Problems in conducting retail audit and how QVALON can help to overcome them

By: Jul Domingo

The retail industry needs to keep up with the ever-evolving needs of its consumers.

And for this reason, reviewing and elevating the company’s performance should come as second nature to any retail organization trying to succeed.

With regular store audits, it’s easier to analyze the products’ value and the shopping experience, determine operational inefficiencies, and ensure employees meet organizational standards.

However, there are problems in conducting a retail audit that affect the outcome of the audit itself.

Here, we’ll discuss the challenges in retail audit that you might face, as well as ways to strengthen your retail audit process.

What are the problems in conducting a retail audit?

A retail audit can uncover store-level problems and implement new processes. But it can be a waste of time if not planned carefully.

Here are the problems in retail audit that can hamper its process and quality:

Broad audit scope

A retail audit includes looking at a wide range of factors affecting your business such as store appearance, customer traffic, product display, customer service, operations, marketing, and merchandising.

However, every store visit does not have to address all of these factors. Comprehensive examinations will not help your case-they will only cause difficulties conducting a retail audit.

Doing multiple tasks at the same time can reduce your productivity by 40%. Trying to fit everything in one store visit can affect how you identify critical issues and create a poor customer experience. So, take the time to perform retail audits separately for each field.

Manually performed audits

From the outset, it looks like performing tasks manually can reduce your costs. But in reality, it can cost your business more and bring challenges in retail audits.

A manual retail audit process can reduce efficiency since employees would have to spend 22% of their time on repetitive activities.

Additionally, paper-based documents are prone to being misplaced or accidentally discarded. There’s also a chance of incorrect data entry since the chance of a human error when manually encoding data is between 18% and 40%. These problems in conducting retail audits can skew results.

Subjective audit findings

One importance of retail audit is to provide you with an accurate picture of your stores’ conditions. To achieve this, auditors must give objective evaluations of audit results. This might sound like common sense, but it isn’t always the case.

Let’s say the area manager, who heads the store operations in a region, is also the officer who conducts the audit in the same stores. Biases can affect the audit results, even enhancing the evaluation results by 5%.

Alternatively, you may hire independent auditors who offer a set of fresh eyes to do the evaluation and spot the real issues in your store. Another way to eliminate bias is to provide auditors with a software solution that helps them perform objective assessments, backed up by a standardized checklist, photo reports, and comments.

Overlooked audit reports

In a retail network, all the outlets should receive action items following an audit. Most problems in retail audits can arise in the post-audit stage if these action items get shoved under the rug.

If your employees won’t respond to the audit findings, the whole retail audit process will go to waste. It’s necessary to closely monitor the completion of these action items.

What can you do to improve your retail audit process?

The following are some of the practices you can carry out to address the problems in conducting a retail audit:

Determine the retail network’s vision, mission, goals, and objectives

Defining how the business is supposed to look like 3 to five years from now can be used to build a strategy and set clear steps to bring them to fruition.

The next step is to ensure compliance by all parties involved-from floor employees and management in every outlet-in the form of an audit.

Retail audits should determine whether the store operates according to standards and what actions need to be taken afterward. This gives direction to the whole retail audit process.

Form your audit team

Another way to solve the problems in conducting a retail audit is to create a team that can assure credibility during the audit.

Consider including the following individuals on your audit committee:

• Department Managers: Most department managers are fully aware of company guidelines and procedures because they’re involved in crafting them. By including them on the audit team, they can properly relay their knowledge to the rest of the committee.
• Internal Auditors: These professionals have extensive auditing experience, allowing them to provide objective evaluations of your business.
• Human Resources: Since HR professionals are in charge of employees’ compliance, their insights will be crucial when deciding the consequences of implementation failures.

Communicate your audit results

As soon as the audit is finished, the results must be relayed to the store managers. This allows them to take urgent action to resolve the issues.

This process may sound simple, but you need to make sure that you’re communicating the audit results clearly and effectively. It’s important to lay out the facts and stay away from vague terms when talking to your staff.

Audit reports should include sufficient detail to explain the issue, risk, and recommendations properly to the recipient.

Use the right retail audit tools

By digitizing your retail audit process, you can immediately receive data, delegate action items, and monitor task completion.

You may use the following retail audit tools so you can perform quick, easy, and efficient audits:

Digital retail audit checklist

With a digital retail audit checklist, you can move away from spreadsheets. This minimizes the risks and problems in conducting retail audit, including the possibility of human error.

The results are released immediately following the audit. What’s more, you can add images and remarks to support your findings. The generated checklist also removes variability and human insight in assessment because they are generated from your existing standards.

It can also assess and keep track of your operations and your employees’ performance, and identify issues related to them before they impact your revenue.

Analytics

To make informed business decisions, relying on generated data is important. And when you use a software management system that provides real-time analytics after the audit, you and your team can spring into action and assess what course to take in order to pivot your ineffective approach.

It’s also important to have lower management and other relevant members of the staff have access to digestible data, so make sure you can present them in a convenient way, such as tabular or graphical forms.

Collaboration tools

Imagine you are reviewing the audit results. It suddenly occurs to you that certain information needs to be confirmed with your store managers.

Rather than closing that audit results tab or calling their numbers, you can use collaboration tools to verify information instead.

With this tool, you don’t have to leave the comfort of your office and spend time traveling to all the stores. Collaboration tools allow you to make calls and inspect the store virtually while you’re in the middle of checking the audit findings.

What is the importance of retail audit results analysis?

A retail store audit gathers data that can give you a broader picture of your store’s conditions. Some examples are:

• Inventory: An imbalance in your inventory can cause spoilage or obsolescence. Excess inventory can also take up too much space in your stockroom.
• Retail display: Stocks not displayed properly on your shelves can lead to a poor shopping experience for your customers.

Keep in mind that performing a retail store audit isn’t just about collecting information. It isn’t only about creating graphs or encoding data.

You need to analyze the audit results, determine patterns, draw conclusions, make recommendations, and formulate strategies to improve your current store operations.

Addressing the problems in conducting retail audit will not only save time-it can also improve the process and quality of the audit itself. Tools, such as the retail audit checklist, collaboration tools, reliable analytics can make the audit process simpler and more efficient.

All these are available in the QVALON system. Ensure your store audits are always fruitful. Contact us for more information.

Originally published at https://qvalon.com.