As retail stores become more remote from the head office of the business, through more diverse and dispersed portfolios, it becomes more and more difficult to know what operations the store teams are performing, how frequently they are performing them, and to what standards.
This understanding is ironically more important than ever as stores serve and survive in a wider variety of contexts, graded and segmented in a growing number of ways, delivering more focused assortments to more different people in a retail world that operates 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
However it is still a widespread scenario that head office retail functions do not know what is happening hour after hour, day after day, inside their stores. This is clearly a huge obstacle to understanding why these things are happening and then implementing improvements to change things for the better.
Firstly, the combination of store visits and interviews needs to be combined to understand both what the customer is doing, and what the retail functions are allowing to happen.
Secondly, new technologies can be employed to focus on customer behaviour across time, or to gather evidence of store operational functions across a wider portfolio of stores.
These findings need to be combined with the correct performance KPI analysis, as well as available loyalty CRM data to arrive at the definitive answer to “what on earth is happening in my stores?”
- What is happening in my stores on an hourly & daily basis?
- Is the same thing happening in all my stores?
- Is the customer behaviour effected by store operational deficiencies?
- How are my store functions impacting my sales, efficiency and profit?
- Where are the weak links in what we do in stores?
- Do I have the right number of people in stores doing the right thing?
- Am I communicating correctly with my stores?
- Do my store managers and personnel understand what is required of them?
- Do my head office retail functions need to be more engaged with stores?
- What are my priorities to change to make my stores work better?
- How can I see what is happening in every store, every day?
This is how we can help…
The “What on earth is happening in my stores?” Audit
Overview:
A combination of physical store visits, stakeholder interviews, strategic performance data analysis and the use of technologies to monitor both behaviour across specific stores through time, as well as the variety of activities across a range of stores
- Store visits & observations
- Store manager, sales personnel and regional manager interviews
- Video analytics recording movement & behaviour
- Image capture using mobile store devices
- POS/ Sales Data/store KPI analysis
- Loyalty/CRM data analysis
Benefits:
- Definitively see what happens in your stores hour by hour, day by day
- To see what happens that shouldn’t
- To see what isn’t happening that should
- To understand the range of behaviour and activities across the chain
- To understand the hourly activities and behaviours
- Understand what store functions and operations are either positively or negatively effecting customer behaviour and store performance
- To quantify KPI improvements of recommended changes
- To be able to prioritise operations for change
Process:
- Discussions and interviews with selected HO personnel
- Selected client store visits
- Interviews with store managers, sales personnel and regional managers
- Store observations
- Analysis of selected store performance KPIs
- Analysis of any available loyalty/CRM data
- Video analytics video capture and traffic analysisImage capture comparison & analysis across the portfolio
- Final report with conclusions and recommendations
For more information on how the “what on earth is happening in my stores” can help.