When it comes to managing your retail business, one of the most important parts of the process is knowing how much to anticipate when it comes to customer demand. Everyone has witnessed stories of businesses failing to realize how many customers have been waiting to take advantage of a certain service or get their hands on a specific product until they’ve completely outsold on release day and have to turn away hundreds more dissatisfied, empty-handed customers. This story doesn’t have to befall your business too. Instead, follow these tips to learn how not to manage your business’s capacity planning.
Neglecting Customer Interaction and Field Research
You can’t get a good handle on what your customers want and need unless you take the time to interact with them directly. There’s much more to capacity planning than just crunching numbers and looking at algorithms. Talk to your customers. Conduct surveys. Get to the root of what they’re looking for from your company so you know what demands you should be catering to. This makes it much easier to anticipate and meet specific retail patterns and be well-prepared in the long run.
Basing Trends Off of Short-Term Patterns
Just because you’ve witnessed a boom in sales this spring doesn’t mean this same event will unfold every spring from here on out. Never base your capacity planning off of brief results; instead, look at long-term patterns to decide how to strategize and move forward.
Utilizing Improper Resources
The full purpose of capacity planning centers on making sure you’re as prepared as possible for anything the market may throw at you. This doesn’t just mean ensuring your inventory is well-stocked, but also your website is able to handle large amounts of traffic when it counts. This means upgrading your server and bandwidth should you need to, as well as taking any other measures to make sure your business’s online hub is always reliable.
