Case Study: Retailer Changing Its Customer Experience

Opportunity  |  With the creation of new sales associate roles and different expectations on how to serve its customers, a leading luxury department store looked to redesign the incentive compensation plans for its large store employee population. Facing financial and competitive pressures, the plan needed to provide flexibility for design changes, financially prudent outcomes, and remain motivating for the highest performing associates. Further, the retailer was struggling to attract associates with an established book-of-business and develop its internal talent to be $1M sellers.

Approach   

• Develop the compensation philosophy, model and incentive plan to align with the company’s strategy, customer experience, and store management teams
• Understand the current and desired customer experience
• Create incentive plan designs for three different sales roles across two payment structures
• Model outcomes for dynamic plan designs
• Visualize impacts on employee groups, departments, and individuals
• Outline an implementation roadmap for pilot stores and beyond

Results  |  The analysis provided potential annual savings of $12.2m and optionality to customize plan design by role before testing through pilots. We built a dynamic cost model for the exploration of future design changes through visualization and scenario modeling.