Having said that, let's get to the heart of the matter; requesting information from your team is all well and good, but how and when should you do it?
Checking whether a new campaign has been implemented is the most common reason for conducting a survey. The information you’re looking to receive will confirm if guidelines were understood to ensure brand consistency.
Make sure the store teams have received the correct information for when the promotion starts and ends.
Did they have any difficulties during the set up? This can help you determine if the guideline was fit for their store size or space allocated to the brand. Having the right space to showcase star products but also stock inventory is key to reducing operating costs. You can also include questions about how easy it was to understand the guidelines, and how efficient implementation was.
Have a dedicated section in your survey that discusses the window display. After-all, they are the first thing a customer sees before entering the store!
Lastly, don’t forget to ask if anything was missing or damaged.
Many, if not most, of your questions in the survey should ask for an attached picture. The pictures will allow you to double check whether a window, corner, or shelf is properly set up, and ensure stores across a country portray the same branding. Send direct feedback on the picture to limit the amount of back and forths with teams. Reward field execution by sharing pictures of best practices to the rest of your network of stores.
Receiving a detailed and overall view of what stores look like shows you concretely what your strategy renders in its real life environment.
Ask for a video walkthrough to experience the store like a customer.
Once the promotion is over, don't hesitate to involve the teams and ask them for their opinion! They are a goldmine and can give any information on the store, the staff, and the customers.
For future reference, you can ask them how impactful the promotion was or if they have any recommendations on how to improve. Once again, those key insights will help you better your brand and be closer to customers.
Having that fluid two way conversation through surveys and pictures helps both the field teams and the head office work together to create a better store experience, and ultimately increase sales.
Having determined what you should include in surveys, we can now focus on the medium.
Mobile applications like the IWD App allow you to set up a survey in an interactive format: multiple choice question, photos, yes or no ….
Once your " standard " survey is created for each new implementation, duplicate it and adapt the questions to the new guideline.
Follow implementation and be notified once done. As a matter of fact, why not send a single-question survey to ask one question, “share pictures of the new animation”? The advantage of doing such is that the head office would be notified when someone has sent in a picture, and can follow-up with latecomers to ensure a timely launch.
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