Your questions answered.

Quorso is being trialed with a select group of Stores so we can better understand how Quorso works at Tractor Supply Company.

• Typical tools provide a historical look into the past and force you to conduct research and make conclusions without providing a baseline of performance of similar Stores, meaning the actions you decide to take may not yield the best result or you may be drawn to areas where there is no or little opportunity for performance improvement.
• Meanwhile Quorso looks at everything, analyzes countless rows of data, and directs your attention to the granular actions that could best improve those metrics. Basically, Quorso gives you personalized suggestions where significant performance opportunities are available.
• Quorso then tracks the performance of accepted Missions to show you the performance change against the comparison group to allow you to celebrate success and continuously learn what actions that you take make an impact to Store performance.
• Read more about how Quorso augments BI and other platforms here.

To make the comparison fair, Quorso only compares you to other stores with similar attributes like operating models, customer demographics, climatological conditions, and others. Therefore, if you receive a Mission, it is because your current sales for that product or category are lower than would be expected considering these attributes.

Remember…we also take other factors into account and can continue to enhance these over times to ensure that you are being compared fairly.

Accept a mission when you are going to take a specific action to improve right now, which you want Quorso to track. You will then be guided through a simple workflow that will help you launch your mission.

Reject a mission when you are NOT able to take action at this time, or if there is a reason no action is required. There is no harm in rejecting a mission.

The activity tab shows you all missions within this KPI. The same ones also appear on your Mission Control screen, where they are organised by most recent.

Beneath the summary of the Mission item and location, there is a label to indicate the status of the opportunity. 

‘Live Mission’ – the Responsible user has logged an action to improve this opportunity, which Quorso is tracking. You can click into the tile to view their action. 

‘Incoming Mission’ – this opportunity has been prioritized and sent to the Mission Inbox of the relevant responsible user for them to launch a Mission, however, they haven’t accepted or snoozed/rejected it yet. 

‘Rejected Mission’ – this opportunity was snoozed or rejected by the Responsible user, meaning they have elected not to take a specific action to improve it at this time. You can click into the tile to view their reason.

No label – the opportunity was not prioritized to be sent to the Mission Inbox this week, nor does it have a live or rejected Mission associated with it. Contributor users can click on these opportunities and send them to the Mission Inbox of the relevant responsible user themselves, with an optional comment. 

Within this KPI, Quorso has scanned through your data to find the areas where you can improve. These are all of the potential missions within this KPI. Quorso prioritizes them for you and picks out the top few to focus on each week, across all KPIs, which it sends to your Mission Inbox.

Opportunities are ranked based on a ‘Quorso score’ that combines:

1. The size of the opportunity i.e. the potential improvement that could be made
2. How far outside the expected range the performance is (the variance), i.e. how likely it is that an easy fix can be made

This is perhaps a new way of thinking that prompts you to look at where to find the ‘easiest’ dollars, as well as the biggest ones.

The graph displays your trend over time. Hover over the points to see the date range and actual in that period. To look at your performance relative to other stores in your organisation, toggle on ‘Peers’ above the chart. This will bring up the quartiles of performance, so you can see where you sit and whether your performance has been going up and down in line with everyone else. 

There may also be an option to toggle on your budget, target or last year’s performance.

For the specific KPI that you are looking at, your rank among all of the other stores in your organization is displayed. No normalization or calculation has occurred here. You can also see whether you have moved up or down the leaderboard since the last data upload took place. You will only see your own store(s).

The four tabs along the top of the screen give you the information you need to assess what’s going on with this KPI, and where you should focus your attention. In other words, Quorso is both a report that presents the facts and a prioritisation machine that takes the tricky analysis out of your day!

Click into a KPI to gather more information on where you are now and what to focus on to improve. You might want to focus on the KPIs that require the most improvement, identified by the colour of the star icon showing your rank out of all stores. The deep red ones are where you are performing the worst.

This is your structured hierarchy of all of the data coming into Quorso. You can come here to find any workpane you want to look at, but clicking through the levels of the hierarchy until you find the category, subcategory or item you want to look at. You can then write a mission (or send the item as a mission to the person responsible for it). This will appear in your Live column on Mission Control, as normal.

You can also use the P&L Explorer like a sales report, as it displays actuals for the previous week on every row.

If you want a long-list of every opportunity Quorso has found for you, without them being ordered by KPI (as they are in your KPI drill-down) or prioritised into the top list (as they are in your Mission Inbox each week), you can come to the P&L Explorer and switch the drop-down to ‘Biggest Opportunities’.

