10 Ways to Improve the Customer Experience in Retail

Phot of an Apple Store
 

By Tricia McKinnon

For as much as we hear the words “the customer experience” the experience we have with many retailers often feels less than ideal. In defence of the retail industry delighting customers is not an easy thing to do. At a time when retailers are fighting supply chain issues, rising inflation and having to implement and often defend COVID-19 protocols the customer experience can be lost along the way. But positive experiences with a brand are important. They can brighten someone’s day and make a person loyal which means they keep coming back for more in the hopes of more memorable experiences. 

If you are looking for ideas to boost the customer experience in your business then consider these 10 tried and true examples of how great brands give customers experiences to remember. 

1. Forget about the hard sell and teach your way to the sale. Most people don’t like when a sales associate follows around them around asking every few minutes if they are interested in buying something. Instead, a better customer experience would be not to place so much emphasis on closing the sale at all. Instead why not offer a class where you teach your customers how to use a product you would like them to buy. 

Sephora does an excellent job of this. From skin care classes, to brow shaping classes to contouring classes Sephora offers classes for everyone. When you have a better idea of how a product works and why it would be beneficial to purchase it, it is easier for the product to sell itself. For many years lululemon has offered free yoga classes where instructors teach you to how to get into great shape while achieving a perfect level of Zen. While these classes are on you can’t help but notice how great your instructor looks in lululemon’s latest pair of Align leggings. 

For most products there is a way to bring your customers into a class to teach them something new and useful. If you are a clothing retailer you could offer personal styling classes. If you own an Italian restaurant you can teach your customers how to make pizza.

Classes can be offered by almost any retailer that sells a product. And given the popularity of DIY videos on YouTube there is a clear demand by the market for consumers to become experts by learning from other experts.

2. Provide valuable services. Nordstrom is making a bet that services are key to a great customer experience. With this in mind a number of Nordstrom stores offer a wide variety of services including: alterations, bra fitting, gift wrapping, personal styling, shoe repair and an endless array of beauty services.

A day doesn’t go by when you don’t hear someone talking about how tired they are. From working moms to those who work several jobs to make ends meet, people are strapped for time. A business succeeds when it finds a way to solve a problem that exists. If you can think of your customer’s needs more broadly than “I need a new pair of pants” then you can tap into a way to provide them with a better customer experience. 

3. Know your customer’s name. One of the details you may not think about but is quite powerful is that each and every time you go to Starbucks the Barista greets you, asks for your name and writes your name on your order. That is very rare, especially for a retailer like Starbucks which serves more than 100 million customers per week. 

Details matter and at a time where communication is often more generic than personal Starbucks provides a personalized level of service each and every time. That effect is compounded when the Baristas get to know you and greet you without even having to ask you for your name. While personalization is a buzz word for many for Starbucks it’s old news. While it sounds fairly basic to greet a customer by name, over the next week as you go into various retail establishments take stock of how many times someone asks you for your name. 

Often it is the little things especially when done consistently that make the biggest difference with how customers experience your brand. 

4. Go the extra mile. One of the keys to Chick-fil-A’s success is its customer service which landed it at the top spot on the American Customer Satisfaction Index for restaurant brands this year for the ninth year in a row.

So what is Chick-fil-A doing that others are not? For one it empowers its employees to go above and beyond to serve their customers. Take this example. In 2019 a 96 year old WWII veteran entered a Chick-fil-A store in Maryland. The long-time customer was visibly shaken because he was driving to the restaurant and barely made it there because one of his tires was flat. After telling Chick-fil-A employees what happened Daryl Howard, a Chick-fil-A Manager, quickly sprang into action and began working on the veteran’s car. 15 minutes later the tire was changed, the customer was relieved and Chick-fil-A had yet another example of why it’s service is legendary.

That’s not Chick-fil-A’s only example of uncommonly good service. Last year outside of a Chick-fil-A restaurant in Virginia a customer, Shauna Hall, accidently dropped her cell phone into a storm drain. The customer who was at the restaurant with her young child was distraught. A Chick-fil-A employee sprang into action again. After spending some time trying to retrieve the phone from above ground he decided to go into the manhole and grab the phone himself. Now how many employees are willing to go the distance like that? We have all had sales associates that are hesitant to even check the backroom to see if there are additional sizes in stock. Needless to say the customer was beside herself with gratitude.

