Retail execution teams can make or break a company’s success.
So, maintaining efficiency and staying reactive is key when it comes to merchandising operations. To this end, what worries and woes keep field teams up at night?
One top field team fear is the possibility of a communication breakdown. Imagine the absence of real-time communication among field teams, managers and executives, and the accompanying poor flow of information and intelligence. This would mean an unclear picture of at-hand data collection and uncertainty about an implemented tactic’s efficacy.
Related to the fear of a communication breakdown is the prospect of inflexible reporting—that is, a lack of streamlined, instant and adaptable data metrics. This all goes back to the need for field teams to remain flexible and reactive. If a chart, graph or form can’t be changed and updated with the simple and intuitive click of a button, field teams will be unable to maintain an accurate view of the rapid movements and changes in retail data. Furthermore, field team reps are dispatched to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of different retail locations. Each location often has unique characteristics and planograms that require data entry customization. If reports are rigid, reps will be forced to enter information that does not 100-percent accurately represent their findings in the field. This, of course, can lead to significant misrepresentation of insights and intelligence.
Another prevailing field team woe is lacking the mobile technology necessary to do the essential work of real-time data collection. A field team that relies on legal pads and excel spreadsheets is a burdened, unfocused field team. Such tedious and manual methods of data collection set field teams back and obstruct a sophisticated understanding of the retail landscape, making the report sharing and data accuracy extremely challenging. Read more about the drawbacks of spreadsheets for field team data collection here.
At GoSpotCheck, we offer cutting-edge mobile data collection technology that alleviates such field team woes, ensuring accurate retail execution data and analysis in real time to provide powerful, actionable insights. Our app structures field team data by location and renders immediate visibility. And our flexible reporting system allows you to generate custom reports and share them with a simple click; so it’s farewell inefficiency, and hello field team productivity!
