The retail audit might seem intricate at times but they are a great method to keep track of how well your retail business is performing. And due to AI, the audits can be performed more efficiently and processed more quickly, thereby reducing manpower costs. Therefore, by no means they could be considered outdated.
Store audits provide substantial insights into your retail business by assessing the performance of your displays, keeping your inventory in check, ensuring the best possible version of your store, and checking that inventory management activities are completed on time.
Furthermore, data such as sales volume, planogram/ SKU’s placements, pricing, product location, and damaged products are collected before auditing. Following the audit, the issues are addressed and resolved, and improvements are provided.
All in all, retail audits capture the critical data that tell the health of the brand and its products. It can identify what is working and what needs to be changed so that better judgments and adjustments could be made.
WHY THE NEED FOR ACUTE STRATEGIES?
Auditing a store can be time-consuming and challenging. But through effective strategizing, it can be done without a hitch. There are multiple ways you can go about store auditing. When a brand settles on auditing, it requires a list of objectives, what needs to be accomplished, and parts that need extra attention.
Imagine a brand wants to know how its customers view the brand. For that, they might go through different types of audits and look for the best option that aligns with their needs and goals. Some of the common ones are:
MARKET AUDIT
Customers switch brands faster than in the blink of an eye but settle toward the ones that provide a consistent and enjoyable customer experience. And market audit keeps that tracked. It is like a wellness check of the brand. It tells how customers feel about the brand. How people interact with it, react to it, and what they have to say about the brand while also keeping an eye on the competition.
Because given that the implementation of the strategy that the brand employs relies heavily on the balance between the reaction of the customer and the competing brands.
MERCHANDISING AUDIT
This report checks the brand performance and gathers all of the inventory information like stock levels, product price effectiveness while also checking the condition of the products, their placement, presentation, the influence of your current visual merchandising, etc.
It is a reactive strategy. Mainly focusing on maintaining the brand's favourable position in the market, while dealing with the implications of the strategies.
PROMOTIONAL REPORT
Imagine a brand that is having a sale or other promotional event. It is critical to assess the campaign's success to identify how customers feel about the promotion, as this will indicate how it will perform in the near future and, eventually, it will assist in additional improvements.
While it is paramount to cement the brands positing in market. Without constant evolution, the brand would readily become irrelevant. So, it is equally important to assess the effectiveness of the strategies.
Once the brand is done documenting what needs improvement, those changes are implemented after auditing the store. Based on those insights, the strategies are planned. Audits are done and changed from time to time per requirements.
Following the store audits, the insights are carried out by the retail maintenance management. The agency then applies the relevant design treatments based on these findings. Consider a brand that wants to improve foot traffic in its store. The agency can use these audit insights to determine what has to be done to reach that goal.
Because the journey is not linear, therefore audits are kept, followed, and repeated so that leaky buckets could be addressed as soon as possible and brands can continuously grow.
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