As part of the set-up process, your central or ops team has defined which data sources they want to bring into Quorso and which KPIs are critical for you to manage your business. The data displayed is for your business – if you manage one store, it will be data only for that store, if you oversee a number of stores, you will have an aggregated view and can filter using the button in the top right. 

Each KPI tile displays, at a glance:

• Your actual trend over time (and a budget or target line where applicable)
• Where you rank among other stores in your organisation and whether you are have moved up or down the leaderboard since the last data upload (if you manage multiple stores, this will display how many of your stores are performing below average)
• How many live missions you or your team is working on to impact this KPI, and whether those are driving improvement or going backwards.

Quorso’s KPI dashboard brings all of your KPIs into one place, accessible remotely from your device. Data will refresh daily or weekly, depending on your company’s upload cadence. Unlike a traditional BI tool, Quorso lets you drill all the way down into a KPI from top to bottom to understand where specific issues are and exactly where you should take targeted action to improve, then back up again by linking the day-to-day improvement actions you are taking with the top-level KPI performance as they work to turn the dial.

At the start of your week, you might sort your Team screen by lowest performing KPIs or Missions to see which managers need particular coaching. Starting with the person on the top left, click into the tile to see what missions are in their inbox (i.e. what they should be focusing on this week), what missions they have live and how those are performing. Click into any of the live or incoming missions to do some analysis of the screen (looking at the chart and Insights Explorer) and leave them a comment with suggestions of what they should investigate or what action they should take.

In the top right corner of the screen, there are options to search for a person by name. 

You can also filter by role type (e.g. if you are a Regional Manager, both District Managers and store managers will appear on your screen. District manager tiles display a roll-up of stats for their team.) 

Finally, you can sort the tiles by any of the attributes displayed on the tiles. This allows you to decide which manager/store to speak to or visit first, depending on the performance of their will (logins, number of missions) or skill (KPI performance, mission performance).

Each user tile contains a number of stats: 

• Number of incoming missions – how many missions are in the user’s Mission Inbox, not yet addressed
• Days or months since the user last logged in
• Number of of live missions – missions that this person is actively working on
• Status of live missions – green=improving, red=going backwards, grey=just launched
• KPIs – how many KPIs this person looks after and how they are currently performing vs target or peers

The Team screen is especially designed for people managers. It gives you all the information you need to have productive 1-2-1 conversations with members of your team, remotely or during a store visit, without having to do any analysis or preparation yourself.

Accept or reject this mission, depending on whether you are able to take an action to improve its performance. Once you have submitted your mission, it will move to the ‘Live’ column back on Mission Control. After the next data upload, the tile will display how much it has improved by!

Your improvement is how much you have closed the performance gap to the normalized peer average versus what it was when you launched the mission. In other words, how you much have reduced your starting opportunity value.

This is something that people often get wrong. Remember, it is ok to reject a mission!

Accept a mission when you are going to take a specific action to improve right now, which you want Quorso to track. You will then be guided through a simple workflow that will help you launch your mission.

Reject a mission when you are NOT able to take action at this time, or if there is a reason no action is required. There is no harm in rejecting a mission.

The button above the chart takes you to a more granular deep-dive into the data. This is designed to help you take really targeted action that gets to the heart of any issues driving low performance. 

Switch between the views in the first dropdown to see different breakdowns. The second dropdown allows you to see your actual values of your variance to peers. Notice that the heatmap colours stays the same when you switch these, telling you where you should focus your attention most (the deepest red). The third dropdown allows you to switch between the previous 1 week or the previous 4 weeks averaged, so you can decipher whether an issue is a one-off or recurring.

The black line of the chart is your actual performance on this item over time. The background colours represent the four quartiles of performance across the peerset, which are the same-format stores in your organisation that you are being compared to. You can see whether your trend goes up and down in line with the rest of the group of stores. 

Where the light green meets the light pink is the adjusted average for the peer group. Hover over the points on the actual line to see the values of each data point in that week. 

Yes, for items where Quorso is comparing your performance relative to peer median, Quorso’s calculation takes into account external factors that may impact your performance.

Here is an example, using a normalizing factor of the item’s parent category sales.

My store (Store A) sells $20 of Strawberries for every $100 Soft Fruit (20%). On average, Stores B-K sell $25 Strawberries for every $100 Soft Fruit (25%). In this example, I’m underperforming vs my peers by $5 (5%).

