How to Improve Retail Store Audit Effectiveness

If you are able to boost the effectiveness of your physical and mobile retail audits, there is a vast amount of time and money that you can save over time. However, once you get "stuck in a rut," it may be difficult to see the positive side or the generated results. Here are several top tips to consider if you want to improve the effectiveness of your retail audits.

Educate Your Team Members Thoroughly

Make sure that you educate and train your team members thoroughly on the process and purpose of retail audits in general. For instance, does everyone on your team know the importance of retail audits or why they are done in the first place?

It is true that completing retail audits allows field managers and representatives to have guidelines on the activities that must be completed daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or even annually. If you have retail audit software, your team needs to be trained on it before it is rolled out or shortly thereafter to prevent discontinuity, downtime or unbridled confusion among your staff.

Identify and Overcome Audit Challenges

In most cases, traditional businesses that are already tight on funds or taking the "frugal" approach to staying in business rely on old-fashioned, traditional and "manual" methods of auditing. For instance, there are still quite a few people that trust in printed forms and file cabinets instead of cloud storage solutions and Microsoft Office. Using retail merchandising software to overcome the challenges of "traditional" auditing can boost your effectiveness and efficiency much sooner than you might think.

Focus on Specific Questions

Another key point is to identify and focus on specific questions instead of broad and vague questions. For instance, if you are concerned about whether the business complies with occupational safety regulations, focus on why compliance is an issue. For instance, you could ask specific questions related to your employees, managers and the procedures and protocol put in place regarding occupational safety. For example, a solid probing question that is specific would be, "Do the existing employees receive periodic training on occupational safety regulations?" or "How are newly hired employees trained on key procedures for maintaining occupational safety?"

Embrace the Beauty of Mobile Applications

Mobile applications play an essential role in the productivity and efficiency of a vast number of businesses in today’s world, especially with the changes enforced by the digital age. Fortunately, this also means that there is a growing collection of mobile retail audit applications that can help you to take your efficiency and productivity to the next level.

Compare Stats Across Multiple Audits

Another key step to boost the effectiveness and efficiency of your retail audits is to make sure you compare your audit reports to one another. Instead of shifting all of your attention toward the current audit, you can examine trends and continuous issues that have emerged in the past by analyzing past audit reports. With efficient retail audit software, you will be able to access this data with just a few clicks and keystrokes instead of a few hours and a file cabinet.

Rajat is a Software consultant and a web developer.