Godiva – Best Practices of Using Retail Traffic Counting

ShopperTrak’s people counting technology was already being used in Godiva’s stores across the US, all of which had found it a very effective way of mapping traffic to conversion rates and of analysing data trends. The European stores chose the same solution, both to ensure a highly accurate traffic count and to maintain a consistent standard across the group. The technology was rolled out to company owned stores in Europe and was delivering results within three months, completely exceeding expectations.

Godiva is now promoting the solution to its franchisees to enable them to benefit from a fully integrated, holistic and consistent approach to people counting and analysis.

In Regent Street, one of the first things the ShopperTrak solution revealed was that three quarters of Godiva’s visitors were not actually making a purchase. Reports also revealed more people bought products between 2pm to 3pm, not the traditional lunchtime rush as the staff had always assumed. These insights enabled the store to make significant changes to staffing levels in order to improve customer service and conversion rates.

The European stores were effectively starting from scratch, staff were unable to benchmark their conversion rates as there was no hard and fast rule for measurement. In retail, average conversion rates differ across sectors, locations and high-end versus value brands. Rates also varied considerably across the Godiva store network. Due to their diverse locations – some in high density tourist areas and others in business and financial districts – peak traffic flows and conversion rates were not consistent.

ShopperTrak advised Godiva that it is more accurate to analyse each individual store’s trends rather than trying to measure each store against the entire network. Another challenge was acceptance. Godiva’s employees were unaccustomed to the concept of traffic counting. Many of the staff and managers were suspicious that the technology was not working properly, or were not convinced that it could improve performance. However, training and education made the store managers ambassadors for the technology. The store managers then worked with their staff teams to ensure the whole store would benefit from the solution. Once they started to see their overall sales increasing as a result, store managers embraced the traffic counting data as a valuable tool.

After installing traffic counting technology, Godiva’s Regent Street store was able to take immediate action, seeing numbers of transactions in store increase by 10% and conversion rates go up from 24% to 26.5% in just six weeks. Store managers are now able to plan staffing to ensure that there is always a healthy shopper to associate ratio and to place the best staff on the shop floor during peak traffic times. They are also able to use the data to identify which members of staff need more training, depending on when conversion rates are dropping and can now plan to carry out stock replenishments during low traffic periods.

Traffic trends and conversion rates are now used to plan financial targets for the year: what sales are predicted, when to run promotions and how to aim for incremental increases in conversions. The solution has also brought unexpected benefits. For example, window merchandising is particularly important to Godiva as a premium, luxury brand. Window displays are changed monthly and their impact on foot traffic is now closely analyzed using ShopperTrak data.

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Sensormatic Solutions is a global leader in enabling smart and connected shopper engagement. By combining critical insights into retail inventory, shopper traffic and loss prevention, Sensormatic Solutions powers operational excellence at scale and helps create unique shopping experiences. Our solutions deliver real-time visibility and predictive analytics for accurate decision-making across the enterprise, enabling retailers to confidently move into the future. With more than 1.5 million data collection devices in the retail marketplace, we capture 40 billion shopper visits and track and protect billions of items each year. Our retail portfolio features the premier Sensormatic^®, ShopperTrak^® and TrueVUE™ brands.

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