Solva Would Like To Wish Everyone A Happy New Year!

2008 was an good year for Solva. We would like to thank all of our partners and customers for making this happen.

We hope everyone will have a good & fruitfull 2009!

Make sure every day counts

Kind regards,

Team Solva

How does it work?

Here a movieclip about a peoplecounting. In here you will see what it counts and escpecially how it counts.

iPod Touch or people counter device? by Brent Gustafson

Here’s an interesting problem that came across my desk several weeks ago. Lets say you want to know exactly how many people are in a gallery at any given time. How do you do it?


There are expensive people counters available, with all sorts of technology, right down to thermal imaging. There are also cheap hand held counters, with plus and minus buttons to add and subtract people as they come and go to keep a consistent count of people in a gallery.
These cheap hand held versions are great…if you only have one entrance and exit point. What if you have multiple entrances and exits? Suddenly the hand held version falls apart, and putting cameras all over is way too expensive.


This is the issue that was put forth to me. We have an upcoming exhibition for Frida Kahlo. The gallery that the exhibition is in can only support 200 visitors at any one time. We expect more than that, especially on busy days. The kicker of course is that the gallery it’s in has two entrances, so we needed to find a way to accurately count how many people are in the gallery at any given time, and if that number goes over 200, the gallery guards would have to hold people from entering until the number dropped below 200.


I thought for sure something like this must have been made before. Surely we aren’t the only people who have ever had this problem? But in looking online I couldn’t find anything that was cost effective and would “just work”. We kept saying “if we only had two clickers that could talk to each other”.


Something interesting happened the same day I was presented with this problem. Apple announced the iPod Touch. As soon as I saw the Touch, my first thought was Art on Call and the Walker Channel. I could see all sorts of uses for both in the galleries. But after a couple hours wrestling with this given problem it hit me, why not use the iPod Touch?


The iPod Touch is handheld, has touch input, and a browser with wifi built in. All we had to do was make a simple web app for it that counted up or down. Two people could have the Touch’s, check off how many people are entering and leaving, and both be up to date on exactly how many people are in the gallery. So that’s what we did.


Here are some screen grabs of what I built. The left image is the typical display of the app. Options are simply to add or subtract a certain amount of people as they enter or leave. You’re able to reset the counter to zero in the upper right (it has a confirmation before doing so). The right image shows what happens when you go over the gallery maximum. The app also auto updates the number every 10 seconds, so the guard who has people waiting will know when the the number drops below the max value right away without needing to manually refresh.

Making a web app specifically for the iPod Touch (or iPhone) turns out to be really easy. It’s just a webpage. You pretty much can do anything that is available in Safari (though there are a few inconstancies to watch out for), and there are also several special meta tags you can add specifically for these apps (for example, I turned off scaling for our web app). Apple has written up a very nice development doc on their website that I used when making this app. It includes things like screen size, font size, color, meta tags, basically everything you need to make something look nice and stylish on these devices. I’d recommend it to anyone working on apps like this. The screenshot to the left is how the iPod Touch looks with the rest of the UI around it, to give you an idea.

As far as the iPod Touch/iPhone goes, I’m very impressed. I really do think these devices are the future of museum audio tours. Well, not just audio, but video as well! There are things that need to be fixed (like the fact that you can’t get podcasts on them via wifi yet), but overall there is so much potential here, simply by having a real browser with wifi on it and supporting rich media, as well as the UI and multi-touch interface. It could very well be the Rosetta Stone of digital museum tours.

Source: http://blogs.walkerart.org/newmedia/2007/10/05/counting-people-galleries-ipod/

Onderzoek: nette winkel niet voldoende

ROTTERDAM – Een goed verzorgde winkel is niet altijd noodzakelijk om loyale klanten te houden. Dat wijst grootschalig mystery shopping-onderzoek onder 230 winkels uit.
Marktonderzoeksbureau &beyond voerde het onderzoek uit en zochten uit welke aspecten van cruciaal belang zijn om een klant loyaal te houden.

Er is niet veel nodig om een klant over de drempel te krijgen: vooral een verzorgde entree, een begaanbare winkelvloer en goed functionerende winkelverlichting zijn essentieel om de klant met een goed gevoel te laten winkelen. Het sterkst bepalend voor de klantloyaliteit is de kwaliteit van het verkoopgesprek. Onder het verkoopgesprek worden in dit onderzoek aspecten verstaan als deskundig en professioneel adviseren, tijd nemen voor de klant, het tonen van interesse in de klant en het geven van een passend advies. Aspecten die voor verbetering vatbaar zijn: stellen van open vragen, samenvatten van wensen, ingaan op koopsignalen en realiseren van de koop.

