3 Reasons Your Store Hates Your Review Process

Every company will have their own store or location review process, and they are certainly not all made equal. We can all agree that reviews are 100% necessary for maintaining consistency and quality throughout a brand, but how much follow through or attention to the effectiveness of our processes is really being applied?

 

At Action Card, we understand the need to “get through” the store review process, but if you’re doing it, you might as well be doing it well. These resources are already being expended, let’s improve upon their return with a little more thought and dedication to improvement and consistency.

 

Your Process Lacks Collaboration

It’s been long thought that two heads are better than one. This can be especially true during the store review process. The current problem is your review process is reliant on one rather than many. The collaborative review process is beneficial because when you get a group of people together -people from their own areas of expertise -you’ll likely find that you get many different perspectives on how you can improve, instead of just one.

 

Bringing location staff into the process allows your reviews to become actionable and educational. This makes for a more transparent review process in which the right people are held accountable, yielding better results. Furthermore, bringing location staff in on the review process eliminates the game of telephone in which diluted and often inaccurate information is passed down from person to person.

 

You Treat Reviews Like a Checklist Item

Instead of just handing over a checklist for the reviewer to mindlessly complete, it can be helpful to the store and their management if you let them know specific parts of the business you want them to pay special attention to, or if you are looking for a certain perspective.

 

Also, provide a place for the reviewer to explain their change request and let you know what their goal for the change is. Not only will this create a higher quality review but will allow for more informed decisions to be made. Context is everything. “It shapes the meaning in all communication. Without context you can’t communicate effectively. When your message is delivered in one context, but received in another, it likely leads to miscommunication.” Providing context behind your direction is going to produce greater results.

 

You Don’t Follow Through

One of the most important issues in follow up is timing; how quickly does the action and communication take place post review? When issues are addressed in a timely manner, they are more likely to be fixed. Try to avoid long lag times between the review and taking action.

 

Another main component of follow through is delegation and accountability. The ball will always get dropped if no one is tasked with holding it. Each request for action should have a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) assigned to it, and each assignment should come with instructions, context and a deadline.

 

It is very hard to change the way we think about store reviews and reporting. Currently, the mood is get through the process and document that it has been done, leading to a lot of wasted resources. Instead, adopt a little more collaboration, accountability and consistency in your process in order to yield the returns that store reviews were always intended to deliver.

 

Anytime you take a workflow from checklist to actionable, there will be kinks, reluctances and a need for a new, refined process. What we do at Action Card is create that process for your unique business needs and workflow issues. Let’s talk about the ROI of your store reviews today. .