How Does a Retail Audit Work?

In today’s ever competitive consumer world, businesses are forced to balance an extremely delicate set of variables. You need to ensure that you are following best practices, meeting customer needs and following any overriding strategy without losing touch with what’s going on at ground level. This can feel like an impossible task, but there is a clear solution. A retail audit can help a business adjust and correct preemptively so that it can avoid potential hits to its reputation or bottom line. This post will explain how a retail audit works.

What Is A Retail Audit?

A retail store audit is a complete health check on your retail store. Your auditor conducts various studies that produce a robust checklist on all the different facets of your ground business. With this information you are able to ensure you are compliant, see if there are inefficiencies or opportunities in your retail business and see potential dangers long before they affect your reputation or bottom line.

How A Retail Audit Works: The Process

Goals

You begin the process by setting clear goals for the audit itself. Do you want to see how you compare to competitors? Or perhaps you want to understand the systems your employees have to use. Either way, you need to know why you're having an audit.

Schedule The Audit

The audit can either be announced to the public, such as in anticipation of a strategy implementation, or done secretly, to capture the reality of what happens in the store without allowing for preparation. The audit itself needs to be planned and all criteria that you hope to measure needs to be prepared (this includes any surveys you intend to use)

Conduct The Audit

This will either be done by a store audits specialist or by a middle manager. The process should be comprehensive and start from the outside before proceeding with the Compliance Audits in the UK. The pathways for the audit should be prepared so that everything can be done smoothly. Auditors may use tools such as devices, photo taking and even special auditing SAAS products.

Develop An Action Plan

It’s not enough to analyse, you need to act. Once the audit is complete, the data that has been extrapolated should be used to develop a targeted action plan. Issues brought up in the store compliance survey should be targeted with priority.

Report

Once the audit is complete and an action plan is prepared, a report is drawn up for corporate headquarters. Now they will be able to put the action plan in practice and develop a better strategy moving forward.

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insidetracks Joined: November 9th, 2020