experience is an area that ReadSoft has particular experience.
Each year Tesco distributes a six-page on-line questionnaire called ‘Viewpoint’ to its UK staff, giving them the opportunity to express their views on almost every aspect of their employment, in part this is what has helped Tesco continue to grow its business. With around 180,000 questionnaires, such surveys though ultimately valuable are time intensive and costly in terms of collecting, processing and analysing the data on the forms.
“We wanted to do more mining of the data to maximise the value of the information, as well as cut down the survey processing time and costs,” says Ros Draper, Viewpoint manager within Tesco’s Group HR Department. Once the questionnaires have been received, batched and scanned, Tesco used ReadSoft’s software to verify the data and pinpoint any errors, scanning around 10,000 questionnaires per day. The information captured by ReadSoft’s software means that the HR team has timely data at its fingertips to analyse staff feedback on a store-by-store basis and provide individual line managers with reports on how their staff are feeling. For the Christmas period this enables the retailer to recognise when workload becomes an issue for staff in stores. For Tesco this led to the introduction of a programme called ‘reducing vacancies’ to solve this issue and which leads to the creation of thousands of additional jobs at Christmas. You can read more about this project here.
This is just one example of how document automation can help retailers manage and derive additional business value from their data, and so drive greater customer engagement and sales in a tough and highly competitive market place.
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