Retail shops have many methods they can use to increase profits. They can try to reduce their overheads. Or they might want to try their hands at automation. Others decide to focus on branding, marketing, and loyalty programs. However, far too many neglect one of the most important parts: customer experience.
Poor customer experience will reflect poorly on your brand while good customer experience could allow you to not only get loyal customers but increase the amount they spend in your store. Let’s take a look at how you can improve your customers’ in-store experience.
Get a Retail Audit
A retail audit is when someone comes in and looks at multiple aspects of a retail store’s branding and design. A company like CJ Retail Solutions, for instance, could come into your business and look at things that might affect the behaviour of customers inside your store. They might be able to identify blockages or help you come up with ways that you can adjust your branding and design to boost sales.
Working with a company like this could help you rethink your whole strategy and identify what you might be doing wrong. They may also be able to help with asset management and making sure that you’re compliant.
Work with Your Employees
No matter what you do to brand and design your store(s) to improve your customers’ experience, all it takes is for them to have one bad interaction with the staff to ruin everything. The first thing you have to do is to make sure that staff is easily identifiable. Try to use vibrant colours if possible, if it fits with your brand image. Your employees are one of the most important touchpoints in your store, so you have to make sure that you vet them properly.
If you need help, here’s a list of some of the biggest pet peeves customers have. These range from being unknowledgeable about products to employees not loading carts. We suggest you check out these and see if any of your employees might be guilty of any of those, so you can make the proper adjustments.
Make the Store more Child-Friendly
If you can manage to keep children happy in your store, you’ll make things that much easier for your customers. This also means that your staff should be child friendly and trained to be so.
On the other hand, if there’s nothing for children, you’ll end up making life difficult for your clients. Many of them will make a negative connection with your store as a result. This not only means that you might not retain them long enough to make a sale, but never see them again and lose them to a store that understands how to care for families better.
These are just some of the ways that you can improve customer experience in retail. This is not something that you should take lightly and could be a cost-effective and relatively simple way to increase your bottom line.