The ability to collect and analyze information about your in-store performance is invaluable. Determining the effectiveness of layouts, promotions displays, and your checkout queue can be difficult to capture. Sure, it’s possible to glean sales information from your point of sale system, but it can’t tell you a true conversion rate. How many people entered your store’s queue but left without making a purchase? Are sales down but foot traffic the same? What changed?
The answer to all these questions can be determined with people counting technology.
Step 1: Place People Counting Technology in Queue Entrances.
People counting technology can give you the missing piece of information when you’re analyzing your conversion rate. Placing it at key areas can allow you to assess specific aspects of your store. By placing people counting technology at the entrance to your queue, you’ll be able to see exactly how many people have entered your line with the intention to make a purchase.
Step 2: Combine Data with Sales Data from POS System.
Your point of sales system will be able to provide the other half of the equation—sales data. You’ll be able to determine how many people made a purchase for a given amount of time. Make sure that this time period is consistent with the length of time that your people counting technology has been capturing your queue traffic.
Step 3: Evaluate if you are Losing Business in the Queue.
If you are finding that your people counting technology is capturing more footfall than your POS system is capturing sales, you have a problem with your queue. This information can provide you with a baseline for how your queue is performing. Are lines excessively long? Are they dwindling before customers reach the checkout? As you begin making adjustments to your checkout line, you’ll now be able to compare the conversion rate to that of the original baseline to see if you are improving or not.
Step 4: Brainstorm Solutions to Solve the Problem.
There could potentially be a number of problems that are resulting in your lower-than-expected conversion rate at the queue. Do you have adequate staff to move customers through the line quickly? Using people counting technology in the entrances to your store can provide you with information on how many people are entering your store. If there appears to be high traffic with minimal staffing, you may want to consider optimizing your staffing levels. You’ll then be able to see how increasing the number of customer service representatives influences the conversion rate through your queue.
Maybe you need promotional or engaging signage throughout the line to keep customers interested. You can then measure if these promotions encourage people to complete their transaction.
You may not realize that your store has an issue with its queue until the appropriate data can be collected from people counting technology and then compared with your sales data. Operating in blissful ignorance is no way to run a successful store. Customers who enter your queue are interested in your product and want to make a purchase. Don’t let them slip away because you didn’t realize your queue was under performing.
