Mystery Shopping
In-Sight Audits
These audits are frequently seen in the retail sector as one of the methods used by corporate organisations to pursue success. They conduct routine audits of shops to make sure they adhere to the agreements you have made.
These audits can be divided into two categories: storage audits and festive audits. While festive audits make sure that items in the promotion are priced and displayed correctly in accordance with the company’s procedure, storage audits focus on verifying pricing compliance by retailers.
Key Features In Performing storage Audits
The company’s field agents conduct these audits. A storage audit and a festive audit will both be carried out by the field representative. The following are significant considerations a field agent must make when conducting storage audits:
Product location
A field representative verifies if the merchandise is placed in the shop based on their initial agreement.
Merchandise Placement
The field agent takes note of where the items are in the store so that he or she can figure out what marketing strategies should be used to compete with other brands.
Market Facing
Various research has shown that facings can increase sales. To improve revenue, a business can think about purchasing extra facings for its brand.
Empty spaces
A field agent inspects the shelf where your products are placed to see whether there are any empty shelves. If there are, check if the shop has refilled the merchandise or if they are out of stock.
Stock not available
A field agent should verify that the products are available on the retailer's store shelves. The business should carry such stock verification audits to anticipate out-of-stock products in order to prevent them.
Key Features In Performing Festive audits
Signposts
To ensure that the majority of customers can notice or be aware of the promotions, the field agent ensures that the company's in-store advertising is showcased effectively.
Commercials
Through unique advertisements and product displays, make sure buyers are aware of where to find the products that are on discount since this will influence their decision to buy.
Staff Knowledge
Staff must be knowledgeable about the company's promotions because customers frequently ask specific questions about them.
Customer Experience Audits
From initial client acquisition and purchase to continuous involvement, the customer experience is extremely important. It is our duty to provide consumer needs in line with their expectations. Consumer experience audits also use practices, such as comparing the competition and comprehending the behavior of consumer segments, to access the consumer experience.
Important Aspects of Performing Consumer Experience Audit
- It helps in understanding business objectives as well as consumer requirements and lifestyles.
- It highlights and identifies the opportunities for your business.
- It shows your contribution at each stage of the consumer’s journey.
- It represents a future perspective on your customers' experiences.
How do we audit business endorsement programs?
The Business endorsement programme may be summed up as the store influencing the customer about their goods or services in expectation that they would make a purchase. It has been noticed that the actual buyer is open to suggestions while he is in the market for a product. There is a higher likelihood of selecting the retailer’s suggested product than others.
For example: When a customer visits an electronics store to purchase a refrigerator and he is unsure about which brand to choose he asks the salesperson to explain the features of the various brands’ refrigerators. The salesperson suggests him to buy a refrigerator from a specific brand. As each of these brands offer the store numerous incentives, discounts, promotions, and gifts in order to encourage them to recommend their brand to the customers, this is why the salesman suggested the buyer purchase a refrigerator from a particular brand. This process is called Business endorsement programs.
Why do we need Business endorsement programs?
The Business endorsement Program is put in place to see if the retailer is encouraging customers to buy a specific brand’s goods or use a specific provider’s services. Additionally, this will reveal how the merchant handles and markets the goods in the marketplace.
When buying a product on the market, it has been seen that the actual buyer is responsive to recommendations. The probability of buying the retailer’s suggested product is higher.
How do we audit business endorsement programs?
The auditor visits the store as a regular customer for the purpose of auditing the retailer suggestion. Here, the producer pays the retailer for recommendations regarding their items; therefore, the auditing is done on retailer recommendations in order to confirm whether the retailers are suggesting their products to the customer.
Merchandise Benchmarking
Merchandise Benchmarking is the process of evaluating your products with the best in the market to identify where improvements may be made. Although it may sound like competitor research, it’s not. The primary focus of Merchandise Benchmarking is on your market-relevant items.
In order to evaluate a product’s strengths and weaknesses, it is necessary to look at the market and the methods employed by market competitors. There are four steps in the product benchmarking process,
- A general knowledge of the latest best practices in the same market.
- Evaluation of the development and production processes for products.
- A comparison of your methods and products to those of other businesses in your market.
- Applying the best practises that have been discovered.
Methods for Comparing Your Products
Benchmarking a product’s performance can help it perform better. Finding the best practises and applying them to your operations and sales calls for these two things.
The basic objective of benchmarking is to gather instances of the best performance and to comprehend the procedures and practises that underpin it. When businesses fully grasp the procedure, they can boost performance by integrating these best practises into their own business activities. Making innovations out of it is more important than strictly copying the practice.
Benchmarking of Products in Four Ways
Organizationally, general, competitor, and functional benchmarking are the four basic facets of product benchmarking. The justifications for each category are as follows:
- Organizationally benchmarking is the process of evaluating one organization’s internal business operation process with that of another with a similar process. Organizationally benchmarking is the simplest sort of benchmarking to conduct and apply when compared to other types.
- In order to determine which activities are the most effective and efficient, general benchmarking involves comparing operations from unrelated industries.
- Comparing a company’s internal goods, services, procedures, or methods to those of its immediate competitors is known as competitive benchmarking. It is the most challenging to successfully complete compared to the other types of benchmarking. When performing a competitive benchmarking, you must take legal factors into account.
- Comparing a functional operation to others that are comparable to or identical to it across sectors is known as functional benchmarking. Similar to internal benchmarking, it’s usually simple to conduct research on and put into practise.
A company’s plan to increase efficiency by locating and incorporating best practises into its own processes is essentially called product benchmarking. It’s critical to compare the advantages and difficulties of each component before choosing which product benchmarking to carry out.
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