Independent Retailers Improving Insights With Free Digital Tools
For independent retailers, methods of reviewing in-store performance may have been as simple as handing your sales staff a notepad to record changes in inventory or shifting consumer trends. But as seamless cloud technology continues to weave together both the online and off-line experiences, the retail industry becomes less reliant on paper and more welcoming to current technological solutions to improve business without discrimination of business size.
Witnessing rapid change each season across every industry, the retail and restaurant industries are especially taxed with the incentive to stay ahead of changing technologies or risk growing stale. It’s with this in mind that Lightspeed unveils its latest educational tool for independent retailers — the Retail Success Index — which aspires to improve insights by means of an industry-validated five-minute questionnaire.
Representing a clientele of more than 50,000 retailers and restauranteurs, updated and efficient solutions such as those provided by Lightspeed seeks to help smaller businesses “reach their full potential” by providing a tool for making data-backed decisions with ease, as summarized by Dax Dasilva, founder and chief executive officer of Lightspeed.
Categories span the major areas of inventory management, employee management, marketing and customer relationship management, data intelligence and sales sophistication. From these categories, a retailer’s RSI score is achieved with a weighted, point-based algorithm which determines an accumulated score.
Actionable insights are delivered for each category and retailers are given the authority to use this analysis to increase success, perhaps focusing corrective efforts in each of the five critical areas, or devoting attention to one major category for rehabilitation.
Regardless of whether operating a big-box retailer or local boutique, having a firm grasp on business strengths and weaknesses is the “first step to reaching stronger store success,” said Nicole Leinbach Reyhle, founder of Retail Minded and advisory board member to Lightspeed.
More so, Lightspeed backs its index with consultants across the retail agenda. Board members include Leinbach Reyhle and Craig Patterson, founder and editor in chief of Retail Insider, among others.
Delivering both action and strategic insight, the Lightspeed Retail Success Index aims to allow independent businesses the advantage “to quickly evaluate their overall operations and determine strengths as well as room for improvement,” Patterson said.
As technology advances in pace with the retail industry, tools become faster, simpler and more cognizant of the overall user experience so business owners can refocus their efforts on improving key categories, which in turn elevate business health.
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