Manage Staffing Smarter 6 ways traffic intelligence can help retailers profit with smarter scheduling

Retail Intelligence Series

Manage Staffing Smarter

We’re seeing the emergence of a new era of consumer behaviour in retailing today, that entails shopping journeys across multiple channels.

Bricks and mortar stores are being viewed as the fulcrum point of shopping entertainment and customer service. This is where compelling experiences can be provided, consumer problems solved, and where, ultimately, most sales are converted. In the UK the vast majority - 82% - of retail sales are still made in stores in 2018, according to Statista.

For this model to cement itself across the wider industry, it will rely on retailers attaching greater value to their store associates, using them wisely and ensuring they are empowered to do what they do best: selling products and assisting the shopper.

Effective labour management will be vital, and it starts with accurate shopper traffic monitoring. Ensuring the proper amount of labour, skill sets required and tasks to be performed during specific times throughout a day can have a profound impact on the success or failure of an individual location.

When considered across all stores in a chain, understanding the amount and type oflabour needed to optimise both customer experience and margins can greatly influence the bottom line.

Industry-leading retailers have use visitor traffic information as a key performance indicator to incorporate into decision-making, better understand their customers and strengthen performance throughout the organisation.

While the use of traffic intelligence to understand store conversion rates or gauge the success of promotional initiatives has proven to be extremely powerful, retailers often overlook its value for managing and optimising labour - an area to view as a strategic asset rather than simply an expense.

What follows are six ways traffic data can be used to optimise labour and boost the bottom line.

Using traffic monitoring and analytics to improve labour management and drive bottom line results

Manage Staffing Smarter

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51% of consumers surveyed will stop

shopping at a specific retailer after 1-2 poor in-store shopping trips.

BRP 2018 Customer Experience Survey

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Scheduling store labour based on Shopper-to-Associate Ratio (STAR)

Shopper traffic data provides retailers with their truest measurement of sales opportunity. Knowing that opportunity is the key to effectively scheduling labour. By syncing the best sales staff with the hours of greatest opportunity, retailers can turn labour from an expense into a very powerful strategic sales tool. By scheduling the appropriate amount of labour during all operating hours, a retailer can ensure customer service levels are never compromised, and fewer customers leave the store empty-handed. Costs can also be more efficiently managed.

The Shopper-To-Associate Ratio (STAR) is the number of employees on duty at a given time, relative to the amount of traffic in the store. It provides the ideal solution to labour scheduling challenges.

A study from InMoment finds that a positive experience with a retailer’s staff increases customers’ satisfaction by 33%. Statistics like this confirm that finding the adequate STAR is crucial for creating compelling customer experiences. The aim is to identify optimal STAR for each location and allocate labour appropriately. With traffic data insight store managers are empowered to justify the need for additional staff resourcing, as they can demonstrate a positive result from the investment.

6 ways to apply traffic data to labour and boost efficiency and profit

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Scheduling employee breaks around store traffic trends

Although breaks are a necessary part of every workday, far too many retail store managers fail to consider the sales opportunity when scheduling employee breaks. Just as scheduling labour requires careful attention to shopper traffic trends, breaks should be scheduled in the same manner, utilising historical data trends that predict the busiest and slowest selling hours for each day.

‘Power hours’ are the highest opportunity hours. All associates should be aware that activities during power hours are devoted to the customer experience.

Store managers often struggle to keep track of which employees have already taken breaks and who still need to take theirs. By designing schedules to align with power hours, managers are able to keep appropriate staff levels on the floor at all times. Breaks are taken only during low traffic hours when they do not interfere with sales opportunity or customer service. Scheduling breaks based on traffic intelligence allows managers the flexibility of easily altering break schedules as necessary during the workday, based on actual real-time traffic flow. It’s also useful to use labour scheduling to comply with local working hours legislation.

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Hiring to the needs of the business and scheduling to traffic patterns

Traditionally, store managers develop their schedules based on staff availability. However, too often, associate availability is for lower opportunity days and hours, and this means service and sales opportunities are often compromised.

Hiring to the needs of the store proportionate to traffic patterns provides managers with the staff availability to meet their scheduling requirements. This ensures that retailers will have the appropriate staff available to better engage with their customers at all times, ultimately leading to improved conversion rates and higher sales.

