Glossary of retail pricing and Customer Success

Glossary of retail pricing and Customer Success

Cannibalisation Retail & pricing

The transfer of part of one line's sales to another line in the same assortment, following a launch, a promotion or a changed price gap. Incremental growth, by contrast, comes from a new customer or from additional volume. Reading a new product's performance on its own sales alone remains the common error: with no tracking of neighbouring lines over the same period and no control scope, an apparent success may have done nothing more than move volume already held.

See also : Price elasticity, Price architecture, Cohort

Centrale d'achat Buying organisation French trade practice

The structure through which a retail organisation, or several organisations together, negotiates purchase terms on behalf of its stores or its members. It is not the same thing as the operating company that runs the shops, and it is often not the entity that places the order or takes delivery. Two consequences for a supplier arriving in France. The negotiation is concentrated: a small number of buying structures cover a large share of grocery volume, so a refusal at that level closes far more doors than a refusal from one chain would elsewhere. And alliances between organisations, including cross-border ones, shift over time, so terms agreed with one counterparty can be reopened when the alliance it belongs to changes shape. Modelling France as a market of independent chains overstates the number of real decisions there are to win.

See also : Référencement, Enseigne, Marge arrière

Churn Attrition Customer Success

Loss of customers or of recurring revenue over a period. Three readings get mixed together. Logo churn counts customers lost, revenue churn weighs what they represented, and involuntary churn, from non-payment, insolvency or acquisition, has nothing in common with avoidable churn, the only case where intervention makes sense. A team can post high logo churn and low revenue churn, or the reverse. Building a retention plan before separating the three measures puts the effort in the wrong place.

See also : GRR, NRR, Health score

Cohort Data & measurement

A group of customers or product lines sharing a common starting point, such as signature month, launch date or acquisition channel, and tracked over time from that reference. A segment is defined by a stable property, not by a date. The point of a cohort is to neutralise composition effects: an overall rate can improve purely because recent business weighs more heavily in the mix. Comparing cohorts of different ages, or cohorts too small for the observed gap to mean anything, cancels that benefit.

See also : NRR, Survivorship bias, Churn

Contraction Customer Success

A fall in recurring revenue from a customer who remains a customer: fewer licences, a downgrade, a renegotiated rate. Churn implies the end of the relationship; contraction is often its leading signal. It is usually noticed when the renewal is signed, although it was decided much earlier, when users stopped opening the product. Usage tracking at seat level makes it visible several months before the contract date, which is the only point at which anything can still be done about it.

See also : Churn, GRR, Health score

Coopération commerciale Commercial cooperation services French trade practice

Services provided by a distributor to a supplier, such as in-store prominence, participation in retailer operations or presence in retailer media, invoiced to the supplier and governed by a contract separate from the purchase of goods. A discount bears on the price of the goods themselves; commercial cooperation bears on a service. For a supplier arriving from a market where trade spend is simply deducted from the invoice, the practical difference is that an invoice arrives and has to be matched to something actually delivered. The point of vigilance is the reality and the valuation of that service, which fall under the rules governing commercial relations in France, and those rules have changed several times. In steering terms, the error is to read the income as a margin top-up without attaching it to the lines actually promoted.

See also : Marge arrière, Triple net, Tête de gondole

Cost of quality COQ Data & measurement

An industrial framework summing four items: prevention, appraisal, internal failure and external failure. The total matters less than reading the items against each other, since they communicate; prevention not spent reappears later, and multiplied, as failure. Cost of poor quality keeps only the last two items. Applied to a customer portfolio, the framework runs into attribution: quiet remedial work and executive hours spent on escalations appear in no budget line and therefore in no comparison.

See also : Escalation, Health score, Onboarding

Coverage rate Data & measurement

The share of a target scope actually populated by a source: lines surveyed against the full set tracked, accounts carrying a usable usage signal, fields completed in a master file. Precision qualifies how correct a measure is, coverage qualifies how much ground it covers. Computing it on the observed scope rather than on the intended scope drives it towards completeness by construction, and the gaps, usually concentrated on atypical cases, disappear from the analysis altogether.

See also : Survivorship bias, Price index, Data quality

Data freshness Data & measurement

The gap between the moment a fact occurs and the moment it becomes usable in the system used to decide. Update frequency is a different matter: a base refreshed every night can carry price readings three weeks old. The level required follows from the speed of the decision at hand, not from a general principle. Driving repricing or a usage alert on data whose latency exceeds the decision cycle amounts to correcting a situation that has already passed.

