2020 brought new challenges to the retail and food service industries. In order to survive, businesses needed to figure out how work within the limitations, restrictions, and guidelines local, state, and federal governments put into place to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to struggling to keep employees and customers safe, businesses had to step up and find innovative ways to get products to consumers in order to continue operating. Moving from in-store shopping and in-restaurant dining to curbside pick-up, online ordering, delivery, and contactless payments had to be done quickly and efficiently.
As customer and employee interaction and cash sales decreased, contactless shopping and payments increased. Conveniences that had been just a piece of the business such as drive-through windows, curbside pick-up, and delivery became a primary revenue source.
In some cases, retailers and food service added revenue streams not previously in their model. For example, many restaurants added outdoors-only dining, restaurant chains added essential groceries and grocery delivery, and yet other restaurants added new products that were more delivery friendly. Retailers added personal shoppers, curbside pick-up, and essential protective equipment.
Retailers and food services pivoted to service customers in every way they could, and with these pivots, new opportunities for loss and fraud emerged.
It was imperative that data analytics also pivot to provide key operational information on these new revenue sources by providing sales trending data and any anomalies that indicated potential fraud and abuse. Proper review by experienced data analysts using trend-, comparison-, and summary-level reporting can reduce the errors and increase revenue.
Here's how analytics reporting has helped the evolving retail and food service industries tackle new challenges.
Valuable Business Reporting
- Weekly, location-based reporting on special employee incentives given to employees who provided additional support. This information is shared with Human Resources and the relevant field team.
- Weekly, location-based reporting on new specialty items to attract customers n. Use this for upsell opportunity in lower performing areas or to help marketing with promotion ideas.
- Weekly sales trending for special promotions by this location. What is working and where? Special promotional reporting builds the partnership with asset management, marketing, and operations to ensure discounts are properly applied and accounted for.
- Weekly Rewards Program trends and potential abuses:
Trend reporting to identify VIP customers and determine which locations may need to promote the program.
- Detecting whether or not employees use their own rewards program accounts to capture the sales and then redeem rewards for more discounts
- Determining whether or not customers are creating multiple accounts to receive special offers
- Detecting refund fraud and scams, which continue to be the most common of fraud and theft:
Customers:
- Returning stolen items for merchandise credits or gift cards
- Exchanging items, sold at a discount, without a receipt, to receive full price back
- Returning funds from a purchase made with a stolen credit card to another credit card
- Purchasing items online and then reporting an invalid transaction and asking for a chargeback
Employees:
- Creating or using previous day’s receipts to refund cash or to their own financial account (such as a credit card or payment app)
- Performing no-receipt returns for their own gain
- Removing merchandise and having friends or family return items for gift cards or in-store credit
- Gift Card Fraud and Abuse:
- Buying gift cards online by using stolen credit card information then using or selling the gift cards
- Performing fraudulent refunds to gift cards then using cards to purchase new items or sold online
- Stealing gift card numbers and using them for online or curbside pick-up
- Discount Fraud and Abuse:
- Employees allowing multiple people and/or people not entitled to purchase using their discount
- Applying a high discount then requesting full price from a customer paying with cash
- Granting unauthorized discounts for friends or family
A business data analyst experienced in retail and food service loss prevention and operations can navigate through the data and aggregate results for decisioning. Your business data analyst can assist in predicting future results by providing actionable insights based on current data, meaning that, as your business adapts to pandemic norms, you can catch loss and fraud before they eat away at your revenue.
