Speaker: Cameron Shepherd, Director of Labor, Analytics and Reporting
What does your business do? Who are your customers?
Cameron Shepherd: We are Party City and we're in the celebration business. Which is really a lot of fun. Because of that, our customers are really diverse and we meet them at different stages of their life and different celebrations. So we're there for the first birthday party, helping parents put together the perfect celebration for their new child. We're there for their 16th birthday party. We are able to help with graduations, whether that's kindergarten, high school, college, postgraduate doctors, lawyers, whomever. It's a very exciting business and our customers join us through different parts of their lives, whether it's something relatively simple as a New Year's, you know, get together a celebration to Halloween or the Fourth of July. That's really our business, we're there to help them celebrate. And it's a pretty interesting diverse customer set because of that.
What challenges did you face before coming to us?
Cameron Shepherd: Organizationally, we have historically had a lot of data, but we haven't really capitalized on it very well and it hasn't been the right kind of data. So as we were exploring our options in terms of how we could bring our entire retail work to the next level of delivering meaningful insights in a way that was able to drive action and results. That's really what led us to ShopperTrak (Analytics). Traffic counting is one of those key data points that provides an insight and a level of analysis that is just not possible from register-based transaction level data where you're only really seeing one half of the coin. And that's something that was very exciting for us as we were contemplating bringing traffic in to really see that other half of a holistic picture.
How has your business been impacted since starting to use our solutions?
Cameron Shepherd: We have seen business impact really from two different sides of the house with traffic information. And the first one is really on the store side. So with traffic as an information point, it really allows our store teams to have a good grasp of controlling what they can control within the four walls of their store. In the absence of traffic information, one of the things that we've kind of historically struggled with a little bit and and have seen a huge amount of opportunity with, traffic information is in a scenario where sales are going up, say sales are up by 5%. In normal course of business. You pat yourself on the back as that store manager and say great job. If traffic is up 10% and sales are only up 5% it starts to raise some questions around is there more that could be done? Are we losing out on potential customers and potential sales opportunity? That's a lens that we haven't had prior to traffic. And it really helps us paint a picture of at a store level using the levers that are at your disposal to make sure to capitalize on all of the opportunity that's available while controlling for external factors or things like that is tremendously valuable and has been extremely useful for us. The other front for us is really more on the store operation side. So particularly on the labor side of store operations, as we look at the shopper to associate ratio or STAR, that's very, very helpful as we're doing labor planning, both on the like by day level, but even to the by hour level to have the information available for us that we can use that to make good efficient forecast and allocate to the stores that need it from a traffic standpoint, not necessarily just a sales or transactions or other labor driver standpoint. Both of those together really paint the whole picture of you know, store benefits as well as operational benefits on the store support center side for us.
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