See also : Data quality, Repricing, Health score

Data quality Data & measurement

The fitness of a dataset for the use actually made of it, assessed on distinct dimensions: accuracy, completeness, consistency, uniqueness, freshness. Absence of errors is not enough, since a base that is accurate but incomplete, or complete but out of date, fails just as badly. Opening a general programme with no target use leads nowhere: without a specific decision that fixes the level required, every dimension calls for endless effort and the work stops for want of arbitration.

See also : Data freshness, Coverage rate, Cost of quality

Enseigne Retail banner, fascia French trade practice

The commercial banner a shopper sees above the door, which does not map one to one onto a company. A single group can operate several banners at different price positions, and within one banner some stores are owned by the group while others are run by independent operators under a franchise or cooperative arrangement. That structure decides how much of pricing is genuinely set centrally: an integrated store applies the banner price, an independent one may keep latitude over part of the range. Two practical consequences for a foreign operator. A price survey mixing integrated and independent stores under one banner name will show dispersion that is structural rather than a collection error. And a national listing agreement does not guarantee shelf presence in every store carrying the banner.

See also : Centrale d'achat, Price index, Référencement

Escalation Customer Success

Moving a situation to a higher level of decision, on the supplier side as much as the customer side, when routine handling no longer suffices. A technical incident belongs to support; an escalation engages the relationship and not only the service. Two symmetrical errors apply: escalating too late, once the customer's position is already fixed, and escalating with no criteria, which devalues the signal. Its cost is measured in executive time, a line rarely charged back to the account concerned.

See also : Cost of quality, Playbook, Renewal

Expansion Customer Success

Growth in recurring revenue from an existing customer: extra seats, an upgrade, additional modules, billed usage beyond the committed level. Acquisition concerns a new customer, while contractual price indexation is worth isolating so the underlying dynamic is not overstated. Treating expansion as a sales target detached from the value already delivered is expensive: sold before the customer has seen a first result, it comes back as contraction at the following renewal, and the second sale is harder than the first.

See also : Contraction, NRR, Time-to-value

Golden record Data & measurement

The consolidated version of a record, whether customer, product or supplier, obtained by reconciling several diverging sources under explicit arbitration rules, attribute by attribute. Deduplication removes duplicates without deciding which value prevails for each field. Those rules are often taken for a technical subject, when deciding that billing beats the CRM for an address is a business call. Left undocumented, the consolidated record becomes just another contested source among the ones it was meant to replace.

See also : Product master data, Data quality

GRR Gross revenue retention Customer Success

The share of a cohort's recurring revenue kept over a period, expansion excluded: only contraction and cancellation pull it down, which caps it at its starting level. NRR takes increases into account and can run well above that ceiling. The value of GRR lies entirely in reading the two together. A wide gap says that growth in the base rests on a few expanding accounts while the underlying book erodes, a position that turns unstable as soon as expansion slows.

See also : NRR, Contraction, Churn

Health score Customer health score Customer Success

A composite indicator meant to summarise the probability that an account holds, built from usage, support, relationship and contractual signals. Stated satisfaction measures an opinion at one point in time, which is a different object. The structural weakness is weighting: weights set by expert judgement and never tested against actual departures produce a score that describes the team's activity rather than the customer's risk. A score worth using is recalibrated against the accounts that were actually lost.

See also : Churn, Cost of quality, Survivorship bias

KVI Known Value Item Retail & pricing

A line whose price the shopper knows, or believes they know, and on which they judge a retailer. Four properties have to combine: purchase frequency, a memorable price point, comparability from one retailer to the next, and visibility. The recurring confusion is with best sellers. An exclusive or own-label best seller cannot be compared anywhere and therefore carries no weight in perception, while a slow-selling line stocked by everyone may matter more. Comparability is both the most discriminating criterion and the one most often dropped from the selection.

See also : Price image, Prix d'appel, Coverage rate

Marge arrière Back margin French trade practice

Remuneration obtained from a supplier outside the invoiced purchase price: commercial cooperation services, conditional rebates, various contributions. It attaches to a period agreement rather than to a sale, unlike an on-invoice discount, which lowers the purchase price immediately. For an incoming supplier this is the part of the French negotiation with no counterpart at home: the price discussion settles one layer, the annual agreement settles the other, and a plan built on the first alone understates what the relationship costs. The difficulty is as much accounting as commercial, since these amounts are usually booked globally rather than by line, which makes any per-product profitability approximate. The practice is regulated in France, and the rules have changed several times: check the current position before modelling it.

