3 Steps to Increased Retail Experience
How does your retail store experience look like? Do your customers spend time with offered products? What products do they care about?
Retail management struggles daily with these questions wanting to find out how to increase sales.
To find out what products customers would potentially be interested in means giving them the freedom to walk around the store floor. Waiting lines can be an obstacle if not managed effectively.
Simply put, queues keep people pinned to a certain spot in a room. This takes away the opportunity to spend more time by going around the room to look at additional products they could be buying.
Customer experience scenarios
Lets assume a client comes into a store with a specific request. After she has selected what she came from, she either:
- stands into a waiting line when no staff is free to serve her or
- signs up for a virtual line and goes around the store to have a second look until she will be served.
The first option forces her to stand still amongst other buyers, leaving her to spend time by playing with her phone or thinking about where the world is heading towards.
The latter gives her time to take another look around the store and make sure she didn’t miss anything or discover new products she had no idea even existed.
Be mindful to use clear notifications how next customer is called. This will reduce your visitors worry of missing ones turn. Customer can see freely what the store offers.
In this simplified scenario, a small change from physical queues to effective virtual queues might lead to a increase in bottom line - just by letting your customers know that they are taken care of.
Follow these steps to retail success
If possible, use this as a team exercises. This gives you as a retail manager or in other roles a chance to share ideas. Service staff spend immense amount of time directly interacting with the customer. They might have valuable input.
- Write down a short answer for the following questions:
- How do your customers move around in your store?
- What are the main spots they spend more time?
- How does your staff approach customers?
- Come up with quick and simple improvement ideas for each question.
- Have an experiment.
Do this constantly to achieve results. Don’t worry about the results of the experiments initially. Doing this process weekly or monthly builds a culture for improvement and contributes to long term success.
Having trouble connecting with your customers? Try Qminder’s queue management system that allows you to learn more about your customers.