Sometimes the question you need to ask is how bad do you want it? How bad do you want the sale or even better a long term customer relationship? Unfortunately many sales associates are not engaged, they do the bare minimum. If you want to enhance the customer experience in your business you have to educate your employees on how to go to the next level and you will also have to ensure you are hiring people that actually want to do that. Every person you hire isn’t interested in going the extra mile and it is important to know this and to let go of employees that are performing at a low level to make room for those that will create the unique experiences that make shopping at your store a memorable one.

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5. Have a fun and friendly atmosphere. If you walked into a store and didn’t know it was a Trader Joe’s you would never guess that the store is part of a $16.5 billion grocery chain. Trader Joe’s feels like your neighborhood’s grocery store. Stores are small, fun and cheerful. While its stores do not have the most expensive design elements they are inviting, encouraging customers to go in and stay a while. Trader Joe’s also proves that you do not need the most beautifully designed or expensive store to attract the most customers.

6. Invest in your employees. Customers love Trader Joe’s friendly and helpful staff. One of the keys to Trader Joe’s success is hiring the right people and investing in them. Jon Basalone, president of stores at Trader Joe’s has said: “we’ve been around for over 50 years, and we’ve never had layoffs. We stay true to what we know works for Trader Joe’s and our crew members.”  “You combine that with the pay, benefits and supportive, fun environment, and people tend to want to stick around.”  This year Trader Joe’s was named by Forbes as the second best large employer in the United States in the retail and wholesale category.  

A great customer experience often comes down to great employees. The better your employees the better they will treat your customers. A lot of times a retailer can’t quite figure out why their business isn’t performing the way they want it to. They analyze all of the sales data, add more promotions, bring in new products but nothing is working. If I am talking about you then try doing a mystery shopper audit. See how your employees perform when you are not around.

7. Provide a unique experience. To provide customers with the experience of what it is like to wear their products in the environments they were created for, Canada Goose has installed Cold Rooms in some of its stores. These small rooms are set to -25 degrees Celsius (-13 Fahrenheit). The rooms are even equipped with a windchill button. 

Customers select a coat and then a sales associate accompanies the customer into the cold room to test the jacket. Speaking about the Cold Rooms, Dani Reiss, Canada Goose’s CEO said: “we’ve found that the cold room is very exciting to customers right now, but we think it will continue to have value long after the novelty factor has worn off.” “It means customers can explore buying a coat in the summer months, when it’s hot outside.” This experience is so good Fast Company named it the best retail experience of the year in 2018. 

While Cold Rooms are a great experience for Canada Goose customers you don’t have to do something fancy to be unique. When Sam Walton, founder of Walmart was starting out he had a store in Newport Arkansas in the 1940s. To bring more traffic into his store he decided to put a popcorn machine and an ice cream machine outside of the store, an idea he called “new and different.” Customers loved it and he was able to turn a profit on the investment. Walton also said, that “I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Walmart.” 

If you are struggling to provide a better customer experience are you experimenting with different things? Are you trying to do things no one else is doing? We often look at Amazon’s success in awe but the truth is one of the biggest keys to Amazon’s success is its history of experimenting and trying new things. Do you remember the phone Amazon launched in 2014? Probably not but without experiments and failures like that there would probably be no Amazon Web Services the business unit that generates most of Amazon’s profits. If you aren’t experimenting with your customer experience you are missing out.

8. Surprise and delight your customers. Tony Hsieh, who was once the CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer, once said that customer service is their main product.  Zappos believes that customer service is a differentiator since a customer has many options for where they can buy shoes. Zappos’ number one core value is to Deliver WOW Through Service.  

To demonstrate this commitment to its customers, in 2015 30 Zappos employees arrived in Hanover New Hampshire in the middle of the night. They dropped off large boxes of gifts to each home in Hanover. The Hanover community is considered to be “fiercely loyal” to Zappos. Approximately 1,900 packages were delivered. The packages contained a range of items including backpacks, headphones and warm weather gear. Not surprisingly residents were delighted to find the packages when they woke up the next morning. 

