Elevate Retail Customer Experience
Discover how to elevate your retail customer experience. Explore strategies, tools, and real success stories to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The Significance of Customer Experience in Retail
Excellent customer service can make or break a brand and retail is no different. In fact, HubSpot research suggests that 93% of customers who love the service they receive will become valuable repeat customers. In addition, a study by American Express found that consumers are willing to spend 17% more to do business with companies that deliver excellent service.
By providing customers with the best retail customer experience, you increase your brand reputation. On the other hand, provide them with a negative experience and they will go elsewhere or worse, tell their friends.
That’s why having a retail customer experience strategy is crucial for retailers looking to differentiate themselves in the market and increase revenues.
Key Strategies for Improving Retail Customer Satisfaction
So, what do retailers need to consider when building a retail customer experience strategy to improve customer satisfaction? One way is through personalising the customer experience.
Even small details can make a difference. In this video, Julien Schneider, CEO at Balibaris explained how they would personalise interactions to provide a better experience. This included asking a regular customer who was a keen traveller about her past and upcoming journeys.
Data gathered via loyalty schemes and past purchases can also help retailers identify any trends or ways to further enhance the retail customer experience. This could include regional offers based on the weather or suggesting products a customer might like based on their preferences.
We’ve also seen retailers building other experiences into their stores such as bars and coffee areas. Having the in-store barista make the customer’s favourite drink while they browse can help make the experience memorable.
The role technology can play in customer experience
Your employees are your greatest asset in delivering fantastic customer experiences. However often they are overburdened with tasks or checks that need to be done daily. Using technology like a task management platform can ensure head office allocates jobs evenly among the workforce but also that they leave enough time for store associates to be on the shop floor. Technology can also be used to train staff and ensure they have product information at their fingertips.
Similarly, using a mobile POS means store associates can meet customers where they are and serve them. During busy shopping periods, having a number of mobile POS units can also reduce queues.
Retailers also need to ensure they are consistent in an omnichannel world as consumers expect a seamless experience regardless of whether they are shopping in-store or online. Something noted by L’Oréal’s Nicolas Koller; “We have a major need for an omnichannel strategy that integrates CRM and e-commerce solutions. Optimising the customer experience is also one of our priorities.” It’s also why L’Oréal turned to Cegid to support its goal and why the group has been a customer for more than 10 years with Cegid being deployed in 35 countries and in more than 3,500 stores.
Measuring and Optimising the Retail Customer Journey
Retailers should also seek to optimise the retail customer journey at every touchpoint and that’s where measurement and analytics come in. Having access to data can help retailers work out what they are doing right but also what is not going so well and optimise accordingly. Best practices and successes can also be shared at a group level for individual stores to replicate.
Retailers also need to ensure they have an optimal customer /staff ratio to support with any customer experience needs. By automating more tasks or standardising procedures into checklists, head office can reduce the time it takes for store associates to complete tasks and free them up to spend more time with customers.
Customers also expect convenience. A good technology platform can help retailers to optimise their inventory, so they know where a product is located and make it simple for them to ship from that store directly to the customer either at home or to their local store.
Success Stories: Transforming Retail Customer Experiences
You can’t have amazing customer experience if you don’t deliver a great associate experience. Something PVH Group’s Robert Newstead is well aware of.
Following a study, PVH Group discovered staff were overloaded with tasks that were taking them away from the shop floor. By using Cegid Retail Store Excellence, they consolidated multiple applications into just three and realised they needed to reduce the volume of comms being sent by head office.
As Newstead explained “This was information we didn’t know. It’s email traffic, it’s phone calls, it’s everything and suddenly you start to see. This has started to come down significantly, especially in Q4. And it’s now given us a clear indication of how we can really give as much to the sales floor to help them deliver that associate experience – because otherwise you don’t get retail excellence; you don’t get consumer experience and therefore you don’t deliver best in class.”
Cegid Retail Store Excellence saved PVH Group four hours a week (equivalent to £300,000 in labour costs) and freed staff up to improve the retail customer experience.
How to use tech to elevate your in-store CX ?
This ebook reveals the four tactics that retail CIOs can apply to improve the customer experience in their stores, and the KPIs to evaluate their effectiveness.