Traffic data can also help store managers align resourcing to peak trading occasions throughout the year, and maximise opportunities. If there are extended trading hours, perhaps in the run-up to Christmas, the seasonal hires can be carefully (and cost effectively) tailored to the nuances of this peak trading occasion, right down to the most important power hours.

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Developing employee training procedures around traffic data

By developing employee training procedures in which traffic and Sales per Shopper (SPS) play integral roles, selling associates, managers and field leaders will begin to see that certain sales behaviours impact conversions more than others.

For instance, training staff members to greet customers individually as they enter the store may, over time, lead to improved sales. Conversely, a sales associate who is stocking shelves when a customer enters, gives the impression they are too busy to provide assistance, which will adversely impact the store’s conversion rate.

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Manage Staffing Smarter

Ensuring operational tasks never compromise conversions

Retailers often make the critical mistake of adding backroom labour to the sales staff already on the shop floor. They are often required to handle activities like inventory processing, stocking, and delivery receipt during peak selling hours.

While this scheduling strategy may be appropriate for some big box retailers with constant backroom needs, most stores are better served to schedule these activities only during documented slow traffic periods. Traffic data will make it clear when utilising sales floor staff to receive shipments, restock storeroom shelves and perform inventory duties will not compromise the stores sales opportunities.

Implementing these steps helps to stretch the retailer’s labour budget while still maintaining the highest possible levels of customer service – especially important for small footprints with caps on how many associates can be on the floor. Employee breaks can be carefully scheduled with the same aim of preserving customer service at key times of the day.

End-of-the-day planning could also be improved in many stores. If retailers take a close look at their data, they might notice that sales and conversion rate normally drop off dramatically in the last hour of trading. But is this because traffic has waned, or because staff are distracted?

Store managers and staff often begin their daily closing tasks while the store is still open and, in many instances, while customers are still in the store. This type of activity sends the customer a message that their business is not important, and consequently, sales are lost. This problem can be avoided with smart scheduling, making sure there is still customer service cover, even at the close of the trading day. Conversely, if a store habitually has little or no traffic in the hour prior to close, then a store manager may make the decision to carry out operational tasks and close on time. This might prove to be more time-efficient, and a popular policy with staff who love to leave work on time, rather than feel obliged to carry out after hours work. Either way, traffic data can inform the right decisions, store by store.

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Making best use of your Sprinters and Marathoners

In retail, stores do well if employee teams are made up of both ‘Sprinters’ and ‘Marathoners’. With traffic data you can determine when to schedule these different types of retail sales professionals, to best commercial effect.

The Sprinter will typically deal with multiple customers, and offer solid branded service experience. They will close the sale down quickly. The Marathoner is slower to build, will take time to show many different product options, and will focus on only one customer at a time.

Scheduling based on skillset will ensure the right employee types are available at the right time, in the right department, and able to maximise every opportunity. It’s also possible to develop training for these employee types, with traffic in mind. For instance, Sprinters can be trained in core product selling techniques ready for peak trading time such as Christmas or Mother’s Day. Marathoners could benefit from detailed product training, with a view to spending a long time with shoppers when traffic is low, and longer dwell times are more likely to lead to conversions.

Retailers are discovering that providing associates with a greater understanding of what traffic means can be empowering and engaging for store teams. Buying into traffic as a core element of professional retailing can help store associates gain job satisfaction and career rewards, as they see their store improve over time.

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Support your people with accurate shopper traffic informationStore staff are your revenue generators, and while we do see automation and self-checkout today, people remain the lifeblood of physical retail. Successful brick-and-mortar retailers such as Apple, Swarovski, Levi’s and Lego are notable examples of how investing in associates can grow the bottom line and create positive morale among employees.

While labour optimisation strategies are simple in concept, they cannot be properly implemented without detailed shopper traffic information. Syncing labour to traffic and conversion rate proves that retailers do not necessarily need to spend more to reap improved sales and conversion rate; rather, they must simply manage their labour more efficiently.

A well-managed, highly engaged store employee team can have a significant impact on conversion rate and customer experience. The fact that a 1% or 2% improvement in this number can yield a 4% to 10% increase in sales revenue makes labour optimisation through traffic even harder to ignore.

This, combined with traffic data’s intuitive nature, ease of use, and ability to help executives make the most informed labour decisions, make it a tool that every retailer needs in order to excel in an increasingly competitive retail environment.

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Retail Intelligence Series

Contact us today for a consultation on how to apply traffic data to labour and boost efficiency and profit.

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