PC World

Knowing the company
PC World is the UK's largest PC retailer with some 160 outlets and 6,000 employees selling thousands of product lines.

Key to its success is its provision of expert advice to both home and business customers. It has specialist sections within each store hosted by knowledgeable and experienced staff, all geared towards engaging customers and helping them to make informed decisions.

As market competition intensifies, PC World is also pursuing a strategy of compelling promotions to continuously excite customers and increase visitation.

All this demands the ability to place appropriate staff wherever customers are browsing, to engage with them, convert them into purchasers and optimise cross-sell opportunities.

Defining the strategy
This service-intensive strategy carries a higher cost-of-sale. As computing has evolved, customers have become more tech-savvy, demanding more in-depth conversations with experienced, therefore more costly, staff; lower hardware prices make it imperative that staff take time to cross-sell products with software and services; and increased demand for service-based products such as broadband connections involves longer sales processes.

PC World's sales strategies are only successful if it can effectively balance payroll and service commitments. This task is complicated by the fact that each store and each department have different sales patterns, and by the exceptional spikes created at short notice by promotions and other activity. Spreadsheet-based plans were no longer viable.

Choosing the solution
Crucially, the company needs the ability to efficiently map workload to sales opportunities, and to identify service issues before they occur.

It also requires a platform that enables the finance team, which is responsible for containing payroll budgets, to work closely with the operations team, which is focused on optimising sales and service.

To achieve these goals, PC World turned to Torex Productivity Management, the complete performance and Productivity Management (PM) solution from Torex.

Torex Productivity Management has helped PC World to accurately profile the staffing requirements based upon the store labour standards, historic sales, customer traffic and sales conversion rates of each store area. The powerful forecasting engine then creates a fully optimised staff schedule, automatically taking into account employee ability, contract requirements and preferences, as well as promotional and seasonal spikes and other business initiatives.

With easy access to this resource demand requirement data, managers can create and manage more complex, yet more customer-friendly and profitable, schedules which actively underpin customer engagement. Real-time reports highlight how well the stores are covering their workload at any time, enabling managers to react swiftly with schedule changes as necessary.

This has helped the company to minimise times of low productivity while scheduling staff appropriately to support excellent customer service.

The sophisticated Torex Time and Attendance Management module automatically tracks employee activity, making even complex and varying schedules easier to manage.

By providing a common language between finance and sales, Torex Productivity Management has helped PC World improve planning processes, which in turn, helps lower costs.

"Torex has helped us reduce the mismatch of resources and customer flow that was costing us money and could have undermined our service standards," said Paul Shortland, Head of Workload and Reporting, DSGi. "We are doing this far more efficiently, which has removed an enormous administrative burden."

Achieving return on investment
Directly as a consequence, PC World has tracked an improved conversion rate. With customer satisfaction measures rising, it has also significantly increased its average transaction values, representing a correspondingly reduced cost-of-sale.

Mr. Shortland said, "Torex has delivered the expected improvements in resource planning, productivity and sales conversions. The solution has justified itself very quickly.

Since the introduction of the new system we've had some great feedback from our colleagues who appreciate our efforts to accommodate a more flexible attitude to their working patterns and training programmes."