Have you ever given any thought to your store hours? When you started your business, what was the driving force behind the hours that you set? Was it something that just sounded good? Was it consistent with merchants in the same area as you? Was it just more convenient for personal reasons? Whatever the case, it probably was not based on any type of customer analytics or on data from a VisiPlus customer counting system.
If you’ve never given thought to customer analytics, now may be the best time to change your mind. Brick and mortar retail business are facing their biggest challenges ever. Online behemoths are making eComm shopping more convenient, affordable and all around pleasant for the shopper. Therefore, that makes getting customers into your store more important than ever. This is where a customer counting device can help you to maximize your business strategies.
As a loss prevention professional, most people assume that my main focus is onbusting shoplifters and dishonest employees. While that holds true for a small portion of my day to day role within my organization, my primary focus is to improve overall profitability for my company. I accomplish that in a variety of different ways. Some include recommending EAS device placement on certain products, improving polices to reduce our exposure to risk and finding any other ways to squeeze that last drop of profit out of our stores. With a VisiPlus customer counting system, I was able to help sell the idea of extending our store hours in order to maximize sales.
Without a customer counting device, it’s incredibly difficult to argue for extending operating hours since hard data is difficult to come by. You almost have to test the hours, compare sales data to historical sales, factor in any anomalies that may have caused a spike, or dip in traffic and then try to reason around that to make, or break your point.
With a VisiPlus customer counting system, you simply install the small overhead sensor to get a highly accurate count of foot traffic in your store. You can then use this data to determine if your operating hours actually make sense or not. Chances are, you’re leaving money on the table by not being in stock, open, or staffed during certain times.
Once we installed our customer counting device, we made several changes to store hours. We started opening a little later and staying open much, much later. The other eye opener was our staffing model. We would base staffing on sales data, not foot traffic. After reacting to the data from our VisiPlus customer counting system, we added sales associates to peak traffic hours. This obviously led to a slight increase in sales, which more than covered the added operating costs of our extended hours.
While they are dozens of uses for the VisiPlus customer counting system, using it to determine that most profitable business hours is one of the most effective uses. Within weeks of using this data, our company saw increases in sales and overall customer satisfaction. Without the hard data to visualize our foot traffic, those increases would have been harder to come by. If you are looking for a way to measure customer traffic in your store, the VisiPlus system is probably your best option.
For more information about VisiPlus contact us or call 1.770.426.0547.