Let’s look at 3 different scenarios to show how Quorso accounts for impact of exceptional events on missions: 

• My store is near a college campus and the students have gone home for vacation: Let’s say footfall in my store drops and, as a result, Soft Fruit sales decline by 50% and Strawberry sales also decline. However, on inspection I can see that Strawberries still make up 10% of Soft Fruit sales. If all things stayed the same with my peer group, (e.g., their Strawberry sales stayed at 15% of Soft Fruit sales) then although I have seen a physical reduction in sales and traffic, my proportion of item sales, relative to the normalizing factor, when compared to my peers, would remain the same.
• A public holiday is driving up traffic in all Stores: Let’s say Stores B-K experience increased customer traffic and Soft Fruit sales and similarly, my Strawberry sales also increase. However, provided that Strawberry sales in those stores still only account for 15% of Soft Fruit sales, and if all things stayed the same with my store (i.e., my Strawberry sales stay at 10% of Soft Fruit sales) then although stores B-K have seen a physical increase in sales, my proportion of item sales, relative to the category parent, compared to my peers is still the same. 
• I run a local promotion on strawberries, while others do not: Let’s say my store doubles its share of Strawberry sales to 20% of Soft Fruit sales. If all things remained equal with my peer group, then relative to peers, I am now outperforming them by 5% which in this case equates to a sales uplift of $10. This is a successful mission.

On a Mission workpane, click on ‘vs. X Stores’ above the chart on the workpane. 

The field ‘Scaler Settings’ tells you what factor is being used. 

The workpane in the example shown is for Grab’n’Go Breakfast Sales. Sales of Breakfast items are being normalised by the sales of the category it belongs to, which is Grab’n’Go (as an overall category). 

Quorso is, therefore, telling this user that, if every other comparable store had the same sales in their Grab’n’Go category as them, the average Breakfast sales is $512 per week higher than what they are achieving. 

The ‘peer variance’ is the same as the ‘opportunity’. Quorso adjusts the parent category sales performance of all of the other same-format stores (your ‘peer group’) to reflect yours, then averages their performance on THIS item. The difference between your actual performance and the average (in the latest week shown on the chart) is your opportunity, or peer variance.

This screen is called the Mission workpane. All of the information here pertains to the category or item written at the top. The purpose of this screen is to give you all the information you need to diagnose any issues that are causing low performance.

Click into one of your incoming Missions to go to the workpane. This is where you can access all of the information you need to help diagnose any issues that are causing low performance.

Click on the button that says ‘All my stores’ in the top right of the screen.

Click the drop-down arrow by ‘Location’ to filter by area/region, or filter by store attribute in each of the dropdowns beneath it. If you want to look at one individual store, use the dropdown at the very bottom.

Your Missions will move across the columns on your Mission Control screen as you work on them. If you start Accepting or Rejecting a Mission but don’t submit it, it will move to ‘Pre-Launch’ in a draft status. 

Once you accept a Mission and finish logging your action, it will move into ‘Live’. Each week, after a data upload, the Mission tile will display your improvement since the Mission was launched. 

After the Mission duration has ended (by default, 4 weeks), the Mission will move to Archive. It will stay here for future reference, with the improvement made over its lifetime. In the background, Quorso continues to measure the performance of the item for another 4-8 weeks and will report on any erosion of improvement since the Mission ended.

This is the difference between your actual performance last week and the average of the stores you are being compared to, after adjustments have been made to level the playing field (explained in the section above). In other words, this is the extra that you need to achieve each week in order to close the gap to the average for this category, sub-category or product. When you accept a Mission, the target amount to be driven by your Mission will default to this (as a weekly value).

Quorso does a lot of clever analysis to make sure it is surfacing real opportunities for you. 

For each individual category, subcategory and product, Quorso compares your performance to other same-format stores (e.g. same style, location or with the same space allocation to individual products) and measures how far you are from the average.

To make it a level playing field, the performance of all of the other stores that you are being compared to is first adjusted up or down to reflect your circumstances. This is based on the revenue of the parent category for whichever sub-cat or product we are looking at.

For example, you’ve received a Mission on an item you sell – let’s say Biscuits. Quorso has looked at how many biscuits you sell as a proportion of the product’s parent category – Dry Goods. It has then compared it to how many biscuits the other stores are selling, as a proportion of their Dry Goods and taken an average. This is like saying, if all other same format stores sold the same amount of Dry Goods as you, how many Biscuits are they selling? 

The variance between your performance and this average, is the ‘opportunity’. Your Missions are your top 3-5 opportunities that week.

This is where your Incoming Missions will sit. These are opportunities that Quorso has surfaced and prioritised for you, as well as any that your Ops Leaders may have actively sent to you. 

You should focus effort this week on improving these, which will, in turn, positively impact your overall KPI performance.

Each week, Quorso gives you a number of new improvement opportunities as Missions. These are personal to your store.