You shouldn’t have to wait until it’s your customer’s birthday to do something special for them. You should know who your best customers are and do something out of the ordinary for them to reward them for their business. While you may see this as an additional cost gestures like this usually lead to high levels of loyalty and future purchases. Author Robert Cialdini writes in his best-selling book Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion that: “one of the most potent of the weapons of influence around us [is] the rule for reciprocation.  The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.” “By virtue of the reciprocity rule, then, we are obligated to the future repayment of favours, gifts, invitations and the like.”  “For those who owed him a favour, it made no difference whether they liked him or not; they felt a sense of obligation to repay him, and they did.”

9. Become a trusted advisor. When speaking about when Apple first launched the Apple store Ron Johnson former SVP of retail at Apple said: “when we launched retail [at Apple], I got this group together, people from a variety of walks of life.” “As an icebreaker, we said, ‘tell us about the best service experience you’ve ever had.'” “Of the 18 people, 16 said it was in a hotel. This was unexpected. But of course: the concierge desk at a hotel isn’t selling anything; it’s there to help.” “We said, ‘well, how do we create a store that has the friendliness of a Four Seasons Hotel?'” The answer: “let’s put a bar [the Genius Bar] in our stores. But instead of dispensing alcohol, we dispense advice.” It has been over 20 years since Apple opened its first retail store in 2001 and that advice has not gone out of style. 

Best Buy realized that with the fast pace of technological change consumers needed help determining what products to buy. In recognition of this in September of 2017 Best Buy expanded its In-Home Advisor program to all major markets in the United States. Customers using this service receive advice for free on which technology products to buy and how they should be installed. By the end of 2018 these advisors provided more than 175,000 consultations. The revenue generated per order for Best Buy from these interactions is much higher than from online or in-store interactions. 

Don’t you love that friend who gives you the best advice? We all know someone like this, the person who always seems to have the answer to a problem we are struggling with. One of the reasons social media influencers have become popular is because they often answer the questions we have in our minds. If you are having breakouts and don’t know what to do with them there is a skinfluencer for you on YouTube. These influencers have racked up billions of views because they are solving problems without always directly selling something to you.

Instead of just offering a class why not find away to also provide customers with answers to commonly asked questions. Just like you have that one friend you always go to you can be that retailer that consumers always go to when they have a problem. That type of experience pays for itself. There a lot of businesses that were built on the backs of blogs that provided solutions to commonly asked questions. Goop and Glossier are two examples of this.

10. Empower your employees. The Ritz Carlton has long been known for its award-winning customer service. It has earned the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award twice. One of the keys to its success is empowering employees to surprise, delight and solve customer problems. As a result of this philosophy, Ritz Carlton employees are empowered to spend up to $2,000 per day to improve the customer experience of any guest.  All employees fall within this program, from front desk receptionists to house-keeping staff.

This program has led to many examples of outstanding customer service. For example, one Ritz Carlton customer forgot their laptop charger in their hotel room. Before the customer had time to call the hotel, the charger was couriered to the customer. A loss prevention employee who sent the package wrote in a note accompanying the package: “Mr. DiJulius, I wanted to make sure we got this to you right away. I am sure you need it, and, just in case, I sent you an extra charger for your laptop." 

The Ritz Carlton believes the key to customer engagement is employee engagement. Instead of having a lot of red tape or bureaucratic processes, the program also enables employees to take immediate action so that problems are solved quickly. When employees are fully engaged and empowered customers reap the benefits.  

The Ritz Carlton has this to say about its employee empowerment program: “the interesting thing about our empowerment is that while the full $2000 (or more, with the general manager’s permission) could be used, it rarely is. In fact, the average actual amount used on an incident is often much, much lower. There is much power for of all our Ladies & Gentlemen knowing that we truly trust them with an amount that large, per incident. They are able to make decisions in the moment to quickly resolve a guest issue or to make an experience beautiful and memorable (or both). And our Ladies & Gentlemen know they can do this on their own, regardless of their level, without having to go through levels of leadership for approval.”

“It shows how much we trust our Ladies & Gentlemen. It’s how much we trust them to do the right thing, how much we trust them to resolve a guest issue well, and how much we trust them to always  think of creative and memorable ways to elevate the experience. There are ways you can create empowerment in your organization that aren’t necessarily a $2000 per incident policy, that will show you trust all your employees. And if you trust your employees to care for your clients, guests, and patients, they really will.”

Tricia McKinnonStrategy & Growth, Customer ExperienceComment