Specsavers Improves the Optical Retail Customer Journey
Specsavers, the British multinational optical retail chain, is driving sales and engaging new customers with Verint Queue Management and Appointment Booking.
The results
Increased Sales
Improved productivity
Increased word of mouth and loyalty
About Specsavers
Specsavers Optical Group is a British multinational optical retail chain, which operates more than 700 stores through a network of franchisee partners. They have deployed Verint Retail Choreography solutions across their entire UK estate, including Verint Appointment Booking and Verint Queue Management. The Specsavers Plymouth store (the subject of our case study video) is one of the business’ top performing stores.
Specsavers stores offer a wide range of services, including optometrist services, eyewear retail, and audiology. Specsavers’ high-street stores are also increasingly working in conjunction with local NHS departments, acting as the first port of call for patients with eye care needs. As a result, customer journeys within Specsavers’ stores can be complex, with customers needing to transition across different advisors for their pre-tests, eye tests, dispensing needs, and more. To support such complex journeys, seamless and transparent staff processes are required.
Meet the required levels of visibility and communication
Previously, the Specsavers stores used manual clipboards and pens to build a waitlist of customers waiting for their different services. However, this method proved chaotic as it did not enable cross-department transitioning of customers and failed to meet the required levels of visibility and communication. Staff members lost time and customers were stranded at different stages of the optical retail customer journey.
Within the Specsavers Plymouth store, where hundreds of customers are seen each day across two floors for different retail and clinical services, the problem was particularly impacting, leading to lost sales and suboptimal staff retention due to the increased stress of managing customers.
Improve customer loyalty and support with Verint Appointment Booking
Specsavers decided to deploy Verint’s Appointment Booking* and Queue Management* solutions across its stores within the UK and Australia. They chose Verint as a flexible and service-oriented software provider with a highly scalable and flexible tool that could support their international store needs.
Verint enables Specsavers store teams to seamlessly identify why customers are entering their store, ensuring they have the right journey and speak to the best advisors for their needs. This enables stores like Specsavers Plymouth to drive conversion, improve loyalty and better support their customers.
With Verint, store managers can better manage customers, colleagues, and shop floor activities on tablet and desktop. Verint’s system gives them greater visibility on team activities, helping to keep their store teams organized and efficient at all times.
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"[Verint Retail Choreography] has enabled us to have a much more pleasant customer experience in the store and we can definitely see that we’ve had a percentage growth in terms of revenue. People are able to come in and complete their sight-tests a bit quicker, which means that they are more likely to stay with us and buy glasses."
"If [Verint Retail Choreography] was taken away from the store, I am not entirely sure how we would cope. I wouldn’t even want to imagine life without [Verint]."
"I am certain that [Verint Queue Management] helps improve customer loyalty. It helps us to identify why someone has come into our practice and allows us to offer them the best possible journey at the right place at the right time."
"We’ve definitely seen an increase in customers purchasing products. Because the level of customer service is much improved, we are able to serve those patients in a better timescale, which makes not only the patients come back to us, but recommend us to friends and family."
"[Verint Queue Management] helps me in knowing with confidence where my patients are and that leaves me having less stress within my working day and that has made me perform better."
"As a management team it’s a fantastic tool and we’re now able to see how long certain processes take within the store. That’s allowed us to coordinate how many members of the team we have for various different parts of the journey. That, in turn, has improved their customer service levels, reduced waiting times and added to the general ambience of being organized."
Verint Queue Management enhances the customer walk-in experience
With the Specsavers eyesight test walk-in customer journey, a store host stands at the front of the store. They greet every customer entering the store, find out their needs, and add them to the virtual queue. Once added to Verint Queue Management, the host tells the customer which part of the store to go to and shares an accurate wait time estimate. While they wait, customers are free to relax in the waiting area or browse Specsavers’ eyewear displays.
Using their desktop and tablet devices, colleagues across each department track waitlist customers and can easily call their next customer. Once they complete their service, the store team can transfer the customer to the next queue for the following part of their journey. For example, an eye test customer would be added from the pre-test queue to the eye test queue and thereafter to the eyewear dispense queue. A colleague in the next department sees the customer on the waitlist and begins to serve them when their turn arises.
If a customer needs urgent eye care, the host increases their queuing priority. An optometrist then uses the Queue Management desktop interface to call forward the customer, speeding up service. When a customer visits the store to collect their glasses, the host can add them into a collections queue. A staff member then prepares the customer’s glasses and calls them forward for collection when ready.
Benefits
Verint Appointment Booking and Verint Queue Management enabled Specsavers to decrease walkout rates while increasing the average transaction value. The enhanced customer experience ensured that customers stay for services, have more positive colleague interactions, and have more time to choose eyewear, thus driving a greater number of customers to purchase eyewear at the end of their journey.
The improved customer experience created stronger relationships with the store team, which made customers more likely to return to Specsavers stores and provide positive feedback to friends and family, increasing word of mouth for the brand. Specsavers have also seen a dramatic increase in referrals.
With Verint Appointment Booking and Queue Management, Specsavers’ staff efficiency has improved as well. Some stores now have additional hours per week to put to better use. Thanks to better visibility of store activities, improved communications across departments, and less on-the-job stress, store teams have become far more productive. It also improved the morale of Specsavers’ store teams, encouraging them to stay within the Specsavers’ family and perform at their best, increasing employee retention.
Verint enables Specsavers’ store management teams to access data that allows them to better forecast their staff activities, while also providing a tool to better manage their staff and shop floor activities on the fly. In addition, Verint provides Specsavers’ head office with game-changing insights that help them make smarter decisions on stocking, marketing and resource planning.
*The solutions referred to as Verint Appointment Booking and Verint Queue Management were called Qudini Appointment Booking and Qudini Walk-in Virtual Queuing when originally purchased, prior to acquisition by Verint.
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