For each of these Missions, you will look at the data in Quorso and investigate the product or category on the fixture to identify any potential issues that may be resulting in worse performance. You can then accept the Mission to log an action that you are going to take to resolve the issue, or reject it to snooze that mission for a set duration on time. Where you have accepted a Mission, Quorso will track the impact that your action is having each week.

Mission Control is where you will manage your incoming Missions and those with a live action. Your previous Missions are also stored here, to refer back to. 

Yes it does. Quorso adjusts the sales of the group of stores you’re being compared to, in order to take account of things like customer traffic and customer demographics. It does this by looking at the performance of the product area that you have received a Mission on, relative to the performance of its parent category sales. Here’s an example:

My store (Store A) sells $10 of bandanas, which accounts for 10% of the Accessories category sales ($100). On average, Stores B-K (with the same Accessories range & space) sell $15 for every $100. In this example, I’m underperforming vs my peers by $5 (5%). Let’s look at 3 different scenarios to show how Quorso accounts for the impact of exceptional events on Missions:

• Storm Uri hits and this is driving down footfall in my store: Let’s say store A footfall drops and as a result Accessories sales decline by 50%, and bandanas also decline. However, on inspection, I can see they still account for 10% of Dog Clothing sales. If all things stayed the same with my peer group, (e.g. their sales of bandanas stayed at 15% of Accessories sales) then although I have seen a physical reduction in sales and footfall, my proportion of item sales, relative to the category parent, when compared to my peers, would remain the same.
• It’s the Super Bowl and this is driving up sales in other stores but not mine: Let’s say stores B-K experience a doubling of footfall and Accessories sales, and similarly, my bandanas sales also increase. However provided that bandanas still only account for 15% of Accessories sales and if all things stayed the same with my store (e.g. my sales of bandanas stayed at 10% of Accessories sales) then although stores B-K have seen a physical increase in sales, my proportion of item sales, relative to the category parent, compared to my peers is still the same.
• My store runs a specific NFL promotion in support of Super Bowl: Let’s say my store doubles its share of bandana sales to 20% of Accessories. If all things remained equal with my peer group, then relative to peers, I am now outperforming them by 5% which in this case equates to a sales uplift of $10. This is a Successful Mission.

In the same way, Quorso takes account of the impact that Covid-19 has had on footfall in different areas.

Yes it does. To make the comparison fair, Quorso only compares you to other same-format stores, and those that have the same shelf space allocated to the product area in question, relative to the category to which it belongs (e.g. Mushroom Soup accounts for 10% of the space allocated to Soups). Therefore, if you receive a Mission, it is because your current sales for that product or category are lower than would be expected considering your shelf space.

Remember…we also take other factors into account, like store revenue and customer traffic, to ensure you’re being compared fairly.

When you get a suggested Mission, you should try and understand why this suggestion has been sent to you. Once you have investigated the potential root-causes, you need to decide whether or not there is something you can do to fix the problem and drive improvement. If there is, accept the Mission and log your proposed action.

If there is nothing you can do, you should choose to reject the Mission. That might be because it’s not something that can be fixed in store, or it’s an availability issue that you can’t control, or you’ve investigated it and can’t find any issue.

If you choose not to take action, it’s important to reject the Mission. If you do not, Quorso will try to measure and track the impact of something you have not done.

A Mission is a specific sales improvement opportunity that Quorso has found for your store, and is the suggested area that you should focus on this week to improve overall sales performance. You can do this by choosing to ‘accept’ a Mission.

Quorso identifies Missions by crunching through all of your sales data each week, and finding areas where your store has an opportunity to improve based on how it’s performing vs all of the other stores. Even if these stores vary in size, revenue, and popularity, our calculations level the playing field. To make the comparisons fair, Quorso will:

1. Only compare you to stores that have the same format as you.
2. Only compare you to stores that have the same shelf space allocated to the particular product a Mission relates to, relative to its category (e.g. Mushroom Soup accounts for 10% of the space allocated to Soups).
3. Adjust sales values of the comparison stores to factor out differing store revenues and customer traffic. This will even take into account exceptional events, like storms, local holidays, or Covid restrictions.

Yes! Should you require our support to deploy Quorso, we would be happy to discuss the addition of supplementary professional services. You can contact our Customer Success team via Support@Quorso.com.

Successfully executing a change often requires visible support from key people. We therefore recommend that you identify stakeholders in the Central, Finance or Operations teams who may be impacted by the change or who’s buy-in will help encourage your users to adopt it. Our suggested method of engaging these stakeholders is to send them comms to make them aware of the change and to share your vision, then to hold 1-2-1 or group meetings to explain and discuss the benefits of the project.

