8 leading Indicators For Quality Control In Retail

There is no clear, infallible single indicator for retail quality. This discourages many retail stores from measuring it.

However, it is essential to do so to provide the best possible service. Read on to learn more about leading indicators that are used for quality control in retail.

1. Customer Satisfaction

As the title of this point states, this is how satisfied customers are with your goods and services and how they are delivered. Because it is subjective, it can be difficult to determine. However, there are a few tools that you can use in order to get an overall indicator of how happy your customers are.

These include:

• Surveys sent or delivered immediately after purchases.
• Net Promoters Score requests (NPS) where you ask your customers to rate their experience with you on a scale from 0-10.
• And open link feedback where you provide a link through which your customers can give you feedback and share their impressions of the service delivered to them. 

To dive more into how you can get more indicators from your customer experience, we recommend that you take a look at 8 Ways To Get More Signals From Customer Experience. Now on to the next point. 

2. Mystery Shopping

Another way to do quality control of your retail operations is mystery shopping. Mystery shopping involves hiring someone to go undercover as a customer. They will then report back on the quality of the service they received. This is often in the form of a survey or a report detailing the experience. 

3. Follow-up Surveys

These are surveys that are taken by customers usually through email a short time period after interaction with your business. They give customers some time to think and provide a more complete overview of your service, and learn why some customers return and become loyal to your brand, and why some might not come back to shop with you. Note, however, you will need to ask customers for their email addresses, which they might be reluctant to give out.

4. Customer Traffic to Your Stores

The number of people coming to your store is a good indication of the quality of your service. If many people are coming to your store, you are likely providing them with good quality goods and services.

5. Number of New vs. Returning Customers

If you have significantly more new customers than returning customers, this is a bad sign for the quality of your service. It shows that you are struggling to keep customers, which could be due to poor quality goods and services.

6. Retail Conversion Rate

Your retail conversion rate is the number of people visiting your store that make a purchase. Although not every visitor will make a purchase, if many are leaving your store without a purchase, this is a sign that they are not satisfied with what they have seen in your store. This gives you quality insights that either your products aren't up to par, you need to reconsider your prices, or your sales personnel needs more training to help convert these visitors into paying customers. 

7. Supply Chain Assessment

Consider whether all your stores have all the necessary products in stock and whether they have all products and setups for a specific campaign. If they don't any the demand is high, it can reflect itself in the customer experience of that store. It's important to remember that all stores are a part of the chain, and if one is weaker the brand quality of your business will suffer. 

8. Product Recalls/ Returns / Reclamations

If many products are recalled, returned, or reclaimed, this is an indication that some products were not fit for sale but neglected in the supply process to the stores. This type of experience will also be reflected in whether the same amount of customers will return to buy more after. 

Final thoughts

Various indicators can be used for quality control in the retail industry. However, it can be difficult to incorporate all of these into a system to measure quality.

A recommendation is to implement an all-in-one control, inspection, auditing and reporting solution so that you can cover all aspects of the retail, product and customer experience quality. 

Are you looking for a tool to improve quality control in your organisation? Falcony | Observe ticks all the boxes for low-threshold reporting, follow-up actions, anonymous reporting and analytics. Is easy to customise, enables real dialogue, data collection, automated reports, and a lot more. 

We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.‍

By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.

More information at falcony.io.