Reducing Costs with Surveys - AccuStore

How surveys can pinpoint waste and improve efficiencies.

Retailers often invest extra time, resources and manpower (money!) when they don’t have accurate data from the field. When your retail organization has an accurate profile of every store, you can eliminate guesswork in determining store needs, improve maintenance scheduling and ensure that you only purchase the exact equipment, fixtures and marketing materials that your stores need. This improved efficiency reduces wasteful overages and unnecessary spending.

In addition to on-site surveys, there are also online survey applications you can use to create and distribute surveys to store personnel to quickly gather specific store-level information and ongoing updates to keep the original survey data and site profiles accurate. You can visually confirm the accuracy of your responses with a simple photo to help you raise the bar on execution and compliance audits. The online survey tool can also sync with your database to eliminate the tedious compiling of manual data into spreadsheets.

Opportunities to Pinpoint Waste

Mergers and Acquisitions. There are several different types of in-store opportunities for surveys. Soon after new store acquisitions or mergers is a great time to capture architectural and equipment details to create initial site profiles for each location—and to ensure accurate data for efficient execution in store going forward.

Marketing Material Overage. Conducting surveys to help pinpoint marketing material waste at each location is another survey opportunity. These surveys can capture POP details, such as the specific number of sign types, hardware components and dimensions of each graphic insert frame. This key data will help to pinpoint and reduce unnecessary overage before the next marketing campaign roll out—and to ensure only the exact quantity each store needs ships.

Fixturing Assessment. Another opportunity for surveys is fixturing assessment for inventory to determine if there are enough fixtures for each store layout and to also assess whether or not the number of fixtures are sufficient for the level of product and inventory at each location. And if there are sufficient quantities to accommodate extra inventory for the holiday season.

Equipment Maintenance. Capturing accurate equipment details cannot only help reduce capital expenditure, but also track and improve maintenance scheduling by reducing the number of maintenance visits for servicing equipment. In addition, it’s important to conduct facility compliance and safety audits on a regular basis to protect your stores and your brand.

Developing the Survey

Once you’ve determined the data you need, the next step is developing the survey. To ensure accuracy of the site data collected at each retail location, the survey team should first complete a business needs analysis and determine use cases with key company stakeholders. They will then conduct on-site walk-throughs to specify and refine all survey terminology, measurement details and customized data points upfront.

Once the final survey specifications are set, the surveyors will begin the comprehensive collection of survey data and digital photos at each site location. It’s important to also have project status meetings for ongoing client communication throughout the survey process. Utilizing this approach will lead to seamless on-site survey execution at each location—and a complete, accurate set of store profile data.

SEE ALSO: AccuStore professional on-site surveys