Reference no: EM133174504

Hamleys is one of the oldest multinational toy retailers in the world. The firm works on a very large scale worldwide and has multiple outlets across the globe. 90% of the company's sales are generated from retail stores. This is due to the value proposition of the brand that it has been offering its customers all these years. 

Customer Experience at a Hamleys Store

Hamleys believes in creating an experience for store buyers. The retail shops' size at Hamleys is three times the size of other retail stores. The store space is utilized not only for attractive visual merchandising (VM) but also for having different toy demonstrations. 

Toy demonstrations of the stores start right from the entrance, one sees Hamleys employees playing with toys like bubble guns, frisbees, etc. 

On entering the store, there are a set of toys kept open for display. For eg: electronic water resistance frogs jumping in a water bowl. These toys are used as props to attract the customers

If you further enter the store you will find toys kept open for children to play. In fact, Hamleys also have a small sitting area where family members can enter the store and play different games. One of the best examples include a 100m robotic cars racing area, 

Store employees also have fun and join the family members and children to play. This keeps the customers engaged and also allows one to check the condition of the toys. If a toy is not in a working condition, it is removed and immediately a new toy is kept at the space place to keep the experience intact. 

Within 10-15 seconds of a customer entering you always have an executive who guides them in the store and encourages them to check different alternatives and at times try them too.

Since Hamleys has been offering this experience to its customers, it has also generated a trust level in them and at times parents leave their children in the stores to play with executives and also celebrate their birthdays.

Situation due to Covid 19

The pandemic has hit and affected various industries, the retail industry being one of the most affected. People are afraid of going out to the stores to get basic amenities for their day to day living. In such a case customers have been avoiding entering the Hamleys stores too in fear of them or their children catching the virus.

They believe numerous people would have entered the store and touched the toys and maintaining sanitation in such large stores on a regular interval is a difficult task. At the same time, the customer experience of the brand is completely focused on providing an experience in the stores and not any other medium

Due to this scenario, the sales of Hamleys has dropped significantly. Additionally, the organisation has a huge fixed cost in terms of the rent of the stores and employee salaries. This has led to huge losses to the firm.

Question 3

Four months after an overhaul of the digital platform and the CRM processes (implemented towards the end of January) at Hamleys, you are looking at evaluating the success of the initiative. To that end, you have pulled the following data from the platform.

	January	February	March	April	May
Number of positive feedback received	13,908	17,323	20,520	27,195	26,800
Total number of feedback received	25,288	29,868	34,200	45,325	43,225
Bounce rate (%)	55%	51%	47%	45%	42%
Sales (INR per month)	25,00,000	40,00,000	35,00,000	45,00,000	40,00,000
Number of transactions	72,250	74,670	90,000	1,22,500	1,13,750
Number of repeated transactions	21,675	23,894	27,900	37,975	34,125
Total unique visitors	28,90,000	28,50,000	30,00,000	35,00,000	32,50,000
Average number of pages visited	3	3.5	3.5	4	4.4
Average time spent on the site (in minutes)	3	3.5	5	7	8

* Bounce Rate = % of visitors who left the webpage without taking an action

3.1. As the starting point, you want to evaluate whether the initiatives have contributed to an increased engagement and conversion for the digital platform. Keeping this in mind along with the data given, list down three metrics that you are going to look at - along with appropriate justification - in this case. 

3.2. In order to evaluate the success of the initiative, you decide to track the following three metrics:

Conversion rates

Average revenue per transaction

% of repeated transactions

Based on the data at hand, you are required to: 

Calculate the above-mentioned metrics for each of the four months

Draw inferences from the trends observed for each of the three metrics

Summarise the performance of the platform business over these five months; for this part of the question, you can include all the relevant data points