Project Description
Case Study
Bata South Asia
from phygital to retail performance
Gamification as a critical success factor for linking employee productivity to corporate performance indicators
DATA AND OBJECTIVES
DATA AND OBJECTIVES
Company Name : Bata Malaysia
Industry: Retail
Employees involved: 1,400
Stores involved: 250
Areas of intervention: Staff training, management by objectives, increased productivity, rewarding and incentives for staff, business process work flow automation, employee journey social advocacy.
Application management levels: temporary seller, employee seller, store manager, district manager.
Dashboard admin: back office, operation manager, Marketing manager, sale manager, kpi manager, visual merchandising manager.
No. of supported processes: 25
Year: 2016/2017/2018/2019
Extensions of the project: Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam
Increase in turnover
Increase in margins
Look at insights and KPIs in detail
Look at insights and KPIs in detail
Bata Malaysia sensed that the business results were more attributable to bottom-up logic, therefore to a greater involvement of employees linked to processes and working methods rather than top-down, therefore due to strategic choices by the company management.
For this reason, the gamification project had the objective, through a careful study of the simple journey , to encourage and stimulate correct behavior on the part of the staff in the Bata stores.
The changes have led to a significant increase in productivity which has been possible through a careful application architecture to track through new sales KPIs and promotions managed and controlled by the Whappy solution.
1 – The context, the challenges and objectives of Bata Malaysia
The complexity and speed of action imposed by the retail industry in recent years has created an acceleration beyond the norm.
The traditional processes of management of the workforce by management have undergone a phase of due crisis the increase in the complexity of the processes and their interactions between the different roles in conjunction with the increase in activities for each season. This has therefore created strong inefficiencies and lost productivity, two elements that on retail structures with large populations can become a real problem.
Like all the more structured retail companies, Bata Malaysia also perceived a strong area of improvement to the advantage of controlling the behavior and actions of the sales staff in the Bata stores.
The relevance of the problem, therefore, in addition to being in giving the network the new canvases and new processes in a more timely and precise manner, was also due to the fact that the result of the actions and behaviors could only be traced after the result , ie over the weekend with control over sales volumes.
Gamification can be used to:
Therefore , only quantitative data such as turnover and the type of products sold were considered. Definitely useful data but which are not able to explain directly why certain actions and projects aimed at increasing employee productivity objectively lead to higher turnover and more sales.
The relevance of the problem for Bata was even more impactful if we consider the fact that:
Training projects were implemented in the stores with a considerable expenditure of financial resources.
Strict store control activities were carried out, intended as the structure, maintenance , cleanliness and correctness of the processes implemented with a non-scalable effort
The timing of implementation of activities, training and controls was very recursive taking a long time to complete completion at the company level.
The control passages and the quantity of shops assigned to each district manager were over 20 each, not making the garrison really productive, which in most cases involved a relational visit once a month.
Bata Malaysia therefore had to face inefficiency and increasing costs to carry out actions to control and stimulate employee productivity without being able to track the actual ROI at the company level.
For this reason it was deemed necessary to change the type of data on which to base analysis and collection methods , not only turnover and sales but also through new KPIs linked to the intermediate phase of the funnel. In other words, KPIs directly linked to Bata’s initiatives to increase productivity, control and correct implementation of processes and working methods within over 250 Bata stores.
“… the results were extraordinary for the immediate adoption rate by the employees and for the commercial results”
“We now managed our sales force incentive program reward in real time through gamification methodology. We use whappy apps every day to engage with our in-store sales personal, it is definitely a good solution”
“Communication and speed in transmitting information to our employees are essential to drive digital change, this is how we have achieved double-digit growth”
“We implemented whappy for our sales force productivity over 2 years ago. It boost effectiveness in communications, e-learnings, display planogram product set-up, promotion campaigns, KPI and sales performance ”
2 – Working method and implemented solutions
The starting point was understand how to generate data and information that would have allowed Bata Malaysia to reduce the operational and strategic effort on the part of management to increase average productivity in the stores, estimate the ROI of training and incentive initiatives for its employees and then define a dashboard of KPIs to link productivity directly to sales and turnover of the individual Bata stores.
It was immediately understood that the starting point had to be the people , or rather the employees of Bata in the individual stores. Here resided a strong area for improvement and considering that the cost of personnel constituted over 70% of the fixed cost of the structure , therefore it was certainly a priority cost center that if one had been able to impact it would have drawn a strong immediate benefit in terms of savings even before the advantages resulting from the new processes implemented.
With the strategic support of Whappy and implementing an innovative corporate process reorganization process based on human emotional design , it was possible to define new KPIs related to the daily work of Bata employees.
We have moved on to a new type of data which, unlike sales and turnover, are “contextual” or speaking. That is, able to automatically populate business control dashboards and explicitly explain how and why a certain sales goal has been achieved .
The next step of the problem was to understand how to activate a continuous generation of these types of data and make them available to Bata top management in a recursive mode of cause and effect, that is a practical way to attribute a change of result to a specific change of process / behavior.
Here enterprise gamification came into play because it was not enough to define a new employee journey from above but the priority objective was to make it live spontaneously, that is, that it was totally shared and considered useful for their work by the employees in the Bata stores.
They were therefore studied and agreed together with top management and district managers Bata a set of incentives not only economic but also of strong intrinsic value (not only monetary but also of merit and belonging through medals and leadboards) to increase the involvement and participation rate of employees initiatives related to training, team building, the fulfillment of specific tasks, the distribution of in-store promotions and the control of work processes.
The final result was therefore the construction of a completely new employee journey within the Whappy application following the behavioral logic of the staff and guaranteeing Bata the ability to manage everything in a single solution.
