How To Offer A Brilliant Retail Customer Experience

When visitors (potential customers) walk into your store, what is it that ensures that they leave with a smile on their faces? What ensures that after they walk out, a positive word of mouth is something that follows? What ensures that they return, not with a complaint but to relive the experience provided by your store?

The answer to all the above questions is a great retail customer experience. Well, it is a culmination of a lot of aspects and is something that should be the top priority for all businesses operating through retail stores.

Why Focus On Customer Experience

The biggest advantage that retail stores have over online shops is the ability to use experience offered to immerse shoppers.

Consciously or unconsciously, the reason why people choose a brick-and-mortar based setup over their digital screens is that they desire a personal shopping experience, which only a physical setup can provide.

The importance of face-to-face interactions cannot be stressed enough. It is a gateway to building an everlasting personal bond with your store visitors. Further, retail stores also have an edge as you have the option of using a rejuvenating store setting to provide a memorable experience to the visitors.

There are lots of other ways to create a retail customer experience that can help you gain loyal customers and fuel your business growth. Here are some of the most effective ones that you can incorporate into your way of doing things.

Stores That Amaze

Getting your store setting right is integral to creating a memorable customer experience. Among the various factors that add up to create your store vibe, the store setting is the most significant one.

Glasses locked behind thick glass panes — a situation that our founder, Sid Sethi had to encounter when he went to buy a pair of glasses from the stores of some of the leading eyewear brands. Determined to address these common problems faced by customers, he founded Specscart.

If you visit any of our stores today, you will find pairs arranged on open shelves waiting — with open arms — to be tried on by their visitors. You can pick them up by yourself and try them on to check how they look on you.

Your store setting also needs to have a wow factor — something that gets etched into the memory of your visitors. Whether it is attractive displays, pleasant lighting, or exquisite flooring, there are multiple ways in which you can set up a welcoming vibe. A foosball table at our store at Walkden has earned us a lot of compliments.

A significant thing that you need to keep in mind while setting up a store is what you do to attract a passerby. This is someone who has not decided to give you a visit. It all comes down to how your store appears from the outside. And once you get the first impression right, good things will certainly follow.

Interaction Over Transactions

Focus on transactions might give you a one-time customer, focus on interaction will build loyal customers.

Unlike online stores, you have the exclusive advantage of face-to-face interactions in a physical store. Of course, it is your team stationed at the stores that is going to do all the interaction. The guiding principle here should be to develop personal bonds.

Whether it is the person designated to assist the visitors in choosing a pair or the one whom the visitor meets at the billing counter during the checkout process, your store staff should be like a friend to your visitors and give their undivided attention to every single individual.

The more warmth and comfort you can generate, the more satisfied the visitor will be. In-store interaction should be followed up by interaction through calls or emails.

Organising activities and special events from time to time can serve as a great platform for interaction with people. Apart from using this as an opportunity to build strong relationships and take your identity to the people, you can also get to know people’s preferences and feedback on such occasions.

An Emotional Bond

At retail stores, you have a better opportunity to connect not only at the level of mind but also at the level of heart.

An emotional linkage with your customers can be magical in retaining them. How do you bring back the nostalgia of childhood memories through the customer experience at your store? How do you ensure that a customer who has chosen you for a mother’s day gift, walks out of your store with the realisation of the unconditional love that a mother has for her child?

Well, the points discussed above will certainly help in creating emotional bonds, but this is only possible when you put customer satisfaction at the forefront of your business model.

For all those businesses who have only offline presence or both offline and online presence, there is no doubt that retail remains a challenging landscape. However, the focus should be on the exclusive edge that retail stores enjoy and capitalising on it.