The following article is based on feedback from one of our customers that has implemented the Visi Plus System in their stores. This is what he told us after using this system for a few months.
One of my stores recently started to use a traffic counter to test whether we wanted to roll them out to the rest of our stores. We started to evaluate the data the people counting reports provided and compared them to our daily sales. We were able to utilize a simple conversion system to see what our average ticket was. The results after the first month were actually quite surprising to us.
We sell a wide mix of low and high dollar items. We never realized that even though our sales stayed relatively consistent throughout the week, we actually had two different factors driving that business. What found out was that on the weekends we had a higher customer count, and during the week we had a higher ticket average. Without comparing the daily sales to the traffic counts, we never would have realized that we actually had a staffing problem that was holding us, and our sales back.
Since we had consistent sales regardless of day of the week, we had consistently spread our payroll hours over the entire week. What we should have done was increase our staffing levels on the weekend to accommodate the higher customer traffic entering into the store. During the week we still needed some employees to make sure that the customers coming in and making larger purchases had the employees attention to ask and answer all of their questions.
Once we changed our staffing structure around, we noticed in the next month our sales starting to increase, as well as our overall ticket average. By increasing the staff on the weekends, we actually found many of our customers were able to make larger purchases because they were able to get the employees attention long enough to ask and answer all of their questions.
Our customers had been avoiding shopping on the weekend for large purchases because we could not provide the correct levels of customer service. Had we not seen the accurate data from the traffic counting reports, we would have continued to miss out on these valuable sales opportunities.