See also : Marge avant, Triple net, Coopération commerciale

Marge avant Front margin French trade practice

The gap between the retail selling price and the net purchase price shown on the invoice, booked at every transaction and attached directly to the line sold. It is the margin that most markets simply call margin. In France it is only the first of two layers: marge arrière comes from remuneration negotiated outside the purchase invoice and settled, in most cases, at the end of the period. An operator arriving from a market without that second layer will misread a French assortment. Ranking lines on front margin alone makes profitable references look like losses, because their economics sit in the annual agreement rather than on the invoice. The listing decision is then taken on an incomplete base, and the supplier who accepted a thin invoice price in order to fund that agreement looks like the weak performer.

See also : Marge arrière, Triple net, Coopération commerciale

Markdown Démarque Retail & pricing

A price reduction decided to clear stock whose rotation is insufficient, usually permanent for the remaining life of the product. Promotion, by contrast, is temporary and seeks traffic. A vocabulary warning for anyone reading French retail documents: démarque inconnue is not a markdown at all, it means unexplained stock loss, whether theft or error. Marking down late means marking down deeper: the discount required grows over time for a smaller quantity cleared, and the margin given up is rarely compared with the carrying cost avoided.

See also : Repricing, Cannibalisation, Soldes

NRR Net revenue retention Customer Success

Recurring revenue from a cohort of customers at the end of a period, divided by that cohort's revenue at the start, with expansion, contraction and cancellation all included and customers won during the period excluded. A figure above one hundred means the installed base grows without any acquisition at all. GRR ignores expansion, NRR absorbs it. Read on its own it invites an unpleasant surprise: expansion concentrated in a handful of accounts hides erosion across the rest, and two companies reporting the same NRR can be in opposite situations.

See also : GRR, Expansion, Cohort

Onboarding Customer Success

The opening phase of a customer relationship: configuration, data migration, training, first use cases put into production. Technical implementation is only one component of it; adoption comes afterwards and is measured over time. The most common mistake is closing onboarding on a delivery criterion, the product being in place, rather than on verified usage. Declared complete with no first result obtained, it does nothing but move the risk forward to the renewal, where there is far less room to act.

See also : Time-to-value, Playbook, Cost of quality

Playbook Customer Success

A documented sequence of actions, triggered by an identified situation such as a kick-off, a drop in usage or a change of contact, setting out who does what, in what order, and on what exit criterion. A procedure aims at compliance; a playbook aims at an outcome and leaves room for judgement. The risk is accumulation: a library of playbooks that are never measured becomes scenery. With no exit criterion and no observed success rate, a playbook is worth a good intention.

See also : Onboarding, Escalation, Portfolio segmentation

Portfolio segmentation Customer Success

Splitting a customer base into groups that receive different levels of coverage, by revenue, potential, complexity or risk. Marketing segmentation targets acquisition and message; this exercise allocates scarce human time. Segmenting on current revenue alone remains the most widespread practice, and it fails in two directions at once: small-invoice accounts with real potential land in minimum coverage, while large but stable accounts absorb attention their risk does not justify.

See also : Tech-touch, Health score, Playbook

Price architecture Retail & pricing

The set of rules organising price gaps inside a range: entry, core and premium levels, the progression between pack sizes, the gap between a national brand and own label. Price level answers for overall positioning; architecture answers for internal consistency. Left to form through an accumulation of one-off decisions, it ends up inverting the gaps between formats, and the shopper then arbitrates against the intention. A range whose larger pack costs more per unit teaches the shopper to stop trusting the range.

See also : Prix d'appel, Cannibalisation, Repricing

Price elasticity Retail & pricing

The ratio of two percentage changes: the volume response that follows a price change. It is not stated price sensitivity collected by survey, which describes an intention rather than an observed behaviour. Two traps dominate. Treating it as a constant, when it varies by line, by season and by price level. And estimating it over promotional periods, where the measured effect mixes true elasticity with pantry loading by the shopper and transfer from a neighbouring line. An elasticity estimated on promotion and then applied to a base price decision overstates the volume gain.

