How luxury brands can ensure their store visits to stockists are consistently effective
To be effective is to be successful in producing a desired or intended result.
If your managers visit your stockists to check your luxury brand displays, they have to produce a comprehensive report which details all the information you need to assess how well your stockist is following your brand guidelines.
If they’re just writing a few notes loosely tied to your overall objectives, the information collected from their store visit will not be very useful.
What’s even more problematic is if each manager is taking notes about different things or giving certain areas more attention than others. This means when you go to analyse your data, it’s going to be hard to spot any noticeable trends or patterns because the notes are all so varied.
How can you make your store visits more effective?
If you’re a luxury brand, there is no room for error, so each store visit needs to cover every last detail to ensure your stand looks nothing short of perfect.
To get the most out of your store visits, you’ve got to equip your managers with the tools and information they need to successfully uncover the information you need to know. Here are our top tips to ensure every store visit your business carries out is effective and valuable.
Have a set list of store visit questions
Always have a predefined set of questions which reflect not only your brand guidelines but also your standards. Use these questions on every store visit to ensure all answers collected are consistent.
If you don’t, you could end up with a brief list of notes which don’t tell you anything, and as a result, the time spent on the store visit was wasted.
If you need help with which questions to ask, click here for our store merchandising checklist for luxury brands.
Break your store visit questions down even further
Once you’ve written your questions out, break them down even more to make it easier for your managers to collect the insights that you're looking for.
For example, if your store visit question is, ‘Is the stand clean?’ You’d want to break this down even further; what exactly does clean look like?
Here’s how you could refine it even more.
‘Is there any dust on the luxury display?’
‘Are there any marks on the signage?’
‘Are there any marks on the products?’
‘Is there any dirt on the floor?’
The more specific you are, the less room there is for confusion, and the more you’ll be able to dig deep into a specific problem and relay the issue back to your stockist.
Specify the length of each answer
If you’ve got questions which are more important than others, it’s crucial that you make this clear to the document user. We suggest giving your questions appropriate weight so your managers have an idea of how long they should spend on each question.
For example, if your manager only has an hour to inspect your luxury stand, you might want them to spend a third of their time inspecting the cleanliness because this significantly affects your brand image.
Carry them out at different times of the day
Don’t carry out your store visits at the same times of the day because this means you’ll find it hard to spot issues or patterns. For example, if a team member always goes at store opening times, you’re not going to get a true picture of how the stand looks after a busy afternoon rush.
You want to know that your luxury stand looks flawless all day long, not just in the morning before the crowds enter the store.
We recommend carrying out store visits in the morning, lunch and evening times to give you the most genuine picture of how your stand looks. If you do each of these times at least once per month, you should start to notice emerging trends or patterns.
Include pictures in your store visit reports
It’s hard to have an informed conversation with your stockist when you’re not entirely sure what you’re talking about.
Let’s say a team member mentioned that your signage was damaged, but you weren’t sure how it was damaged because they didn’t specify, and you couldn’t see it for yourself.
This lack of information will slow you down because you can’t contact your stockist to report the damage until you know the finer details. So that means you’ve got to chase your team member up to ask them to explain the details. This means it takes longer to fix your issue, so potential customers bypass your luxury stand because it looks damaged and unappealing. Ultimately it means more sales lost.
If you ask your store visit assessor to include photos, there’s no ambiguity. You can see exactly what they’re referring to and what issues need to be addressed. It also makes it easier to relay the information to your stockist.
Set tasks as you go
How often have you seen an issue at work, set a mental task to get the job done but never followed through or forgot to ask the person who could help? As a result, no action was taken, and the problem was prolonged. This becomes a major issue for your luxury stand because the longer your point-of-purchase display looks undesirable, the more potential customers you could miss out on. To alleviate this problem, we recommend setting tasks as you go.
Our clients use the handy feature on our store visit app, allowing them to set tasks with deadlines. This means nothing ever slips through the net, and your store visits will always be efficient, effective and productive.
Analyse your data
If you’re just looking at your store visit insights on a report-by-report basis, then it’s likely you’re missing out on emerging patterns and trends that could make it easier for you to suggest a solution to your stockist.
For example, it might become obvious that your signage always becomes damaged at the end of the month. Therefore it would be wise to install new signs before the month ends. Or perhaps you notice that your shelves are most likely to be empty in the evenings so it’s essential that staff replenish your stock at 4 pm.
Giving clearer guidance to your stockist makes it easier for them to comply with your standards and makes them more likely to follow your requests. As opposed to someone who just says, ‘my stand looks dirty; can you make sure it’s clean all the time’ this is a very vague and generic request which means it’s probably going to be forgotten or get dismissed.
Our clients take advantage of the helicopter view analytics provided by our store visit app. It collates all the data from every store visit report, highlighting areas of strength and weakness so they can easily see what needs to be improved. These are updated every time a new report is submitted, so they’ve always got a live, up-to-date report of how their stands are looking.
Keep everything in one place
Ask those who are carrying out your store visits not to send the information over to you separately. When that happens, things get lost, making it harder to keep track of everything. For example, if you’ve got photo files spread out, docs sent on different emails and extra notes in different places, it’s likely that crucial information will slip through the net.
Our clients use Ocasta Review to keep their store visits organised. They can create their own customised template of questions, collect all insights from the app, store photos and set tasks. All of these smartly organised into a store visit report to give structure across your organisation’s visits.
If you’ve partnered with a stockist, store visits should be regularly scheduled into your business calendar
You would like to think that after you’ve signed the deal to showcase your luxury brand in a retail store, everything’s taken care of. Yes, the basics are taken care of, but standards can often slip, leaving your luxury brand looking a little dishevelled.
If you want your potential customers to be ‘wowed’ whenever they see your point of purchase display, then you’ve got to set time aside for regular store visits.
Looking for a store visit app?
If you’re looking for an easier way to manage your store visits, why not try our store visit app for free? We have an exclusive offer for our readers; a free 60-day pilot where you can trial the app in-store and see how it works for your luxury brand.
Here’s how the pilot works:
1. A personalised, quick demo to check we're both a good fit for each other
2. If that goes well, a 60-day pilot in the field with your pilot sales team
3. If you’re happy with the pilot, you can launch it across your entire sales team
Get started now and see how Review can work for your store visits.
