The busiest shopping season of the year isn't just a boon for revenue, it's also a season for a systems and technology review. We know that sounds much less exciting than a healthy bottom line — but hear us out.

As shoppers flood your stores and scroll your website making purchases along the way, inventory is being shuttled around — whether it's shipping from warehouse to store or being carried by associates from the backroom to store floor or omnichannel fulfillment areas — all to to keep up with shopper demand and complex omnichannel logistics. Speaking of associates, they should be busy engaging customers, performing value-adding sales work, and replenishing shelves. Meanwhile, other associates are hard at work fulfilling omnichannel orders in the store and in the parking lot.

So once the season ends and the tinsel comes down, you'll want to know: How well did it really work?

The only way to know for sure whether all your holiday prep and investments in technology really delivered ROI is to first know your measures of success — and then to actually measure them. Let's look at how you can get a firm grasp on your stores' success and plan more effectively for the next holiday season.

The bottom line is certainly a clear indicator of success, but if that's all you're relying on to tell you whether or not your staffing allocation was fit to task or if your inventory management met demand, you're not going to learn much. Limited data sets only give you a certain perspective, but not the full view of your season's performance. It may not tell you how well each store served customers, whether or not your labor spend was smart or wasteful, or how many customers left unsatisfied due to out-of-stocks.

If you did know the answers to each of those questions, you'd be able to prepare more effectively for the next season or promotional campaign, fix critical issues that occurred in various stores, and maybe even reward certain stores and employees for jobs well done.

So how do actually measure these mission-critical metrics? That's the million-dollar question, and the answer is deceptively simple: relevant insights from data. But where that data comes from, how you collect it, and the business insights gained can ultimately make or break any attempt at measurement and refinement.

Before you start to gather data, it pays to identify what you intend to measure. In terms of measuring retail success during the holidays — and every day — the key metrics, aside from revenue, fall into four categories:

• Inventory accuracy: Is what's in your inventory management system, including your e-commerce platforms, really available?
• On-floor availability and out-of-stocks: What's on your shelves, what needs replenishment, and what's sold out?
• Labor optimization: Are you spending the right amount on labor based on traffic and sales?
• Omnichannel fulfillment rates: What percentage of your omnichannel orders were you able to fulfill 100%?

Each of these paint a powerful picture of your stores' success or opportunities for improvement, and each can be determined by collecting a specific type of data. And that's where advanced retail technologies comes in.

Through use of tried-and-true technologies like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) to the application of cutting-edge IoT (Internet of Things), AI (Artificial Intelligence), and Computer Vision technologies — retail can tap into the power of big data for even bigger gains. And when you use cloud-based platform that integrates each of these, not only do you have measurable data at your finger tips, but also the actionable insights and predictive analytics to help you make sense of it.

You may, for example, learn that your stores had strong inventory accuracy this holiday season, but omnichannel fulfillment rates were less than optimal. So what gives? It could be that your staffing plan did not align to BOPIS (buy online, pickup in store) or BOPAC (buy online, pickup at curbside) service level needs. You might also learn that you fully staffed multiple shifts that saw relatively little foot traffic, meaning you overspent on labor and cut into your bottom line.

Each of these insights can help you refine your stores, your processes, and your associates' training. And each of those aspects can contribute to better performance during next year's holiday season — and throughout the year.

In short, when you use advanced retail data to look beyond the bottom line, you can usually find ways to grow it. And that's something every retailer can get behind.

We hope you have a successful holiday season, profitable in both dollars and data. To learn more about which metrics are most important to measure this holiday season — so that you can be ever-ready for the next — download our white paper: The Top Must-Measure Store Metrics for Retail Success. Get your copy today. And don't forget to visit our 2022 holiday hub for more helpful insights and guidance on how to make this holiday season very merry, indeed.