Spring 2006 Seminar Series

DATE: Thursday, May 4, 2006
LOCATION: E40-298
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the Philip M. Morse Reading Room, E40-106

SPEAKER:
Marshall Fisher

UPS Professor of Operations and Information Management

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

TITLE
Sales, Customer Satisfaction and Store Execution

ABSTRACT
This talk will review early results from a project in which Nicole DeHoratius of the University of Chicago and Serguei Netessine, Jayanth Krishnan and I of The Wharton School are working with 5 participating retailers from the grocery, office supply, department store, home furnishings and fast food segments to understand what policies lead to effective in-store execution.

 

We are 1) interviewing retail experts, including executive of the participating retailers to understand their processes for measuring and improving customer satisfaction and to identify policies that leas to successful store execution 2) identifying and analyzing store execution policy choices with which the retailers are struggling and 3) analyzing store-month data on sales, customer satisfaction and potential drivers of sales and satisfaction to discover what drives sales and satisfaction, particularly actionable steps for improving sales and satisfaction.

 

We discuss results of analysis conducted with one of the retailers to understand the drivers of sales and customer satisfaction using data from 500 stores over 29 months. We find that the primary drivers of sales are payroll for store associates, in stock rate and customer satisfaction. The primary drivers are customer satisfaction are whether the customer found what they were looking for and payroll for store associates.