The checklist decides the quality of everything that follows. If the questions are vague, no analysis can rescue them.
A visit checklist is the set of questions the team answers at every point of sale, defined in advance and identical for everyone. It serves two purposes at once: making sure nobody forgets to check something important, and producing answers in a comparable format, so hundreds of visits can be added up rather than read.
They fail by being too long and by using open questions where closed answers belong. A 40-question checklist gets rushed; a free-text field produces 30 different ways of saying the same thing. Either way the data exists but decides nothing.
For every question, know which decision it supports. If there is no decision attached, the question goes. That single criterion cuts half of most checklists.
Yes/No, a fixed scale or a list of options. Free text only for what cannot be anticipated, and always as a complement.
Between 8 and 15 questions per brand is the range where completion quality stays high. Above 20 it starts to drop.
Make the shelf and promotional material photos mandatory. That is what turns an answer into proof.
Run three real visits with the checklist before handing it to the team. There are almost always two ambiguous questions that only surface in store.
After a quarter, look at which questions always get the same answer. If 98% answer "yes", the question stopped informing and can go.
Defines what gets checked and against what criteria, aligned with what was negotiated with the retailer.
Adjusts the checklist when a question turns out ambiguous or something recurring is not covered.
Answers in store. They are the ones who know which questions make no practical sense, and worth listening to.
Uses the answers to compare. Entirely dependent on questions being closed and stable over time.
A merchandiser represents four brands in the same store. Instead of four visits or one giant checklist, they answer one checklist per brand inside a single visit. The data comes out separated by brand, which later allows analysing each one on its own and seeing which others it co-occurs with.
For six weeks a block of three questions about the Christmas campaign is added. When the campaign ends the block is removed, but the answers stay in the history and can be compared against next year.
In categories with display rules, the checklist includes the legal criteria and requires a photo. The record then doubles as proof of compliance, with date and location.
| Badly designed checklist | Well designed checklist |
|---|---|
| Open questions, free-text answers | Closed answers, addable and filterable |
| 40 questions rushed through | 10 to 15 questions answered with attention |
| Changes every quarter | Stable, therefore comparable over time |
| Photos optional and rarely present | Mandatory where evidence matters |
| Nobody knows what decision it supports | Every question has a decision attached |
| Checklists per workspace | No limit |
|---|---|
| Question types | Yes/No, multiple choice, scale, numeric, text and photo |
| Scope | Per brand, per category or per location type |
| Mandatory fields | Configurable per question |
| Health score weight | Configurable, so critical criteria weigh more |
| Changes | Old answers keep the checklist version they were given under |
| Analysis | Filterable in the Analysis Centre by question, answer and period |
Between 8 and 15 per brand is the range where completion quality stays high. Above 20 answer quality drops visibly, because people start answering out of habit.
Yes. A hypermarket and a convenience store do not share criteria, and forcing the same checklist produces "not applicable" answers that pollute the data.
Old answers stay tied to the version they were given under, so they are neither lost nor remapped to the wrong question. Frequent changes hurt comparability, so it is worth batching them quarterly.
Sparingly, and always as a complement to a closed answer. A notes field at the end is useful; replacing objective criteria with free text makes analysis impossible.
Each question can carry a weight. Negative answers on high-weight criteria pull the store indicator down further, which makes the health score reflect what actually matters instead of treating everything equally.
They should. The people in store are the first to notice an ambiguous question. It is worth reviewing the checklist with the team once a quarter.
Everything agreed with the retailer only counts if it is actually in the store. Retail execution is the discipline of verifying that, with evidence, and acting when it is not.
Every store visit produces information worth keeping for years. Recording it was never the problem: getting back to it is.
A field team spends between a quarter and a third of the day driving. It is the biggest hidden cost in the operation, and the easiest to cut.
In the setup session we build the checklist with you, starting from what you already check in stores today.