Over the past years, retailers and merchandisers have started to seize on-demand individuals to get accurate and quality data to take more informed business decisions.
Crowdsourcing provides immediacy and has become valuable to producers and retailers; in fact, retailers have so much to gain when talking about collecting real-time insights inside the stores.
Here are some reasons why you, as a retailer, should step into Crowdsourcing:
1. Availability
We know the goal is to avoid out-of-stock situations at all times, as they inevitably bring sales and customer retention losses. However, ensuring an adequate quantity of stock that's in-date and proactively replenished to avoid empty shelves, especially during peak trading times and weekends, is challenging for any business.
Luckily, activating a Crowd of shoppers is the best tool to gather data in real-time regarding OSA and OOS situations, allowing retailers to take quick decisions and immediate action to improve distribution, moving from a fixed-based resource to a task-based resource.
2. Store Performance and Compliance
As the retail landscape gets more and more complex and competitive, with shoppers being more demanding by the hour and new trends emerging all the time, retailers need to be well-equipped to perform in-store audits, measuring compliance and thus delivering consistency throughout every single store.
Relying on a crowd that provides you with eyes on the ground in every corner of the country is a perfect solution to ensure planogram compliance and share of shelf per SKU or brand.
Attractive shelves with neatly faced products and improved promotional compliance lead to increased turnover, ROI and satisfied customers who keep coming back for more.
3. Customer experience
There is a shopper path to purchase; although complex, understanding it and assessing the elements that affect success from a customer point-of-view is very important to increase customer satisfaction and keep the customer experience consistent.
Conducting mystery shopping programs through crowdsourcing to perform under-the-radar customer audits is one of the best ways to gain customer insights and measure the services provided.
The concept is straightforward: mystery shoppers go undercover to check on several in-store elements, such as store cleanliness and organization, friendliness and helpfulness of employees, presence of promotional materials and quality of the overall experience. Then the shoppers report their insights and provide feedback, allowing retailers a quick overview of stores' performance.
4. Competition
Retail is one of the most competitive industries; meeting the customers' needs while slaying the competition and staying relevant in the market can be intricate and requires lots of work. Thus, collecting intel and understanding how competitors perform in terms of prices, promotions, and quality of service is crucial for retailers.
Crowdsourcing is a fast and cost-effective tool to assess the competition, getting insights into their strengths and weaknesses compared to yours. As a mystery shopper, the member of the crowd can gather relevant information that allows your business to create a competitive edge and evaluate and improve your own existing strategies.
Are you ready to have all agreements fulfilled, have an improved ROI of your TEAM and have a clear brand overview to accelerate in-store experience and sales simultaneously? Then, get in touch with us
