The Warehouse improves in-store communications with Episys

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: The Warehouse improves in-store communications with Episys.

The Warehouse, one of New Zealand's largest non-food retailers, has selected the Retail Enterprise Suite, a signage solution from global information technology solutions and services company, Episys, to help improve its communications in store.  

The solution is being implemented in partnership with Propel Interactive, an Episys partner.  It will enable The Warehouse to produce clearer signage to increase customer conversion to sales and help its customers better understand sales and promotional messages in-store.

Ian Morrice, CEO at The Warehouse, said, "A big challenge we face is that we have a wide range of products (around 75,000), and in a given week we will have up to 2,500 different weekly specials running throughout the business.  We feature all our products and our prices online and on fliers, therefore when a customer comes into one of our stores it's really important that the integrity of the pricing is there and it's 100% consistent.  Every Wednesday a new mailer drops into letterboxes, and a whole new promotional cycle kicks off, so our store teams need to be geared up to planning and executing this."

Morrice added, "Episys will make the execution of our signage easier, and improve the whole productivity of our team.  Less time will be spent putting up tickets because with Episys, we'll be able to produce only the tickets that are needed.  A big benefit for us is the elimination of waste.  Now there will be less tickets printed, as we only print the tickets we need, as opposed to printing extra pages which the stores then need to throw away."

Owen McCall, CIO at The Warehouse, said, "One of the major reasons leading to implementing this solution in our stores is that our customers didn't always understand the prices that we displayed.  By implementing Retail Enterprise Suite, we can communicate much better to our customers so they understand our prices, and, in turn, increase sales.  Even with a 1% increase in conversion we could increase sales by millions of New Zealand dollars per year."

McCall continued, "The main attractions of working with Episys are firstly, the clear partnering approach that Episys has taken to work with us, and secondly working together as a team to make this happen.  We want our customers to be able to believe that when they see the price on the product or on a ticket that it's the right price, and it's the very best deal that they can get within the marketplace."
 
Peter Lewis, Marketing Director at Episys, said, "The Warehouse is one of New Zealand's largest and best known retailers; it is estimated that 60% of the population shop at The Warehouse over any given six-month period, so it is vital that all signage is correct to encourage customers to keep on coming back."