Using data and Business Intelligence to get the most out of your people
For many businesses, the people working in your shops, cafes or restaurants are the faces of your organisation. A customer’s experience with your brand is based on their interactions with your frontline staff, and these interactions can make or break a company’s reputation.
While customers who have a poor experience are likely to share their experience on various social channels, it’s not always as easy to identify all the positive experiences people have. By taking a closer look at your data, you can get a good indication of which your staff create memorable customer experiences – the ones that lead to positive feedback and the customers coming back.
Here are some ways you can use data in your business to help improve the performance of your people.
Individual employee performance
Tracking individual employee performance gives you the ability to know who is exceeding expectations and which team members need additional support. Over time, you’ll also have the information you need to design staff training and know where to reward or re-assign people. You can also identify trends and act on them in real-time before problems arise or opportunities are lost.
Here are two easy metrics which can help you measure individual employee performance:
Items per transaction – this gives you an indication of how well a team member is working with customers to find complementary customers i.e. are they using opportunities to cross-sell items.
Using data, you can identify ways to increase items per transaction and determine where and why opportunities were lost. Was it due to stock limitations, a team member’s limited product knowledge or someone just not asking the right follow-up questions.
Sales per employee – use this data to identify your top salespeople and see if they are willing to share their secrets with the rest of the team. This data will also show you which staff may need additional training.
Time of day/time of week
Over time, you will start to build a greater understanding of when your busy and quiet periods are and the level of staffing you need for specific times of day, and certain days of the week. By using this data, you can manage your rosters to meet the times of high demand while ensuring your staff don’t sit around bored during the quiet times.
Understanding these peaks can help many sorts of businesses roster more effectively. This metric isn’t just useful for retail and hospitality businesses but also childcare centres, medical centres and other customer-facing organisations.
Rostering your best people during peak times
Once you know when your peak times are, you can ensure your best people are working then. By cross referencing your peak periods with the individual employee metrics above, you have all the information you need to make these staffing decisions.
Identifying gaps and training needs
As you build trends for your team’s performance, you can start to identify gaps and training needs for your staff. If some issues appear widely across the team, that gives you an indication of where business processes or product training could be improved.
If certain people consistently underperform, you also have the data you need to have talk with them about what they need to improve and how they could do so. Some staff may benefit from working alongside high-performing colleagues or from additional training about the business and its products.
Distributed sites
If you have staff in multiple sites and people who travel between them regularly, access to mobile and cloud-based business intelligence tools is critical. Having the information for all stores available in one place with accurate, up-to-date data presented in an easy-to-understand way will help to facilitate these conversations and make this information accessible to all staff.
Getting started
The power of these reports often depends on your ability to report across both your POS system, and your rostering software. If you're thinking of upgrading your hospitality or retail systems and want to future-proof for data management like this, we recommend Deputy for your rostering and Lightspeed or Vend for your POS. All of these have excellent data-accessibility, and are capable of providing you with all the data you need to drive your reports.
