Numbers from a field visit tell part of the story. The rest lives in what a trained visitor trained to notice, record and feedback to management alongside numbers.
Competitor Presence Nearby
By taking note of who else is trading nearby (e.g. a new discount store, a competitor running a promotion, a shop that has closed down and just re-opened) a field visitor can provide a wealth of information to the numbers generated by the visit.
Physical Condition of Assets
The visitor records the physical condition of your branded assets (e.g. faded signage, leaning shelf units, peeling stickers). Small problems that can be addressed quickly to prevent a drift in the image of your brand that customers perceive without quite knowing why.
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Things that affect customer behaviour and therefore your store’s performance such as lighting, smell, noise and temperature cannot be measured. A field visitor can make a note of whether a store looks or feels unwelcoming, and highlight any issues with display or other areas that could be affecting performance before it’s too late and your footfall starts to decline.
Staff Engagement and Compliance
There is a form of structured observation that recognises watching how staff engage with customers, how they manage to deliver a product demonstration, and how they work from a planogram. GOV.UK sets out guidance on how to conduct compliance and service checks. Many of these use forms of evidence that are collected during field observations.
Local Environmental Context
In order to understand the anomalies in your numbers it is useful to a field visitor to record the local environmental context. This could be details of any road works, a local event that may have drawn customers to the area, or the fact that a neighbouring tenancy has recently changed hands.
Field visits provide value beyond just recording numbers as a trained visitor can notice things that no dashboard can pick up.