Our Deployment Guide details three roll-out options. Depending on your circumstances and requirements, you can choose one option, or conduct a phased roll-out that encompasses them all. 

The first is to roll out Quorso to a small central team, who share opportunities with frontline managers via email or social channels.  

The second is to roll out Quorso to Area Coaches, who manage their areas’ KPIs in Quorso and log improvement plans that they have discussed with their Site Managers. 

The third is to roll out to the Area Coaches and the Site Managers, all of whom collaborate on managing KPIs and logging/reviewing improvement plans in Quorso.

Not a lot. Our deployment guide, which you can link to above, lays out the key steps that we recommend you take. 

Our suggestion is that you set up a small project team to help you develop and communicate your vision for using Quorso, then once you have defined your user group and deployment approach, it is a case of creating and sustaining momentum through a series of comms and follow-up calls to a sub-group of users. 

As well as being a tool for managers to use on a daily basis to manage the performance of their business areas, Quorso is intended to slot into your existing performance management processes as a platform to enhance business review meetings, line manager 1-2-1s, site visits, etc. It is, therefore, easier to embed Quorso into the organisation if these processes are already established. If senior members of your organisation are using Quorso to run their meetings, this also provides strong advocacy to encourage more junior managers to adopt the tool.

Yes! The beauty of Quorso is that it has a lot of highly intelligent analytics going on “under the hood”. The simple, easy-to-understand user interface that sits on top means that users can easily interpret what Quorso is telling them. The short training clips on this page are all users need to learn the ins and outs of Quorso.

As a customer of Quorso, you remain in control of your data and data about your users. When you remove users from your Quorso instance, their data will be removed from Quorso’s databases within 30 days. If you wish to delete a Quorso user’s account data, our Data Engineering team has a process to permanently anonymize the data. If you would like Quorso to delete your customer data or Quorso user account detail, please send an email to privacy@quorso.com.

Our data security program is designed to ensure that the policies, controls and processes are appropriate to the type of personal data and data processing collected. You can find our security policy here.

Quorso-hosted instances are hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS). By default, Quorso hosts in the AWS UK region, but at the customer’s request, we can host in various other regions.

Yes. We retain basic User contact information to communicate with our customers and their users about product and security updates, relevant marketing, training and events.

Quorso, as a Data Processor, holds two classes of data: information about Quorso Users and the customer data necessary to facilitate insights and activity tracking within the app.

Information about Quorso Users includes end-user login/registration account information for Quorso Users plus metadata about their usage of Quorso.

Metadata is used to facilitate product improvements, customer support and license auditing.

Login information is controlled by customers directly as it is entered on their Quorso Q-Admin instance and they can delete their Quorso Users’ (i.e. their employees’) information at any time.

We retain basic user account information, which includes contact information used to send product updates, relevant marketing, training and events based on the users’ contact preferences.

For more information on how we collect and use personal data, find our privacy policy here.

Find them here.

Customers or prospects may request the Quorso DPA directly from your account executive.

• Yes, absolutely. You can steer Quorso’s Opportunities to align with or to prioritize company initiatives, campaigns, promotions, etc.
• You can also integrate Quorso with your BI tool, combining the charts you love with the actions that will improve them.
• Learn more about using Quorso to enhance your existing tech stack here.

• Typical BI tools focus on 7-8 relatively high-level metrics which present a summary snapshot of your business. Quorso looks at everything, and directs your attention to the granular actions that could best improve those metrics.
• BI tools are great for watching what is happening, but they do not take, track or measure action, so they do not deliver tangible improvements that can be scaled over time.
• Read more about how Quorso augments BI and other platforms here.

• Quorso fits seamlessly within your existing operational management process, with no need
  for changes.
• Most Store Managers review Quorso on a Monday instead of, or alongside, their existing management information. They see how their existing plans are progressing, and then typically write a further 2-3 plans.
• Regional managers then review new plan proposals, providing coaching as required.

• Without Quorso, most front line managers typically spend six hours a week planning how to improve. With Quorso this only takes approximately one hour per week.
• Regional managers use Quorso to streamline their weekly performance check-ins, so they use Quorso for 2-3 hours per week.

• 3-4 weeks, once we receive your data.
• Includes two days of your Data Lead – the rest is done by Quorso.
• You can learn more about implementing Quorso here.

• Quorso has pre-built connectors to dozens of the most popular data systems – and we are adding more all the time. See our full list of integrations here.
• Our proprietary data pipeline enables us to automatically ingest data of any type, format, volume, and frequency.