What does the perfect store walk look like?

What’s the problem?

I was in the car with a District Leader. In one hand he was looking at “the bookbinder”, a printout of hundreds of pages of some of the core trading data for their 10 stores annotated with pen marks everywhere. In the other was a clipboard with a form filled with what looked like 100 or so questions.

“Is everything ok?” I asked the DM who was clearly stressed. 

“It’s just so much information and it’s only getting more,” he said. “How am I supposed to easily figure out what I’m to focus on here?”

This conversation, and many like it, was one of the earliest foundations of why we started Quorso.

Today, I’ll sit in a car with a DM and instead of book binders and clipboards, it’ll be tablets with business intelligence and digital checklists. The paper saving is apparent but the information overload and confusion is, if anything, worse.

The two core objectives of a store walk.

A store walk, performed by any Field Leader from Store Leader all the way to C-Suite should have two core objectives.

1. To assess the standards and performance of the store against company objectives 
2. To coach the team on how to improve those standards and performance.

So a perfect store walk is a combination of both Quantitative and Qualitative data.

The Quantitative – targeted data insights and follow up

In a perfect store walk a Field Leader is prepared with the list of 5-10 actionable items that will most readily improve performance of the business. Getting to those actionable insights shouldn’t require filtering through hundreds of data points but rather:

1. Be readily surfaced at an actionable level – talking about sales being X% down isn’t actionable. Instead, focus on a promotion that isn’t laid out properly, on-shelf availability in a section impacted by replenishment cycles, or improving attachment rates for associates X, Y, and Z. Data needs to be at the level which is insightful and actionable to drive improvement.
2. Be capable of capturing actions and follow up – too much in retail is fixing the latest fire every week and not looking at progress. Actions must be able to be logged and measured so that every week teams can see whether their actions are having an impact.

The Qualitative – dynamic surveys

Not everything in a store can be captured cleanly by data for example; greetings standards & cleanliness, are not easily recorded.

In a perfect store walk, rather than a list of 150+ pre-set questions that get skimmed through without enough attention, each question in a dynamic survey should be triggered by importance. 

1. Deep dive based on relevance – if either the data or field leader sees the store is clean, ask one not ten questions about it. Dive deeper when the data or initial assessment requires it.
2. Trigger follow-up based on answers – surveys aren’t just there for surveys sake. They must have the ability to trigger the right follow-up actions to people either in or outside the store.

Is this even achievable?

For those in the world of business intelligence and digital checklists, you may be asking is this even achievable? 

To achieve the perfect store walk requires a mixture of deep personalized analytics, combined with intuitive workflows, rather than just leaving the Field Leader to do it all themselves. 

Luckily it’s something Field Leaders at over 40k stores in the US are using daily, powered by tools like Quorso not just saving them but driving deep impact as well.