Functionality for the store
- Onboarding for the training and introduction of each new employee
- The management of pre-season canvases / campaigns
- Training, with video and virtual coaching
- Modeling of specific KPIs to be achieved for each campaign and period
- Dynamic role play processes for the continuous qualification of personnel
- Integration of pre-existing workflows to make functional employee tasks more efficient to connect the KPIs
- The management of the planogram for each specific campaign / canvas for product display in the POS
Management of social employee advocacy, lead generation and couponing
- Loyalty management and attribution to the individual seller
- Control and monitoring of the performance of each single store, group results and of each individual employee
Functionality for district managers
- Real-time management of your own group of stores to manage
- Control and approval of the planogram
- Management and control of sales KPIs by store or by single individual
- Management of physical Check in directly in the store and archiving
- ISSUE management of specific problems for each store with the head quarter
- Management of rewards towards store managers based on the results obtained
Head quarter functionality
- Management and control of onboarding for new employees
- Administrative dashboard with BI part and APP process
- Real-time creation and management of remote processes
- Correlation of activities and processes with sales
- Correlation between population behavior and sales
- Real time management of any ISSUE
- Creation and management of individual KPIs by store, by group area
- Creation and management and control of MBO plans for the population divided into District managers, Store managers, sellers and temporary sellers
- Productivity management and control of the entire supply chain in each stage
The implemented system has consequently made it possible to manage more efficiently activities such as the setting up of the store in the windows and in the order of priority of the display of the goods according to centrally decided formats, the control of KPIs and the definition of expectations (estimates) sales in stores.
But also the employees finally had the possibility of being able to verify, control and feel fulfilled by being able to check in real time their progress and achievement of their objectives, without dispersion of information but only with sequential tasks to be performed.
Bata was therefore able to change for the first time the management process that was found to be substantially dispersive if not blind and unable to quantify the ROI of corporate initiatives , passing from a top down control to the proactive activation of the staff, with a bottom up logic, able to activate and make available new and more relevant sales KPIs.
Application structure
The application consists of 4 levels:
Application structure
The application consists of 4 levels:
3 – Results obtained
The modern success of enterprise gamification is due to the fact that it makes the ROI and impact of business initiatives aimed at increasing productivity and efficiency measurable.
Therefore, even in the case of Bata, it is possible to report the objective effectiveness of the gamification project which, thanks to a precise comparison of productivity by store, team and single individual, allows to continuously track the performance drives in a continuous process of improvement. .
We limit ourselves to making transparent performance data and results that Bata has kindly allowed us to show publicly.
- 96% of employees in over 250 stores were spontaneously involved in the project and used the application provided by Bata without resorting to corporate incentives.
- 63% of employees spontaneously used social advocacy functions present in the application with a conversion rate on the final customer of 12.4% for the delivery of in-store promotions. (The conversion rate on Social through paid ads was barely reaching 2%).
Revenue increased with indexed previous year comparison (TALY Tournover Against Last Year).
- In the training field , a 93% successful completion rate of programs was recorded thanks to elements of gamification and evolved role play dynamics.
- Increased customer loyalty. 43% of the customers generated by the social advocacy activities carried out by employees returned to the Bata stores several times .
- Average reduction of 28% on the internal cost of managing processes . The processes managed and monitored continuously were 25 (and repeated almost constantly in the following 4 years).
Bata’s margins increased by approximately 113% thanks to the management of the canvases in the stores.
Look at insights and KPIs in detail
Look at insights and KPIs in detail
- 96% of employees in over 250 stores were spontaneously involved in the project and used the application provided by Bata without resorting to corporate incentives.
- In the training field , a 93% successful completion rate of programs was recorded thanks to elements of gamification and evolved role play dynamics.
- 63% of employees spontaneously used social advocacy functions present in the application with a conversion rate on the final customer of 12.4% for the delivery of in-store promotions. (The conversion rate on Social through paid ads was barely reaching 2%).
- Increased customer loyalty. 43% of the customers generated by the social advocacy activities carried out by employees returned to the Bata stores several times .
- Average reduction of 28% on the internal cost of managing processes . The processes managed and monitored continuously were 25 (and repeated almost constantly in the following 4 years).
Revenue increased with indexed previous year comparison (TALY Tournover Against Last Year).
- Bata’s margins increased by about 215% thanks to the management of the canvases in the stores.
Look at insights and KPIs in detail
4 – The next steps of Bata Malaysia
After the success of the Asian launch implemented in Malaysia (which had already had its Beta launch in Italy in 2012) , Bata decided to open the Whappy project to other countries besides Malaysia, such as Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam in the following years.
But that is not all. In fact, for 2020 the integration with a project called HappyFIT is already being defined.
HappyFit is Bata’s world wide project for the globalized management of training marketing, KPIs and MBO management of the entire Bata population which today has more than 30,000 employees in more than 70 countries around the world with a number of over 5,000 points of sale.
This project shows quite clearly the difference between what is now called by the common dedicated gamification platforms and what is instead the true applied methodology of gamification.
In fact, gamification in a generic sense often means something with points, medals and prizes, it is obvious that this solution hrepresented quite another job in terms of reconstruction of processes capable of truly involving the population of employees in an interconnected and recursive way, taking up concepts of relationship, support, employee journey and gratification linked to MBO projects.
A type of solution that has all the effective touchpoints of gamification, human emotional design and that can hardly be obtained with standard tools, with customization limits and simply connected to your CRM.
We help organizations to identify what really works by acting on their culture and on their people to make it scalable and replicable in any context, regardless of the technologies used.
