The Measurement Minute

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

A good store dashboard should provide context on the big picture KPIs of traffic and conversion. To do that, it should show shopper quality, merchandising performance and operational efficiency. Of these, measuring shopper quality is by far the hardest – because it’s very difficult to distinguish the root cause of a failed shopper visit. Was the store to blame or was the shopper just not interested? This Measurement Minute details an approach to measuring shopper quality with behavioral people-measurement and describes a succinct and effective visualization for showing overall shopper quality and how it’s changing.

 

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

Though the best uses of shopper measurement data often involve focused analysis to answer a specific business question, there’s both a need and real value in making store measurement data more accessible. Often, that translates into a demand for KPIs and dashboarding. That can be challenging, because the most obvious KPIs for in-store shopper measurement are driven by PoS and Door-Counting – not shopper behavior. But if you want a dashboard that drives one level deeper into why store performance is the way it is, then shopper measurement can help.

 

 

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

Retention has become a critical problem for many businesses and for retailers, current retention woes are just icing on an already dismal cake. Churn rates in retail are staggering – and that was true even pre-pandemic. Many new employees don’t last a year. Almost half don’t last 90 days.

 

That kind of brutal churn is one of the reasons why Associate measurement is critically important in retail. Good measurement lets you understand the true impact of churn on store operations. It gives you tools for minimizing that impact and hiring, training and allocating new hires more effectively. It even gives you way to help move knowledge from the front-line to Corporate.

 

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

While flexible digital mapping and a generalized alerting system can cover a very wide variety of real-time applications, queue management usually requires special customization. Metrics like stations open and estimated wait time don’t fall out of standard people-measurement. Mostly, they aren’t super complicated but they are often just a little more complex than you might expect…

 

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

Real-time people-measurement creates an array of valuable operational and marketing opportunities. Those opportunities usually involve an alerting capability built on top of the real-time feed. In this Minute, the benefits of combining a flexible space mapping system and a generalized alerting system are described. By putting the two together, a single operational capability can support a huge variety of applications, from occupancy management to maintenance scheduling to dynamic associate allocation strategies across facilities as different as stores, airports, parking lots and hospitals.

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

In The Age of Customer Equity, Allison Hartsoe tackles the journey companies must take to understand and value their customers appropriately. A long-time customer analytics expert, Allison’s new book is a great read and a powerful introduction to putting customer value at the center of your business and your analytics. In this Measurement Minute interview, we cover how the book came about, some of its core lessons and themes, and thoughts on how customer equity thinking starts and grows in the enterprise.

 

 

 

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel

 

A real-time data pipeline for shopper journey data creates all sorts of challenges, and one of the biggest is handling Associate detection. If your using realtime data to dynamically move Associates to the right places in the store, it’s critical that you know who’s a Shopper and who’s an Associate. This Measurement Minute explains why that’s harder in realtime, how BLE and camera-based detection work, and the best compromise right now between the two.

 

 

 

 

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel

Are real-time analytics valuable? Usually, not so much. So why are we spending a boatload of time adding a true real-time pipeline to our DM1 people-measurement platform? It’s because real-time data opens up a number of powerful store use-cases for operational improvement and even loss prevention. From occupancy and queue management to dynamic Associate allocation strategies, real-time data creates powerful improvement opportunities that don’t really need analytics.

 

 

 

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

With today’s advanced people-measurement technologies, it’s not that hard to measure when Associates are interacting with Shoppers. This interaction measurement delivers a whole array of useful metrics and analytics opportunities. From measuring basic interaction counts, cross-tabulating interactions against shopper engagement, correlating interactions to checkout and basket size, and tuning interaction strategies in terms of shopper time in store and section, the opportunities for both deep analytics and real-time operational improvement make interaction measurement one of the keys to successful in-store shopper journey analytics.

 

 

 

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

Measuring Associates is an unexpected benefit of doing powerful in-store shopper measurement. But when it comes to making sense of Associate data, the metrics that work for shoppers don’t always apply. There’s little point in measuring Visits, Lingers, Draws or Dwells – all core shopper journey metrics. On the other hand, time in area and area occupancy matter. And when you measure both shoppers and Associates, cool things happen…