counttrack Scheduling store staff according to traffic or Sales transactions?

10.11.2022

Scheduling store staff according to traffic or Sales transactions?

With approaching winter end-of-season sales, it is time for retailers to get ready for higher visitor traffic in their stores. But how do you keep shoppers satisfied without breaking the bank on the store labor costs?

There are two key issues with the store staffing that affect the conversion rate and costs the most.

1. Understaffing:
not having enough employees in the store during peak traffic hours causes customers dissatisfaction, it is hard for customers to find help and long checkout queues can cause basket abandonment and the loss of sales.

Understaffing also forces a lot of strain on store employees, they have to work even harder to accommodate unplanned visitor influx. The work environment becomes disorganized resulting
in insufficient sales.

2. Overstaffing:
negatively affects already high retail labor costs. When the forecasting of the store traffic is overinflated, it ends up with too many shop assistants and not enough potential customers on the store floor. In this case, overall store performance suffers due to the increased costs of unproductive scheduling.

By implementing counttrack® People Counting you can match sales associates’ hours to the store traffic levels effectively.

The key to maximizing efficiency is to optimize floor coverage while minimizing the cost.

So how to optimize the store staff scheduling?

Reliable data is the key success factor for daily store management. How many visitors will come to the store, and when exactly they will come is necessary to know for effective planning.

When you have enough staff to help the visitors they are much more likely will turn into customers. Scheduling staff according to transactions alone is misleading and less effective in optimizing the store's performance.

If you know when your store is the busiest, you will be able to precisely forecast the peak traffic hours and days to allocate enough staff for the visitors. By analyzing traffic patterns, you will also know your slower days and won't be spending unnecessarily high amounts on
labor during these times.