In Part 1 of the series, we examined the importance and challenges associated with Store Visit Reports. In this part, we are diving deep into understanding the persistent business impact of the store visits and perfecting them to deliver consistent and better customer experience.
Persistent Business Impact of Inefficeint Store Visits
Store Visits are designed to help each store and the HQ team deliver consistent value. If the inefficiencies mentioned in Part 1 take over, the purpose of Store Visits is lost. That leads to:
Ineffective Area and Regional Managers
When Area / Regional Managers fail to conduct complete or consistent reviews, the visit and the review conducted during the visit itself become ineffective. The inability to see issues through to closure led to further loss in effectiveness even when the visit itself was well conducted and documented.
Unresolved issues
Missed observations and the loss of context, as most observations are documented during the visit, sometimes lead to missed or misunderstood tasks. This, in turn, leads to delayed, missed, or inaccurate actions.
Inconsistent customer experience across stores
The inability to see actions through to closure often leads to inconsistencies across stores. The customer experience is far from what the HQ has envisioned.
Cultural impact – Frustrated teams
The store and managers often misalign if the issues persist in subsequent visits. The misalignment arises from the lack of well-documented, consistent, and trackable Store Visit reports. This leads to unnecessary friction among teams. This and the ineffectiveness of an underlying process lead to the best team members feeling frustrated and ineffective, a completely avoidable situation.
Perfecting the Store Visits
Now, everything boils down to setting the right expectations, sharing standard guidelines across all stores, managing compliance adherence, and holding teams accountable. This provides structure and frees up time for high-value tasks during store visits.
Having understood the DNA of the Store Visit and its underlying challenges, we have created a Store Visit WorkApp powered by Wooqer that can enable you to conduct a Perfect Store Visit. Here are a few salient features of the Wooqer Store Visit Report:
Let’s revisit our challenges and see how to overcome them to perfect the Store Visits.
| Challenges | The Perfect Way |
| The ghost store visit | Geo-fencing and Geo-tracking:Allow area managers to open the visit report only while at the store or at a track distance from the store at the time of submission. Know that the visit really happened.Date | Time capture:Automatically detect the time of form opening and submission to get visibility into the time spent at the store. Get insights for improving efficiency and effectiveness. |
| Inconsistency and lack of standardization | Configurable visit report templateAccess the standardized Wooqer Store Visit report, designed in partnership with industry experts. Configure this to your needs or create your own from scratch within 60 minutes without technical dependence. |
| Lack of one place for all observation | Configurable visit report templateData CollectionCollect data from every aisle and every outlet. Standardized data collection ensures all observations are noted in the desired format. |
| Ineffective use of Store Visit time | Configurable Visit report templateOffline ModeWorks offline as well, saves your progress, and uploads to the cloud when re-connected to the network. Dynamic FormAllow the Store Visit report to flow differently by creating dependencies within questions. For example – If a pest issue is noted, the form can expand dynamically to get more details about the pest issue. If not, no such fields come up. Nothing is missed.Auto-scoring on VisitsAll visit reports can be automatically scored to generate a Scorecard for each store. Measure progress to manage stores better. |
| Risk of subjectivity | Configurable Visit report templateEvidence Backed:Cut down friction by documenting each observation backed with evidence. You could ask for pictures, videos, documents, and even live camera clicks. This removes any risk of subjectivity and lack of information due to mere discussions. |
| Actionable follow-up | Automated Corrective Task ManagementInitiate tasks and assign them to the store or HQ rep automatically. Enable Area Managers to initiate tasks manually during or after the visit. All corrective tasks, generated automatically or manually, are tracked to closure with built-in reminders to drive timely actions. Get complete visibility. |
| Store Visit History | Dashboard and Store 360 Review KPIs, store performance, and previous Store Visit’s task completion to ensure you are well-informed and armed for your Store Visits |
| Insight and Analytics | Auto-scoring on VisitsAll visit reports can be automatically scored to generate a Scorecard for each store. Measure progress to manage stores better. Reports & InsightsGet insights to understand the top issues across stores, identify stores that have not been visited recently, understand how many visits each area manager makes, and much more. |
Improve Evey Store and Eventually Business with Perfect Store Visits
With the perfect Store Visit, retailers and restaurant businesses can
More Effective Managers
Zero misses by area and store managers with immediate documentation of all observations. Close all action items faster and have complete visibility with auto-reminders on the corrective tasks.
More Efficient Area Managers
Area managers can save time in note-taking and follow-up tasks by documenting on the move (Wooqer App works offline, too). The saved time could lead to more visits, self-development, more quality time with the team, or even better work-life balance, all while being more effective
Improved Culture
Area and Store Managers’ relationships become more cordial as friction disappears from the discussions with documented facts and standardized processes. Improved effectiveness further adds to the happiness quotient.
Better Customer Experience
With more issues promptly actioned, customers get a better experience across all stores.
Higher Sales
Sales inevitably benefit from more effective and happier staff and a consistently better customer experience. After all, that’s the reason the Store Visit Report is such an essential part of the SOP.
Conclusion
This concludes our two-part series on Store Visit Reports. See here for part 1. Store visits and their right orchestration can be immensely beneficial for your business. With Wooqer, you can leverage the mobile-first, digital, better, and faster way to store visits. Collect more data, generate more insights, and enable your team to make better visits with Wooqer.
