For retail stores, customer experience is one of the most crucial brand differentiators. This experience includes everything from what your store looks like and how your employees engage with customers to whether your checkout process was a positive or negative experience.
Related: Smart Call Solutions for Hotels and Resorts
It’s essential for every brick-and-mortar store to look for ways they can improve their customers’ shopping experience. We’ll explore nine ways that you can do this, along with some techniques to increase your sales at the same time.
Engage With Your Customers
You likely do this already through social media and on the sales floor, but there’s more to offer a meaningful, personalized in-store experience. For example, you can engage your customers with custom surveys and encourage them to leave feedback, ratings, and reviews.
When you see negative feedback pop up, you can address the problem and work to turn it into a positive experience.
Create a Better Atmosphere
While many business owners would think this goes without saying, we’re going to say it anyway—brick-and-mortar locations need to be well lit and have organized shelves and clear pathways through the store.
Use signage that not only helps customers navigate the store but also engages them with info on things like your current promotions. Guide your shoppers through the store, give the space some personality, and let your customers visualize what your products would look like in their own homes. Crafting a great store atmosphere can improve the customer experience as a whole.
Engage All Of Their Senses
The way your store looks matters—we are visual creatures. However, if that’s all you’re focusing on, you’ll be missing out on four other opportunities to connect with your customers and improve their experience.
- Make it easy for shoppers to touch and feel your products. One disadvantage of online shopping is that there’s no tactile interaction.
- Play music throughout your store. Choose songs that encourage positive emotions—music with a slow tempo encourages people to make more purchases.
- Don’t forget about your scent. Bakeries, coffee shops, and restaurants have it easy, but other retailers often struggle in this department. Basic scents like vanilla, cotton, and lavender are perfect for retail environments.
Emphasize Customer Service
If you want your customers to take care of you, take care of them. If you give them a bad experience, it will be a challenge to recover from it, assuming you manage to keep that customer in the first place.
Poor customer service leads to millions in losses every year. And most customers say that customer service is important when determining their loyalty to a brand.
You can emphasize customer service by:
- Making sure employees are available to customers in need
- Encouraging customer loyalty with rewards programs
- Offering knowledge about products rather than pushing for the sale
- Thanking your customers to make them feel appreciated and valued
Our Smart Call wireless paging system is designed with the customers in mind. Check out this short video below on how it can work for you.
Keep Your Employees Happy
Whether or not your employees are happy can significantly impact the customer experience. For example, high levels of employee dissatisfaction lead to turnover, which can make your store feel unstable. Alternatively, happy employees tend to be loyal and offer your customers a dependable, consistent, and knowledgeable face, which builds trust with your brand.
Related: Smart Call Solutions for Bars, Restaurants, and Coffee Shops
Happy employees are also much more likely to collaborate and put the necessary time and effort into creating a great customer experience.
Reward Their Loyalty
Customer loyalty is a powerful thing. For example, loyal customers tend to make more purchases over time while costing less to maintain—retaining customers means sales and revenue boosts.
Loyal customers can also turn into brand ambassadors who can influence the shoppers around them. Offering them incentives to keep your current customers loyal is a great strategy, and providing them with a loyalty program that rewards them regularly is even better.
Either way, you need to reward customer loyalty in a meaningful, personalized way. For example, you can offer exclusive discounts personalized to your customer’s specific shopping habits, adding more value and improving their shopping experience.
Give Them Easy Checkout Options
The customer experience also extends to their time spent in your store. Once they’re ready to make a purchase, they don’t want to wait in lines, especially if you use slow or complicated checkout processes.
Similar to why online shopping often ends with abandoned carts, difficulty and dissatisfaction in your store can send that customer to a competitor that makes things easier. Enabling fast, frictionless discounts can help end their shopping experience in a positive way.
Sometimes, it’s as simple as allowing mobile payments or using payment-enabled tables that your staff can carry with them throughout the store. For small purchases, this strategy can eliminate the need for your customers to stand in a long line.
Offer Free Wi-Fi
Customers love to compare prices and research products while in a store, and they appreciate it when retail locations offer free Wi-Fi. When you offer Wi-Fi, 61% of customers will spend more time in your store, and about half of them will make a purchase.
Offering Wi-Fi in your store can also increase loyalty and sales—28% of retail owners notice that deploying free Wi-Fi boosted loyalty and a 3.4% sales lift.
Host Events
Many customers show interest in in-store events, and offering testers and samples of products can significantly improve sales. Some research shows that food samples can boost your sales while pushing competitors’ sales down. That means partnering with a related business that offers food can be beneficial for offering your customers samples while they shop.
You can tie events in with your loyalty programs to create exclusive shopping access for your most loyal customers every now and then to strengthen that relationship and encourage other shoppers to stay with your brand.
Related: Smart Call Solutions for Theatres, Cinemas, and Discos
Improve Your Customers’ In-Store Experience With Smart Call
Smart Call is a communications solution for retailers that ensure you’re always there when your customers need you most. With Smart Call, you can expect:
- A better customer (and employee) experience
- Immediate ROI
- An increase in revenue and overall performance
Start improving your customer experience while boosting sales at the same time. Get your demo of Smart Call and see how your customers’ in-store experience can get so much better.
