With the Wooqer Store Visit Report WorkApp, make your District and Regional Manages more effective with a mobile enabled App that helps them conduct quick and complete reviews, document observations made during the store visit and track non compliances to closure, effortlessly. Raise the bar and never face the same issues again.

The Current Store Visit

As a retailer, you already know how a typical Store visit happens. The Area Manager and/or Regional Manager walk into the store. A walkthrough starts with the Store Manager. The Area / Regional Manager starts making  observations. If the Store Manager is diligent, he/ she starts scribbling notes, usually on a piece of paper. Once the visit is over, the diligent Store Manager would follow through on these tasks. Meanwhile, if the process requires so, the Area Manager will get back and document the observations from the visit and publish them internally.

The Challenge

While on the face of it, all seems fine, there are several underlying challenges with the way store visits are conducted. 

1. The Store visit has happened only on paper and no one really visited the store.
2. Not all aspects of the store were reviewed during the visit.
3. The Store Manager did not take notes of the points shared by the Area Manager or if notes were taken, the context was forgotten by the time he/ she could get back to the notes and plan action.
4. The Area Manager did not take notes during the visit or did not document the observations post the visit. The visit report documented subsequently was not accurate. 
5. Different definitions of good vs bad across different Area Managers and lack of standardisation across stores.
6. The Area Manager/ Regional Manager has no feasible way to follow up on issues observed during all store visits

These challenges are important to address as they have significant business impact which if not addressed can impact team morale, customer experience and sales.

The Business Impact

When allowed to operate with these inefficiencies, the Store Visit can fail at delivering the key value propositions it is meant to leading to :

Business impact: Ineffective Area / Regional Managers

When Area / Regional Managers fail to conduct complete or consistent reviews the visit and the review conducted during the visit itself becomes ineffective. The inability to see issues through to closure leads to further loss in effectiveness even when the visit itself was well conducted and documented.

Business impact: Unresolved issues

With missed observations and the loss in context as most observations are documented post the visit, the task at hand is sometimes missed or misunderstood. This in turn leads to delayed, missed or inaccurate actions.

Business impact: Inconsistent customer experience across stores 

The inability to see actions through to closure often leads to inconsistencies across stores and needless to say, the customer experience is no longer as per the plan. 

Cultural impact – Frustrated teams

When the same issues are noted during subsequent visits, there is often a dispute around whether a particular observation was indeed made during the last visit. This leads to unnecessary friction amongst teams. This along with the ineffectiveness on account of an underlying process lead to the best team members feeling frustrated and ineffective, a completely avoidable situation.

The Perfect Store Visit

Having understood the DNA of the Store Visit and it’s underlying challenges, we have created a Store Visit WorkApp powered by Wooqer that we believe can enable you to conduct a Perfect Store Visit. Here’s a few salient features of the Wooqer Store Visit Report:

1. Geo-fencing | Geo-tracking – Allow Area Managers to open the Visit report only while at the store or track distance from store at time of submission. Know that the visit really happened
2. Date | Time capture – Automatically detect the time of form opening and submission to get visibility into the amount of time spent at the store. Get insights for improving efficiency and effectiveness.
3. Complete Visit report – The Wooqer Store Visit report WorkApp is designed in partnership with industry veterans and is designed to mimic the customer journey and cover all aspects of business including customer experience, loss prevention, performance reviews etc along with all areas within the store ranging from the entrance,  shop floor, billing counters, rest rooms all the way to the back of house. It’s complete in all respects.
4. Configurable Visit report template – Get access to the standardised Wooqer Store Visit report, a workApp designed in partnership with industry experts. Configure this to your own needs or create your own from scratch within a few minutes / hours without any technical dependence. Get complete and consistent observations.
5. Dynamic form – Allow the visit report to flow in different ways by creating dependencies within questions. For example – If a pest issue is noted, the form can expand dynamically to get more details about the pest issue. If not, no such fields come up. Nothing is missed.
6. Evidence backed – Cut down friction by documenting each observation backed with evidence. You could ask for pictures, videos, documents and even live camera clicks. No more discussions. Only facts.
7. Automated Corrective Task Management – Initiate tasks and assign them to the store or HO rep automatically on all observations indicating non compliance to SOPs. You could also enable Area Managers to initiate such tasks manually during the walkthrough or a discussion post the walkthrough. All corrective tasks whether generated automatically or manually are tracked through to closure with built in reminders to drive timely actions. Get complete visibility.
8. Auto-scoring on visits – All visit reports can be automatically scored to generate a Scorecard for each store. Measure progress to manage better. 
9. Reports & Insights – Get insights to understand the top issues across stores, identify stores that have not been visited recently, understand how many visits each Area Manager is doing and much more.

The Business Benefit

With the Perfect Store visit, businesses can expect

1. More effective Area and Store Managers – With immediate documentation of all observations, nothing is missed by either the Area Manager or the Store Manager and with auto-reminders on the corrective tasks, and visibility into progress, more actions get closed, faster.
2. More efficient Area Managers – With the observations getting documented on the move, Area managers save time invested on subsequent documentation and long drawn follow ups trying to get a status update on all observations during the visit. Time that could lead to more visits, self development, more quality time with team or even a better work life balance all while being more effective
3. Improved culture – Area Managers and Store Managers relationships become more cordial as friction goes away from the discussions with documented facts supporting all discussions. Improved effectiveness further adds to the happiness quotient.
4. Better customer experience – With more issues getting actioned timely, customers end up getting a better experience across stores
5. Better sales – With more effective and happier staff and a consistently better customer experience, sales inevitably benefits. After all that’s the reason the Store Visit Report is such an important part of the SOP.