Increasing Sales and Satisfaction at the Bookstore

Cuyahoga Community College Store Undergoes Top to Bottom Makeover to Better Support Campus Community

Challenge

Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) is Ohio’s oldest and largest multi-campus community college. With three campuses located in the greater Cleveland area, Tri-C has a rich tradition of providing high quality, affordable educational programs and serves 55,000 students annually.

To best meet the needs of its students, the college operates a bookstore on each of its three campuses. Two years ago, the college’s administration realized that although the stores were seeing good results, they still could be better. That’s when Tri-C decided to bring in an expert, turning to Barnes & Noble College for assistance.

Solution

Barnes & Noble started by overhauling the bookstores’ IT systems, which included installing its electronic inventory and point-of-sale system. This technology provides a quick checkout system and fully integrates with the school’s financial aid and campus debit card system. These changes had huge implications for the bookstore because a large percentage of Tri-C’s students receive financial aid and would benefit from this integration.

As part of the move to a more sophisticated IT infrastructure, Barnes & Noble also developed a fully functioning website to support the bookstores. The website ties into Barnes & Noble’s registration Integration System, which allows students to reserve and order textbooks as soon as they register for a course online. Today, the online bookstore represents 32 percent of the stores’ total business.

But the real heavy lifting happened when Barnes & Noble gave all three stores an extreme makeover in just one weekend. Barnes & Noble employees from around the region came together and removed all of the stores’ merchandise, remodeled the stores to give them a more modern look and replaced the entire inventory. First thing on Monday morning, all three stores and the online bookstore were up and running once again, offering more to the campus communities than ever before.

According to Chris Peterson, director of stores for Barnes & Noble College, the changes they made to the three stores weren’t just cosmetic. They also took a close look at staffing and helped build new management teams that would help make the stores’ vision a reality.

“Barnes & Noble has more than met our expectations. They developed an itemized plan for the transition process that included refreshing our stores’ inventory, introducing a new IT system, selecting new apparel and hiring the right staff,” said Chris Moir, executive director of Campus Services and Retail Operations at Tri-C. “When the time came for implementation, everything went like clockwork.”

Results

In the year following Barnes & Noble’s drastic changes to Tri-C’s bookstores, the school saw its sales increase by 30 percent. In the past, Tri-C’s bookstores were stocked with textbooks and retail items that were selected based on “gut feelings,” which didn’t always resonate with students. Now, Tri-C takes a more strategic approach to selecting retail merchandise for its bookstores.

“Barnes & Noble looks at merchandise sold at similar college bookstores and conducts student focus groups to identify what students want from their bookstore,” said Peterson. “For example, knowing that Tri-C’s students depend on financial aid not only to purchase their textbooks, but also many of their school supplies, our bookstore now offers products like rolling backpacks and laptop computers, which we didn’t have before.”

June 2011 marked the two-year anniversary of Barnes & Noble and Tri-C’s partnership, and the bookstores continue to serve as retail destinations for each campus. Indeed, Barnes & Noble’s own dedication to its clients has enabled Tri-C to provide a more customer-focused environment for its students.

“Barnes & Noble is so much more than a vendor – they are a trusted business partner,” said Moir. “I’m absolutely 100 percent convinced that we made the right choice when we brought Barnes & Noble on board.”

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