As retailers continue to expand and grow, the old adage still rings true- if you can measure it, you can manage it. Basically, if you have a tangible metric in place you have a way to quantify success or failure. Based off of those metrics you can set goals and mark improvements. The latest metric reporting in retail comes in the way of people counting.
People counting is a measurable way to count customers that are coming into your store. If you are using a system like VisiPlus for your people counting, you have a categorized report that breaks down how many people you have in your store during each hour of the day.
This might seem like random information; until you start to see the ways it can benefit your overall store performance. One of the most common ways VisiPlus is used it to determine ticket/ basket averages. Take the day’s sales and divide that total by the total number of customers as reported. The total will be your sales per customer. Now that you know your current rate you should be able to set goals to increase your average ticket. By incrementally increasing sales per customer, you will increase your overall sales in a more manageable way. You can also use this same computation over time to see if you are making the necessary increases.
People counting is also a great way to compare your payroll and staffing levels. It makes a logical sense to put more staff where you have more customer traffic. By having the VisiPlus reports, you have a definitive number of customers at a specific time. You can then make adjustments to your employee schedules to ensure you have enough coverage to satisfy more fully these customer demands.
On more than one occasion, a retailer has looked at the results from their actual people counting reports and has found that they had inappropriate staffing level at the proper times.
Without adding additional employees or payroll hours, these retailers were able to increase customer satisfaction and sales just by reallocating their existing hours to different times of the day.