Speaker: Scott Harvey, VP of Franchise Business Support, Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory
What does your business do? Who are your customers?
Scott Harvey: Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory makes premium chocolates and confections that we sell to our franchise retail locations as well as our co-branded locations with the Coldstone Creamery. Altogether we have 250 Rocky Mountain Chocolate locations across the country. Our customer, given our stores are in tourist towns, outlet malls, shopping districts, our core customer is really families, potentially on the road for family vacations, weekend getaways, fans that just come back and visit their favorite Rocky location. We have a lot of gift buyers, people picking up truffles for a birthday, a thank you, holidays and things of that nature.
What challenges did you face before coming to us?
Scott Harvey: We knew, I guess a guesstimate of how many people were walking through the door each day, but we really didn't track it. We didn't know what our conversion rate was. We didn't know if we were staffed appropriately to meet the needs of the guests coming into the store. And really what ShopperTrak has pointed out to us is not only the foot traffic, but also looking at the transactions, looking at the labor reports, and really combining all that together, it's given us more than a gut feeling. It's giving us qualitative data that we can use for scheduling to make sure that we have the appropriate number of team members during our busy hours, folks to focus on guest service, to focus on conversion. I am really to be able to track that information, which is invaluable. It's just something that that we didn't have insights to before.
How has your business been impacted since starting to use our solutions?
Scott Harvey: How the business has been impacted since we installed ShopperTrak into our Durango flagship and also our Corpus Christi, Texas locations. We installed the camera systems in June in both locations. Both locations were 32 - 34% from a customer conversion rate or a guest conversion rate. Now both locations are up to 39%. So respectfully, one store is up 5%, the other is up 7%. And when we look at the number of opportunities coming into those two stores on a daily basis, Corpus Christi is around 300 per day and Durango is over 400 per day. And to be honest, I didn't believe those counts, so I had the store managers count how many guests walked into the stores, reported back, and ShopperTrak the system was accurate, which was great news. The average ticket per transaction has stayed the same or increased slightly. The units per transaction are up slightly. But really the focus on conversion, this has led us to being able to coach our team members, or as we refer to them, chocolatiers, because we can see who is at work during the highest conversion as well as the highest average per transaction value and also the lowest. So not only has it shown us how to staff our labor better, because we didn't increase labor costs, we just reallocated it, but it's also shown us where we have training opportunities, coaching opportunities with our chocolatiers. To coach them on how to better take care of the guests. So it's been really eye opening. It's been a great system. We are now moving forward, putting it into our other three company locations and also have introduced it and the ROI to our franchise community.
What would you say was the most positive aspect of working with our team?
Scott Harvey: It was really Amanda, Anna, and the entire team with ShopperTrak. They were great to work with. We did two pilots. I will not mention the name of the other pilot, but basically they installed cameras and gave us reporting, and that was it. Amanda and Anna had weekly meetings with our store managers. They really dove into the data. They dove into the conversion, the labor reporting, and really challenged us and the team and the store managers on what we could do to improve, what behaviors, what activities could we change to really drive the performance in the stores using this information. So, they really focused on improvement, but they really focused with our management team, on coaching and training, and really that's why we made the decision to go with them instead of another company. Not only that, they took the time to come to our convention, our franchise convention in Chicago, and supported us with presenting, 3 different times during that convention to our franchise community. So it's been a great relationship.