Geen verspilde moeite‘Aandacht besteden aan een verzorgd winkelbeeld is natuurlijk geen verspilde moeite’, zegt onderzoeker Roeland Jacobse. ‘Naast sturen op een goed verkoopgesprek en houding en gedrag van medewerkers, kan een retailer met de P van presentatie een bijdrage leveren aan het verhogen van zijn klanttevredenheid. Om een klant terug te laten komen is echter meer nodig.’Daarnaast is ook bij houding en gedrag van medewerkers een sterke relatie met klantentrouw geconstateerd.

Begroeten van de klant, oogcontact maken met de klant gedurende het verkoopgesprek, betrokkenheid en enthousiasme tonen en op een vriendelijke manier afscheid nemen. Al deze onderdelen dragen bij aan een positieve klantenbinding.

Kleding- en schoenenketens halen ongeveer dezelfde gemiddelde scores als de dhz-winkels. Moderetailers zouden kunnen leren van sportretailers, die eveneens kleding en schoenen voeren in hun assortiment. Punten waarop sportketens het structureel beter doen zijn onder andere luisteren naar – en tijd nemen voor de klant, het bieden van keuzemogelijkheden en professioneel adviseren.

Vooral Perry Sport en Intersport doen het erg goed op deze punten, ondervonden de onderzoekers.Elektronica en telecomElektronica en telecomwinkels presteren opvallend verschillend, gelet op verzorgd winkelbeeld, houding en gedrag en het verkoopgesprek. Telecom doet het beduidend beter dan winkels in de consumentenelektronica.

Jacobse: ‘Beide branches hebben te maken met technologische ontwikkelingen die elkaar snel opvolgen en integratie van verschillende gebruikerstoepassingen in één product, wat regelmatige producttraining vereist. Een mogelijke verklaring zou kunnen zijn, dat telecomwinkels meer investeren in de kennis van medewerkers.’

Beste jongetje van de klas

Bij apotheken en reiswinkels kan de klant met een gerust hart om advies vragen. Personeel van dit type winkels toont veel enthousiasme en betrokkenheid. Zelfs het afscheidnemen is hartelijk en vriendelijk. Tijdens alle bezoeken hebben de mysteryshoppers een gefingeerde aankoopbehoefte gespeeld, die het mogelijk maakte een verkoopgesprek aan te gaan.

De medewerkers van apotheken komen niet alleen in houding en gedrag, maar ook tijdens het verkoopgesprek het best uit de verf. Vooral de medewerkers van Kring-apotheken en Lloyd’s Apotheken komen erg deskundig en professioneel over met hun advies.

Scores van verschillende retailbranches op winkelbeeld, verkoopgesprek en houding en gedrag. Tussen haakjes staat het aantal bezochte winkels in de desbetreffende branche vermeld.
De volgende bedrijven zijn meegenomen in het onderzoek: Kring, Mediq, Escura, Lloyd’s, Formido, Gamma, Praxis, Hubo, Karwei, Mutimate, EP, Dixons, BCC, MediaMarkt, Esprit, Mexx, The Sting, Miss Etam, Promiss, M&S, Vögele, Ziengs, Van Haren, Dolcis, Sasha, Tango, Nelson, Van Dalen, Intersport, Sport 2000, Perry Sport, T for Telecom, Primafoon, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Belcompany, Thomas Cook, D-Reizen, Arke, Globe, Toerkoop en enkele zelfstandige elektronica-winkels.

(vrijdag 14 november 2008, Maarten Beernink)

bron: http://www.elsevierretail.nl/1069898/Algemeen/Algemeen-artikel/OnderzoekNetteWinkelNietVoldoende.htm

Solva About us

A quick overview about us

http://www.solva.nl/

Increase your hitratio (english)

For nearly 30 years, we have been following closing ratio in stores and its relationship to sales. The bottom line... if you are serious about increasing your store sales, the fastest, least expensive and longest lasting increases in sales will come as a result of selling to a higher percentage of your traffic. This is especially true in mall based specialty stores, but we have seen cases, such as liquor stores, where one would believe that everyone that enters the store will make a purchase make significant increases in sales by focusing on the things that drive closing ratio. Basically, retailers have two types of strategies to increase sales... either increase the amount of traffic you receive, or do more with the traffic you get.