See also : Cannibalisation, Repricing, Survivorship bias

Price image Price perception Retail & pricing

The belief a shopper forms about a retailer's overall price level from a narrow sample of lines whose prices they actually remember, then extends to the whole assortment. Real price level is computed across the full catalogue, and the two figures diverge, often durably. The costly mistake follows from that gap: spreading a competitiveness budget evenly across the range, when perception is decided by a few dozen visible and comparable lines. Investment that lands anywhere else changes the arithmetic of margin without changing what the shopper believes.

See also : KVI, Price index, Prix d'appel

Price index Retail & pricing

The ratio of one retailer's prices to a competitor's over a common basket, expressed on a base of one hundred. Its value depends entirely on how the basket is built: which lines are in scope, how they are weighted, how often prices are collected and by what method. An average price asks none of those questions. The main trap is product matching, since comparing different pack sizes or formats manufactures an artificial gap. An index whose coverage and collection dates are undocumented cannot be interpreted, however precise the figure looks.

See also : Price image, Coverage rate, Data freshness

Prix d'appel Loss leader French trade practice

A line positioned deliberately low to draw traffic, on the assumption that margin rebuilds across the rest of the basket. A KVI is an observation about the shopper; a prix d'appel is a decision by the retailer. The decision only produces an effect if it lands on the observation, that is, on a line the shopper genuinely remembers and can compare. The second half of the mechanism is almost never verified: without measuring the associated basket, nothing shows that the traffic generated covers the margin given up. Two further points apply in France. Resale below cost is regulated, so the depth of the move is not a free variable. And advertising a line held in token quantity is treated as a separate question from the pricing decision itself.

See also : KVI, Price image, Seuil de revente à perte

Prix de vente conseillé Recommended retail price, RRP French trade practice

A price level recommended by a supplier to its distributors, with no binding force: setting the resale price is the distributor's decision, and imposing it belongs to competition law, whose rules evolve. A different object under a different regime is the struck-through reference price displayed during a promotion, which answers its own consumer information requirements. Treating the recommended price as a neutral benchmark misreads it, since it shapes market expectations and distorts any price index built on lines that align with it. A brand owner entering France should expect the recommendation to be honoured unevenly from one channel to the next, and should model the margin it needs on the price actually charged rather than on the one printed in the trade presentation.

See also : Price index, Price architecture

Product master data Référentiel produit Data & measurement

The base describing an organisation's products and their attributes, covering identifiers, classification hierarchy, characteristics and selling units, and authoritative for the systems that consume it. A commercial catalogue presents an offer at a point in time; master data is meant to stay the single reference over time. The most expensive trap is the classification hierarchy: built for buying, it describes substitutability poorly, and every price analysis by category inherits the defect.

See also : Golden record, Data quality, Price index

QBR Quarterly business review Customer Success

A periodic meeting between supplier and customer, intended to compare results obtained against objectives set and to decide what comes next. What separates it from an operational check-in is the presence of decision makers and an agenda about value rather than day-to-day execution. The classic drift is the activity presentation. A review that sets out what the supplier has done, with no measure of what the customer obtained, produces no decision and eventually drops off the calendar.

See also : Health score, Renewal, Portfolio segmentation

Référencement Supplier listing French trade practice

The decision by which a buying structure accepts a supplier's line into the range its stores are allowed to order. It is a precondition for selling, not a sale: a listed line still has to be ordered by each store, placed on a shelf and given a facing, and a listing obtained without those follow-through steps produces no volume at all. Listing is normally reviewed on an annual cycle alongside the terms of the agreement, which is why commercial terms and shelf presence are negotiated as one package rather than as separate discussions. Delisting works the same way in reverse and is the standard lever in a difficult negotiation. A supplier planning a French entry should budget for that cycle, since arriving between two review windows can cost the better part of a year.

See also : Centrale d'achat, Enseigne, Tête de gondole

Renewal Customer Success

The continuation of a recurring contract at its term, with or without changes to scope and rate. What gets decided there has nothing in common with the initial sale: the customer now has experience of the service, and the judgement rests on observed results rather than on a promise. Handled at the end of the cycle, a few weeks before the date, it arrives already settled. The only lever left is a commercial gesture, whose cost reappears at the following cycle.

