“Data driven decisions.” It’s today’s corporate buzz phrase. Most everyone can agree that making choices based on the numbers rather than the assumptions is wise. However, the true stumbling block is how to interpret and distribute the data. SimpliField’s retail analytics were designed to open the door for easy access and establish a single source of truth for gaining unprecedented visibility and closing key operational execution gaps. Between your store managers, district managers, headquarters, and all parties in between, trusted data helps empower decision makers.
SimpliField’s retail analytics solution is designed to help retailers get the maximum value possible from their data. In one simple platform, you can easily visualize complex data, turn it into valuable insights—and put that information in front of the people who can use it, whenever they need it.
Today we’ll be talking about how to best use and interpret data for key use cases, including both customizable and standard dashboards.
Data Visualization, However You Need It: SimpliField’s Dashboard Builder
Oftentimes, the frustrations experienced by headquarters, field, and frontline teams can be attributed to simple visibility and execution gaps. These teams lack the data they need to make confident decisions. When we discuss data gaps and frustrations for headquarters with frontline teams, it usually comes down to a few main variables: data availability, visualization clarity, and accessibility to support different needs across the team. Our solution is SimpliField’s Dashboard Builder - a self-serve portal, where you can create visualizations of any data—including both the data you collect with SimpliField and external data sources.
How to Save Time with Data Analytics
How much time do you spend digging for data to understand what’s happening on the frontline? If you’re simply sending out tasks and using core competencies, standardized dashboards are key to keeping you and your team on track. But if you’re finding that you need to go in and pull reports, parse excel sheets, and constantly update the results, or email the team with personalized views? That takes hours away from more important tasks. Consider looking at SimpliField’s Dashboard Builder.
A custom export feature is a great way to export data from checklists directly to an excel format that meets your needs. As retailers and wholesalers have daily, weekly, monthly objective targets to meet—exporting with custom help is necessary to stay on target.
One common use case we’ve heard is when stores aren’t aware of their target, they may miss the mark by as little as one sale at the end of the day, only because they were completely unaware. Frontline teams are therefore not incentivized as they could be.
Without time to aggregate and distribute data, headquarters can’t keep their field teams informed. Without visibility to the data or access to get behind a computer to check data, the front line can’t take action steps. To go a level further, frontline teams may have some of the raw data, but taking time in the home office to aggregate and make an action plan before they send it back to the team causes inconsistency and error. Plus, the end users and the team often don’t use the data because it’s buried in their emails in excel files, and it’s stale.
With SimpliField, your data lives in one place, always updated on a mobile app, so headquarters and field teams can be aligned on data and goals while saving time in the process. Hone your team’s attention with concrete data in real-time with our user-friendly platform.
Establish Data Visualization
A single source of truth across your organization, personalized for each role, can mean clear objectives for your headquarters and actionable steps for your field teams. With simple data visualization, home office can assess the high level view, while each layer of the business has access to their needed information.
For our clients, we help operators train and launch these customizable dashboards—giving them nearly-unlimited operational visibility to meet their needs. Need quick end-of-year reporting, quarterly analysis, or on-the-go presentations? Dashboards can look at daily, weekly, quarterly, yearly metrics comparing stores and regions based on different use cases.
Create dashboards personalized to specific users/roles. You can customize as many dashboards as needed to fit your needs with SimpliField data. You can import external data that has been exported from virtually any data source as a flat file on an as-needed basis. Then you decide how you would like to visualize this to the team (eg. sales, performance, etc.)—requiring low-to-no involvement from IT or data/business intelligence teams.
Accessibility is key, and being able to see these things on mobile is crucial. You don’t need to dig for emails and find excel files within them—or figure out how to use another data visualization tool. From beginning to end users, data should be accessible to all in near-real time.
Excelling with Our Standard Dashboards
The dashboards below have been influenced and proven by best-in-class retailers and wholesale brands. Keep all your reporting in one place — with vital frontline data captured by SimpliField and easily visualized in our Standard Dashboards. Here’s what to look for in analytics capabilities:
Checklist and Survey Compliance
Store checklist coverage shows an analysis of SimpliField checklist data to better understand coverage and compliance across regions, brands, and teams. Harnessing the data in Store Checklist Coverage, we can identify and correct gaps in execution.
To begin, filter your search query by time period, checklist name, the country or region, the store field name, or the store field values. You’ll quickly see the ratio of visited stores to not visited stores (for field use-cases) or a completion ratio for in-store checklists (for in-store use-cases)—both numerically and geographically. The checklist score and completion dates will aggregate in the fields below.
Rather than flying blind to what stores are following guidelines, keep your finger on the pulse of which stores are executing successfully and completing their designated checklists.
Engaging Your Teams
As there are many types of data and just as many ways to analyze it, team performance can be assessed across specific teams, stores, or checklists.
Within the SimpliField app, navigate to the filters section of the Team Performance dashboard. Use the dropdown navigation to select the checklist name, checklist target, date range, user, or user fields you’d like to focus on. The dashboard will collect data from each of the fields, and display the overall reports, completion rate, average score, and more. The data then builds on itself—allowing you to see each user and the reports they’ve done, stores they’ve visited, and stores they’re expecting to visit.
Drill down into each user or use comprehensive data to determine team performance and drive engagement in this way.
No Store Left Behind
There’s a saying that goes, “One bad apple can spoil the bunch.” Get real-time understanding of how each store is performing so overall compliance, excellence, and execution stays true to your standards.
Individual store insights can be found in the Store Performance dashboard. Don’t let any stores slip through the cracks! Determine which stores need help or attention versus which are excelling.
Assess store-level scores over different time frames by sorting by checklist, date, store, and values. The stores will automatically segregate by region, but you can continue to dig deeper by store, checklist, and more.
Underlying Data Drivers
Gain a competitive advantage by truly understanding and implementing strategies taken from the Reports and Action Plans dashboard.
Unlock rich quantitative and qualitative insights from your checklist reporting. Leaders won’t need to wonder what is driving a trend behind a particular region or group of stores as they are now able to look at the underlying drivers and assigned tasks.
For example, once you distill your data down from users, stores, checklists and more, you can easily see the indicators of strong performance. Variables like time, completion, and score will show you exactly where to place your focus.
Making Data Useful for Field, Frontline, and Headquarters
SimpliField’s retail analytics, communications, and operations solution is designed to help retailers get the maximum value possible from their data. In one simple platform, you can easily visualize complex data, turn it into valuable insights—and put that information in front of the people who can use it, whenever they need it.
Retail analytics are an essential ingredient for any retail business trying to stay competitive, grow, and optimize operations today. Contact us today for a live demo and see how SimpliField can supercharge your retail analytics and take your business to the next level.
