How can Retailers Enhance the Customer Experience?

According to surveys, consumers will spend over $3 billion on ecommerce by the end of 2019. Considering the recent loss of several well-known high-street brands, this doesn’t come as a surprise. As the online market keeps growing, high street retailers have faced tough times in recent years. With iconic brands like Thomas Cook and Mothercare going into administration, the landscape doesn’t look safe for any business in 2020. Here, we examine how retailers can enhance the customer experience and boost sales as we head into the New Year.

High expectations

Consumers have high expectations when they set foot in a retail store. You need to fully optimise your service to make sure the reality lives up. If not, you could find yourself closing down stores and letting staff members go.

One of the main benefits of shopping online is avoiding the crowds and queues – even if you’re buying tickets, you can make yourself a hot drink and get comfortable while you wait. But in a store, the physical queues which lie ahead of you can make you as stressed as road traffic does, which is already an advantage of staying at home rather than going into a store to do the shopping.

According to data, customers are happy to wait up to a maximum of 13 minutes in a queue. Although this may seem like a high waiting time, businesses around the world are still trying to improve this area of their operations and make great changes to ensure that no customer is ever disappointed with their service.

It is imperative that you give customers good value for time as well as money and tailor the experience to them. Businesses that have not had a focus on this area of their business reported that they lost 75% of their customers due to lengthy waiting times; which of course led to a decrease in business opportunities. Customers that do not have an enjoyable experience with your business will not likely return. Waiting times tend to increase if retail businesses do not have modern queue management systems in place. 50% of people believe waiting in a queue is irritating, so if you’re not already looking to introduce such systems in place — you could face bigger problems as a business.

Plan for improvement

If you want to achieve measurable business growth, you should look at personalising the customer experience. You should have an aim to deliver an efficient customer experience from the moment someone arrives at a store up until when they leave. Enhancing the customer experience is all about adopting new technologies that can streamline all processes across an organisation.

Do you have a viable POS (point of sale) system? You need to invest in a POS that has the ability to drive results and also give you greater visibility over your business inventory; it can often be hard to strike the perfect balance. What makes your business better than your competitors? It all comes down to the in-store experience, so you should make it your mission to ensure that someone is always on hand to help with any queries someone may have about a product or service. Although customers do tend to wait a generous 13 minutes before leaving; that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try your best to serve them as quickly as possible.

You should also look at improving the efficiency of your employees when serving customers. This in turn will generate continuous results when implementing new solutions or upgrading current technologies – something which often takes time to adopt. Through a focus on queue management, you’ll be able to streamline the flow of people who visit your store in an efficient and less stressful way. From this, you’ll be able to create upsell opportunities and offer a more tailored experience to your customers if integrated across different areas of the business.

In addition, this should also help you make informed, intelligent decisions. In effect, it removes the need to go back and forth manually to check the availability of products. As well as this, you’ll be alerted when it’s time to restock your inventory, which can remove the need of constant monitoring; allowing you to always be prepared for popular store times.