Traffic building is typically costly, and includes opening or renovating or relocating stores; advertising; increasing inventory levels; and other such strategies. In one way or another, to increase your traffic, you must spend money. With the competition in today’s markets for most retailers, traffic will not just increase automatically. The days of “build it and they will come” are not what they were in the past. The other type of strategy is to squeeze more dollars from the sales opportunities that present themselves every day. This can be done in one of two ways... increasing closing ratio, or increasing the average transaction value. Both of these strategies are very much within the control of the selling floor and operations management. The key is understanding how to impact each of these, and the potential each strategy holds for improved sales and profitability. In any retail store,or even website, a simple equation holds true to explain how an why retailers make the sales they do.

Traditionally, retailers have calculated sales with the following equation:

Transaction Count X Average Sale Value = Sales
Most POS Systems and cash registers provide the tools to make this calculation, however, there is a major flaw in the use of this equation. The problem is that the store’s transaction count is a compound calculation. It is made up of traffic, and the store’s closing ratio on that traffic. It is possible to have changes in both traffic and performance (ie. Closing Ratio) with no net change in transaction count as the table below indicates.

Drive Your Closing Ratio... Drive Your Sales 2 / 3

The information is subject to change without notice.

In each case, the retailer will see a transaction count of 200 using conventional thinking. Looking at this example however, there is clearly a difference between the three scenarios. In the second case, it takes 1500 people to make $7000 in sales, where in the third scenario, it takes only 800. In the third example, the store was nearly twice as effective and efficient as in the second case. This happens in EVERY store, however, most retailers do not have the tools to identify these changes in productivity, and therefore, the ability to take aggressive steps to capitalize on store potential. Too often, we hear store managers saying “there was no traffic”. This statement typically means “we didn’t put a lot through the till.” In most cases, when store managers count their store traffic, and measure their conversion rate, the traffic “excuse” only rears its ugly head when there truly is a problem.

Rather than explaining retail sales using the equation above, a more precise one is:

The New Retail Equation: Traffic X Closing Ratio X Average Sale Value = Sales

This equation takes into account ALL the factors that contribute to store sales... traffic and performance on traffic. It more fully explains WHY the store made the number of sales it did. Once this is known, the potential can be seen and calculated, and specific actions can be implemented, and evaluated independently.

So... how does one drive their closing ratio? While there are several ways, in the vast majority of stores and companies,the answer is simply by providing more effective service. This can occur a number of ways, from altering staffing to provide more consistent customer service, to training, to setting more specific performance targets and standards. The end goal is to open more sales. The more sales you open, the more you will close. Giving your staff every opportunity to sell, and making them aware of the targets, and accountable to make sure they reach those targets drives closing ratio.

One of the most exciting new developments on the horizon is a management decision making software, geared at providing store managers a specific set of actions to follow each day to provide them the best chance of opening and closing more sales. This software, which can be run at literally the press of a button, will identify how much potential exists in the store, examines why sales are lost, and provides workable solutions. It also provides the basis for region or division managers to look at individual stores, examine which steps are being followed and which are not, and how much the store made or lost as a result of the efforts made.

The leverage effect closing ratio has on sales is an important concept to understand. Let’s assume, a store gets 1000 traffic weekly, sells 20% of that traffic at an average transaction of $20. Using the Retail Equation, the sales would be:

Let’s explore the following strategies...

A) Bring in an additional 100 people per week
B) Increase the average sale by $2 per transaction
C) Sell 4% of the 80% of the stores traffic that doesn’t buy from the store.

Drive Your Closing Ratio... Drive Your Sales 3 / 3. The information is subject to change without notice.

Mathematically, this would look like:Traffic Closing Ratio Average Sale Sales



Clearly, the benefits of driving closing ratio in this situation, far outweigh the benefits of the other two strategies. The bonus, it is easier and considerably less expansive to achieve this type of increase than it is to consistently drive more traffic, or put an additional 10% more onto every purchase. Sell to 4 more of each 80 people that leave the store empty handed.

What drives closing ratio? The answers generally fall around service. This could mean the skill level of the people in your store; (i.e. Their selling skills and product knowledge), scheduling both people and tasks so staff are able and ready to focus on selling during the periods when the potential is highest; setting realistic, specific selling targets and monitoring results (in terms of closing ratio); and enabling your people to open more sales. In “big box” stores and grocery stores, the amount of service could include the number of cashiers you have on duty at specific times.

Over the last 30 years, we have learned that every store has traffic and buying patterns. We know that:

Traffic Flows and Buys in Predictable Patterns
Once these patterns are known, managing for sales becomes much easier, and more effective. Gaining a handle on these patterns, exploiting them, and using them to track change in the store will provide many insights into the store’s potential, and will go a long way to helping to drive closing ratio. Driving closing ratio will become the easiest way you will find to increase your sales.

For more info check www.solva.nl