Don't Sweat It: Quick Product Retrieval
The Challenge: A leading cosmetic and fragrance company, discovered a significant defect in one of their antipersirant products. Even worse, over 15,000 defective units had already been shipped -- to one of the largest retailers in the world.
To keep consumers out of harm's way, and to maintain a postive relationship with the retailer, Wal-Mart Stores, our client had to remove a lot of product from store shelves all over America -- in less than two weeks time!
As if things weren't bad enough, the crisis was compounded when our client faced resistance from Wal-Mart itself. Because Wal-Mart expected to receive full retail price for the product through customer purchases, their stores were reluctant to take the monetary loss that would result from returning product directly to our client. Without enough field staff to reach every Wal-Mart store within the required two-week recall time frame, our client was confronting a major crisis that seemed to get worse with each passing minute.
Our Solution: ICC/Decision Services implemented a crisis action plan immediately. We initiated a complete removal of all defective units from Wal-Mart stores faster and more efficiently than our client could have dreamed. In fact, we completed the product removal so quickly that we finished it on the same day a competing vendor had proposed to start. In all, we collected 15,468 defective units (worth a total of $47,000) from Wal-Mart's shelves. Our quick action secured Wal-Mart's profits, and it helped to maintain our client's strong relationship with this major retailer.
How We Did It: With our nationwide field force, the ICC/Decision Services team is prepared for almost any eventuality that can occur in the fast-moving world of retail industry. Thanks to a broad-reaching network of at-the-ready staff, all we needed was a three-day notification period in order to launch, execute, and successfully complete this critical program. And throughout it all, our online, real-time data reporting system let our client breathe easier -- because they knew exactly what was happening, every step of the way.
