How to Create a Great Retail Customer Experience
If you work in retail, you’ve probably heard the term ‘the customer is always right’. We’re not here to say whether that’s explicitly true or not, but your customer’s opinion and perception of your business is incredibly important to your success. If you want to improve public perception, a great place to start is by offering an incredible retail customer experience.
We’re going to cover how you can offer a great customer experience, improve sales, lower customer churn, and expand your brand awareness. Let’s get started.
Understand your customers
What does your business do? What is the reason customers purchase from your business? What do you offer? It might seem a tad simple, and barebones, to think about these things, but it can help to reconsider these questions if you’re questioning how you can improve customer experience. Simply put, you need to think about what you’re bringing to the table, and whether that’s enough for your customers.
Think about your customers’ needs, wants, and pain points. Does your business help them tackle their desires, or concerns? If you can consider what your customers want, you can start thinking about what you can offer your customers. The greater the personalisation of your offerings, the more invested your customers will be in your business.
Reduce wait times
Don’t keep people waiting. Your customers are busy, have places to be, and aren’t going to sit around waiting for too long if they can go online and find what they were looking for there. And, who’s to say that they will purchase what they were after from your business? You should make the transactional experience as frictionless as possible. And, one of the main ways to do this, is by ensuring that your customers won’t have to wait too long. Staffing enough employees per shift and equipping them with tools that speed up the customer payment process will help with this.
Allow your customers to pay multiple ways
As we’ve just covered, making the transactional experience as frictionless as possible is imperative to improving customer experience. Needless to say, having someone tell you that you cannot purchase an item because you’re not paying the way they want you to can be incredibly frustrating. Offer your customers the ability to pay using debit or credit, contactless, and yes, even cash. It may be easier for your business to not accept cash, but many people still rely on cash as their primary method of payment.
Provide excellent customer service
We’ve all experienced poor customer service at one time or another, and it’s enough to leave a sour taste in your mouth. If your employees provide such service, your business, and your brand, will suffer for it. This is where employee training is super important. Coach your employees and ensure they’re operating in a friendly and respectful manner. Also, make sure they’re knowledgeable about your stock, services, operations, and so on. Plus, being prompt and proactive can help, too.
Create a customer loyalty programme
Customer loyalty schemes are a great way to get customers back into your store. The sweet promise of exclusive deals, offers, items, and promotions for someone is enough to entice them back; even if they had no intention of buying anything new anytime soon. Offer multiple different benefits and personalisation within your customer loyalty offerings and you’ll be sure to have customers coming back for more.
Enhance the customer experience
This could mean anything. And, that’s precisely the point. We’ll call this the ‘misc’ section of the article. Think outside the box about any single miscellaneous way you can improve customer experience. If you were to walk into your store right now (as a customer), what would you see? Does the store have a simple layout? Will customers find it easy to move around the store? Are sales associates easy to locate? Are your items clearly displayed, and labelled? Do you know where the tills are located? Etc. The changes you make could be as simple as displaying fewer items in your store to reduce clutter, or could be as complex as completely remodelling the interior of your store. The choice is yours.
Be responsive to customer feedback
It would be a bit short-sighted if, in the pursuit of improving customer experience, you ignored your customer’s feedback. So, put simply, listen to your customers. Conduct surveys to your customers and off them incentives for doing so (e.g. 5% off your next purchase under £50 if you complete this survey). You can even get your employees involved too, and ask them to ask your customers in-store, or at the tills, what they think could be improved. Some may not be interested, but some may offer you some valuable feedback you hadn’t considered before.
