Case Studies

Nisbets Returns Management

About the Client

Nisbets are the leading supplier of catering equipment in the UK, supplying restaurants, hotels and bars with professional kitchen equipment and catering supplies. Their website contains in excess of 25,000 varying catering products and they have gained a reputation within the industry for service, competitive pricing and their vast range of equipment that is available at any time for next day delivery. Nisbets have 32 stores Nationwide; with each store housing a range of over 3000 products. Nisbets head office is in Bristol however they also have offices in Ireland, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain and Australia, with the export division shipping products to over 100 countries world-wide.

Details of the Work

The client regularly carries out a wide range of postal catalogue mailings alongside smaller, targeted mail outs detailing up to date offers and promotions. Each monthly catalogue generates a significant number of returned items of mail which is due to the everchanging catering marketplace and its establishments continually changing names, closing or re-opening under new ownership.

The client had previously been using their own warehouse staff to sort, collate and record the returned items, however this arrangement for the client was unsatisfactory. In busy periods, the time for collating and recording the returned mail was limited, resulting in severe backlogs and extortionate labour costs due to the returns being manually entered by members of staff.  As a result, the client needed a far more cost-effective solution that could provide them with data very quickly whilst also reducing cost.

The Solution from CMS

Returns management has been a long-standing service for Central Mailing Services, as it provides a number of key benefits for clients. It reduces the cost of subsequent mailing campaigns as you can take out records that have not yet been picked up by the various files that are run when data cleansing. By creating our own data matrix code system, we can scan returns at high speed whilst also recording the reason for the return, if given, and can also use multiple code locations at times to avoid issues with Royal Mail over-labelling. Thorough returns management can also have a significant green impact, as with high frequency campaigns it reduces both waste and the environmental impact of transporting items that are not going to land on doorsteps.

We extract the data from the scans and construct detailed mailing reports for the client meaning this data can then be used to supress those records from further campaigns, whilst also acting as a quality check to the standard of the data supplied. A number of companies find this extremely useful to check the age and quality of the data supplied to them. Nisbets have the data supplied back to them in a certain way, each week, to assist them in tracking the results from the multiple ongoing campaigns.

All personalised physical waste is securely and responsibly destroyed with certification of destruction provided each time. The generic waste is collated and bailed responsibly and is then sent to recycling agents for reprocessing. Nothing is sent to landfill or general waste.

The Result

Nisbets were delighted that they handed over the returns management to Central Mailing Services, they were able to significantly reduce their costs on labour, and get much faster and more detailed reporting information back.