By Terry O'Connor
Executive Advisor at Courts Asia
It’s the end of the 2010s, customers are changing and competition is intensifying. Customers who walk into your store have already done their research on the products they want to buy, even before stepping into the store itself. If your tactic to win is through discounted pricing, your best bet would be low margins and eventually insolvency in the long-run.
So what is the best approach for customers who already know what they want?
Make the actual product a “souvenir” , and the exceptional customer experience the ‘product’ of their shopping trip. The winning strategy is to create the feeling that the shopper is the most important person in the store. If you are solely counting on your low price and good quality product as your unique selling propositions, you are directly competing with every other retailer online or down the street. But when the customers have an exceptional shopping experience in your store, they will return for that experience again and again.
How do you create such exceptional retail customer experience?
It is neither impossible nor difficult, but it requires training, determination and planning. Retail companies should invest in retail sales training for their employees because employees who are informed, educated and well-trained, will have greater confidence and job satisfaction. When employees know what they are doing and feel confident, it will translate through their expressions and actions, and customers notice this. Your employees are your frontline. If they are confident and happy, so are your customers, and this should be everyone’s goal.
Through the right sales training, your employees will know that first impression matters. Saying basic greetings and having a genuine interest to help customers is the first step towards engaging them and building rapport during their shopping experience.
At Courts, our sales staff are trained to abide by the ‘Customer Service High Fives’, which are five basic steps for a fulfilling shopping experience. This includes enquiring what the customers’ search criteria are, the purpose of the product and how it will fit into the customers’ lifestyles based on their needs. One factor to bear in mind is as the company gets bigger, uniformity of performance is an issue as well, but this regresses with time, commitment and employees imbuing our customer-centric training.
This method is also practised by Hong Kong retailer, Mabelle, who uses its growing scale to develop consumer insight capabilities. Their store managers understand their shoppers’ profiles (local vs mainland Chinese) and customise assortments and sales pitches to match customer needs. The result: smaller stores with higher sales success rates.
Despite the rising trend of online and mobile shopping, customers still crave the personal touch, evident by the growing preference to ‘ROPO’ (Research Online, Purchase Offline). Hence, our stores are where we create meaningful engagement with our customers in the form of exceptional in-store experience. Retailers need to step up the game in improving the retail customer experience and not solely focus on discounted prices and online offerings. Brick-and-mortar stores are still significant in the retail world, and it is an avenue for retailers to show what they have that sets them apart from their competitors.
Retailers need to remember that a negative retail interaction has a longer shelf life than a terrific and rewarding experience. Customer experience has become a must – so either evolve or face being obsolete.
Executive Advisor at Courts Asia
It’s the end of the 2010s, customers are changing and competition is intensifying. Customers who walk into your store have already done their research on the products they want to buy, even before stepping into the store itself. If your tactic to win is through discounted pricing, your best bet would be low margins and eventually insolvency in the long-run.
So what is the best approach for customers who already know what they want?
Make the actual product a “souvenir” , and the exceptional customer experience the ‘product’ of their shopping trip. The winning strategy is to create the feeling that the shopper is the most important person in the store. If you are solely counting on your low price and good quality product as your unique selling propositions, you are directly competing with every other retailer online or down the street. But when the customers have an exceptional shopping experience in your store, they will return for that experience again and again.
How do you create such exceptional retail customer experience?
It is neither impossible nor difficult, but it requires training, determination and planning. Retail companies should invest in retail sales training for their employees because employees who are informed, educated and well-trained, will have greater confidence and job satisfaction. When employees know what they are doing and feel confident, it will translate through their expressions and actions, and customers notice this. Your employees are your frontline. If they are confident and happy, so are your customers, and this should be everyone’s goal.
Through the right sales training, your employees will know that first impression matters. Saying basic greetings and having a genuine interest to help customers is the first step towards engaging them and building rapport during their shopping experience.
At Courts, our sales staff are trained to abide by the ‘Customer Service High Fives’, which are five basic steps for a fulfilling shopping experience. This includes enquiring what the customers’ search criteria are, the purpose of the product and how it will fit into the customers’ lifestyles based on their needs. One factor to bear in mind is as the company gets bigger, uniformity of performance is an issue as well, but this regresses with time, commitment and employees imbuing our customer-centric training.
This method is also practised by Hong Kong retailer, Mabelle, who uses its growing scale to develop consumer insight capabilities. Their store managers understand their shoppers’ profiles (local vs mainland Chinese) and customise assortments and sales pitches to match customer needs. The result: smaller stores with higher sales success rates.
Despite the rising trend of online and mobile shopping, customers still crave the personal touch, evident by the growing preference to ‘ROPO’ (Research Online, Purchase Offline). Hence, our stores are where we create meaningful engagement with our customers in the form of exceptional in-store experience. Retailers need to step up the game in improving the retail customer experience and not solely focus on discounted prices and online offerings. Brick-and-mortar stores are still significant in the retail world, and it is an avenue for retailers to show what they have that sets them apart from their competitors.
Retailers need to remember that a negative retail interaction has a longer shelf life than a terrific and rewarding experience. Customer experience has become a must – so either evolve or face being obsolete.
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