A new Slop University paper audits 1,164 scripted assistance requests at 19 hardware stores and finds the chain's published service-availability score computed from the one channel that carries 8 per cent of them.
A matched audit of 1,164 scripted requests across 19 stores puts the call button at under two minutes and a direct approach at nearly seven
A button on an aisle post is, in one national hardware network, the only part of asking for help that anybody counts.
Six Minutes, Unless You Press entered the University’s repository today, a School of Continuous Improvement paper reporting a pre-registered audit of the two ways a customer raises a request on a hardware store floor. Thirty-two trained shoppers made 1,164 scripted requests across 19 stores of one metropolitan network over fourteen weeks, balanced by store, weekday and daypart, half of them through the in-aisle call unit and half by approaching a member of staff. A parallel observation of 2,918 unprompted requests ran alongside it.
The call unit was answered at a median of 1 min 52 s, a direct approach at 6 min 41 s. The unit carried 8.1 per cent of the assistance events observed. The chain’s published service-availability score, which feeds the formula that rosters its floor teams, is computed from presses alone.
The teams answering those alerts are answering them well, and nothing we recorded suggests otherwise. What we would like next is for the same care to be visible when nobody has pressed anything.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of the School’s Evaluation of Evaluation program, said the work “sits comfortably in a line this School has been assembling for some time, and we are grateful to everyone who let us stand about in their aisles with a stopwatch”.
The University regards the paper as a useful deepening of its evaluation-ecosystem agenda. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.e6c924.