How to improve customer service experience? Focus on your employees and engage not only their minds but their hearts as well.
Many retail stores offer similar or the same products as yours. Anything else is available online.
If your customers can only expect one product, you are directly competing with every other retailer online or down the road.
This puts you in a bidding war that you cannot expect to win in the long run.
When you rely on discounts to differentiate yourself, it’s low margins and a quick spiral to bankruptcy.
So how do you approach customers looking for a specific service or product? This way, you’re making your product secondary to their overall customer experience.
Your customers should leave your store with products, but you don’t want the price to be the only driving force for them to enter your store.
Your service or product should be a souvenir of an excellent customer experience that people will remember, repeat and share with others. They might even tell their friends about a salesperson’s name because they were extraordinary.
Creating such an experience isn’t that difficult – even during a pandemic – but it does require training and planning.
Here are 4 strategies to remember and improve your customer experience:
Remember, a satisfied sales team creates satisfied customers.
Your employees are your front line. They are the public face of your retail management system as they deal directly with customers. Customers take notice if they are unhappy or uninformed.
On the other hand, informed, educated, and well-trained employees have more confidence and job satisfaction. They know they are good at their job because they have been given the tools and knowledge they need to be successful. That satisfaction and trust will be evident to your customers.
Remember, it all starts with the engagement.
The first impression your customer gets as they walk through the door of your store comes from your sales team. If they are separated, that first impression is one of indifference.
When employees can be seen talking to each other behind the counter, checking Facebook while leaning in front of the display table, or playing invisible as they hide in the stockroom, customers know it. It doesn’t make a great first impression.
Retail sales training teaches your team to get in on the game and engage with customers as soon as they enter your store. Giving a basic greeting and having a genuine desire to connect lets your customers know that helpful, interested people are waiting to assist them.
It’s the first step to engagement, the first step towards building a relationship. Don’t forget to try some retail games to motivate employees to engage more with your customers.
Remember, be happy that they are happy.
Sometimes employees are unable to afford the luxury products they are selling to others. In the wrong seller, this can lead to jealousy. Those thinly masked feelings impact your salesperson’s ability to build a relationship with the customer.
In fact…
We believe this is the main reason why customers try to use their smartphones instead of trying to talk to a salesperson.
The right retail management program teaches your sales staff to live the opposite way through the sales process. They learn to enjoy the thrill of buying an item from someone else, and they see value in the experience they provide. They no longer serve as one of the reasons why customers don’t return.
Remember, your customers buy with their heart, not the head.
A typical analytical sales approach always comes down to one thing: price. You can’t win on price. The more your employees harp about what’s on sale — and what isn’t — the more they will increase the price to the top of the idea to buy an item. With customers’ smartphones ready, you may reluctantly be pitted against online retailers on your own sales level. Then the price is a losing conversation.
The best strategy is providing an exceptional customer experience, with the product as a souvenir of that experience… the feeling that the buyer is the most important person in the store at that moment.
Well-trained, informed and friendly salespeople know how to read customers and talk about their motivators to get them to buy. Once they have that data in mind, great salespeople can create a story that personally connects customers to the items they are interested in. It takes the price out of the equation.
When was the last time you heard a customer in your store say, “I love it! I’ll have it!”?
Your customers want to buy because of emotion. This watch will show my mother that I am successful; This pair of skis will make our holiday perfect. When emotion is allowed and encouraged in selling, it is much more powerful than price.
Conclusion
Discounts and price-matching can be profitable to retail management in the short term, but they will drive your profits down in the long run. Customers will leave with products, but not much.
To drive sales and keep profits high, you need to create a shopping experience that sets you apart from the competition.
When you do this, the product simply becomes a souvenir from that great experience, and your customers will return again and again for that experience.