Running Retail Compliance Audits in the UK

With all the other frustrations in life, the last thing your customers need after a long week at work is to enter your store and fail to find what they want quickly. Analysis has shown that people who have a fixed idea of what they want to buy, will give up very after a few minutes if they can’t find what they want, and will head to another store to try there. Customers, it seems, tend to be very focused when they want something in particular, and are apt to a short attention span. If they want something in particularly, nothing else will do.

If the customer has entered your store to purchase something then they should be able to find it quickly. Unless they know how your store is laid out, signage will play a huge part in this on a macroscopic level, but once the customer arrives in the right place, they need help on a more microscopic level. This is where the power of retail audits come in their own.

If you are smart, you will have a field merchandising team who will help build your store to maximise the customer buying experience. They will carry out a number of subtle but necessary tasks to ensure that those entering your store have the best experience and are able to do the shopping that they want quickly and without any kind of hinderance. They will:

• Be responsible for product layout in store.
• Ensure that products are positioned in the best way.
• Make the displays look appealing.
• Carry out retail audits.

While all of these tasks are very important to your store, they are a bit lost if you don’t get your team to carry out the retail audits to ensure that everything is always right. If you have stock flying off the shelf and being replenished regularly, or simply have customers browsing and replacing items out of kilter, you will need to run audits to make sure everything is right.

Retail auditors carry out some very important functions within the sector, both in store and in the wider context. While their primary role is to perform in-store audits, both standard Retail Audits and Trade Compliance Audit Services or Checks, also known as Follow Up’s in the retail industry. Since these have to be carried out on a regular basis, that makes them busy people. And then there are planograms to conform to.

Planograms are the nerve center of your sales operation; they are a visual merchandising tool that helps you visualise your store layout, with a special focus on product placement. They help you position your products so that you can maximise sales and get the most sales for the least amount of effort. This visual representation is a highly technical way of putting the products in the right place so that the maximum number of customers encounter them, and you sell them. Suddenly you are no longer leaving your sales to chance but are actively focusing on getting the most out of them.

Your retail auditor team should have a good knowledge of planograms and will be able to use them to maximum advantage of them and help plan out your store ahead of being in the best position to audit it. This is the best situation that you can hope to achieve in a retail business and one that will give you the greatest return.

In the world of selling products, it isn’t sufficient to just fill a store with goods and hope that they will fly off the shelves. If you really want to make an impact, you need to invest in your audit team and a full suite of Retail Store Audit to boost your selling area.

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insidetracks Joined: November 9th, 2020