See also : Contraction, QBR, Escalation

Repricing Retail & pricing

Changing a selling price already in place, at shorter or longer intervals, in reaction to a signal: purchase cost, competitor price, stock level, observed demand. Initial pricing sets a position and markdown clears stock; repricing does neither. Automation without guard rails remains the most frequent error: an engine that follows a competitor with no margin floor and no range consistency check produces downward spirals and contradictions between formats of the same product. The engine is also never better than the latency of the feed it reads.

See also : Markdown, Price architecture, Data freshness

Seuil de revente à perte Resale-below-cost floor French trade practice

The floor below which a retailer may not sell a product on, computed from the effective purchase price rather than chosen freely. The mechanism matters more than the arithmetic: which components of the negotiation are allowed to lower that floor has been redefined more than once, and for some categories an uplift applies on top of it, so a shelf price cannot simply follow the buying price down. Two consequences for an incoming operator. Aggressive entry pricing on a bought-in product is bounded in a way it is not in every market, and the bound moves with the terms negotiated rather than with a commercial decision. And clearance periods are the recognised exception, which is part of why the discount calendar concentrates there. The area is regulated in France, and the rules have changed several times: check the current position before modelling it.

See also : Triple net, Soldes, Prix d'appel

Soldes Statutory clearance periods French trade practice

Clearance periods fixed in the French calendar, during which a retailer may sell below cost in order to run stock down, subject to conditions on how long the goods have been held beforehand. Outside those windows a retailer runs promotions, which are a different object: a promotion is temporary, it does not permit sale below cost, and it does not carry the same display obligations. The dates and the surrounding conditions are set by regulation and have been adjusted several times, including for particular regions and sectors, so check the current position before building a calendar on them. For an operator used to markets where clearance timing is a free commercial choice, the practical effect is that a large part of the annual discount calendar is common to every competitor and cannot serve as a differentiator.

See also : Markdown, Seuil de revente à perte

Survivorship bias Data & measurement

The analytical error of reasoning only on items still present in the data, ignoring those that left it: customers gone, lines delisted, stores closed. What separates it from a merely incomplete sample is its direction, systematic and almost always flattering. A health score calibrated on the active base alone, or an elasticity estimated only on lines still sold, produce conclusions that are reassuring and wrong. Correcting for it means keeping the history of exits, which many systems never archive.

See also : Cohort, Health score, Price elasticity

Tech-touch Customer Success

A coverage model for a customer segment with no named contact, running on automated sequences, documentation and journeys triggered by usage. Low-touch keeps episodic human contact; neither model amounts to an absence of service. Installed as a cost measure on a segment that was never properly identified, tech-touch goes blind: with no usable usage signals and no rule for escalating to a human, the loss of the segment surfaces only at non-renewal, when the whole cohort moves at once.

See also : Portfolio segmentation, Escalation, Coverage rate

Tête de gondole End cap, gondola end French trade practice

The display unit at the end of an aisle, the most visible position in a store after the entrance area. Space there is finite, allocated in advance, and generally paid for by the supplier under a commercial cooperation agreement rather than granted along with the listing. The distinction that matters is between the paid position and the promotion itself: a price cut with no visible position and a visible position with no price cut behave very differently, yet the two are usually bought as a bundle and never measured apart. The recurring error is to read the sales lift of an end cap as the effect of the promotional price, then rebuild a price elasticity from it. What is measured there mixes the discount, the position and the extra stock the store carried for the operation.

See also : Coopération commerciale, Price elasticity, Référencement

Time-to-value Customer Success

The interval between signature and the moment the customer observes a first result matching what they expected. Time to go live measures a technical delivery and is usually reached far earlier. The whole difficulty sits in defining the result, which has to be written with the customer, in their own terms, before work starts. Without that definition agreed up front the measure becomes declarative, and the indicator ends up documenting nothing but internal lead times.

See also : Onboarding, Expansion, Data quality

Triple net French trade practice

The purchase price left once every component of the negotiation has been deducted: on-invoice discounts, deferred rebates, commercial cooperation remuneration. The net invoiced price carries only the first layer, which is why two parties can each quote a net price and mean different numbers. Any comparison of buying competitiveness is made on triple net, on one condition: allocation. Amounts negotiated globally have to be pushed back down to the line under a key that someone owns, otherwise triple net stays a retailer-level average, useless for arbitrating a range. A foreign buying team modelling French terms from invoice prices alone will underestimate what local competitors actually pay and read its own cost position as better than it is. Which layers may be counted for regulated purposes has been redefined more than once.

See also : Marge arrière, Marge avant, Seuil de revente à perte