Retail Operations
10 October 2022
Peak trading season is fast approaching, and we’ll soon see more shoppers hitting the high-street. This exciting uplift in footfall will bring its usual challenges: are your stores compliant? How do they look? Do your store teams know what they’re doing? This means store teams need to execute brilliantly – all the time. And the key to great execution is regular, digitised Area Manager visits.
Typically for Area Managers, manual processes and paper checks make it difficult to pull together all the information so they spend too much time on admin and not enough time supporting stores.
At StorIQ we believe digitising your Area Manager visits is essential in backing your business during peak times; by ‘going digital’ Area Managers can effectively monitor store compliance, gain greater visibility of their stores, and save vital hours in a busy time. With the added benefit of retail operations knowing what’s going on in the store estate in real time too.
Monitor useful VM compliance metrics across stores
At StorIQ we believe that every store should be visited at least once during key trading periods. How do you measure up?
By collecting photos from store visits, you can build a visual archive of your Christmas windows and POS so you can iron out any issues as quickly as possible with the VM team to maximise your peak season trading.
To save time for your field teams, and get your stores compliant quicker, you need a tool that organises photos for you. That way you can build up a visual archive of stores, so you can give super-fast feedback. This will make sure that stores can fix any problems promptly.
Gain greater visibility across the store estate
Digitised Area Manager checks brings together all the tools an area manager needs to complete a store visit in one easy to use app; one place for AMs to see what’s happening across their store estate & follow up where necessary.
Specifically, with the StorIQ reporting tools, Area Managers can now tailor their view to see everything they need, to help them be more productive and see at a glance what is happening across their stores.
This works the other way round too. It is only possible to drive consistency across a store portfolio if retail field operations are transparent. The Retail Operations team should have access to store review scores, visit frequency and task completion rates etc. This data should be neatly packaged into easily digested review reports. If the need arose, the operations team would be able to access the data immediately without having to trawl through endless emails or dusty filing cabinets.
Save Area Manager’s time – time they can devote to store teams
A common complaint we hear from Area Managers is that they spend too much time chasing Store Managers to complete outstanding tasks. Time is wasted by trawling through emails and cross-checking spreadsheets. Sometimes just knowing which stores need follow ups can be difficult.
Using data from StorIQ, we found that an estate of 500 stores generates approximately 250 store reviews per month. And if that data is not collated, analysed, and stored within a software platform, it would be impossible to manage.
With a digital store review process, you can use the operational data from the previous year’s peak season to streamline next year’s operation and improve sales in store.
Areas Managers are vital to retailers’ success at Peak – the key trading time of the year. Digital retail operations tools can make a huge difference to Area Managers by giving them:
Giving time back to retail and store teams to focus on selling and customers at the busiest time of the year is what StorIQ does best. Request a demo today and see how your store estate could land a digitised peak.
