If you own a retail business of any kind — a small shop, a clothing shop, a pet food shop and so on — you have probably experienced, or plainly seen, that a great many customers do not come in solely to buy the thing they had in mind. Plenty arrive expecting to be satisfied, to get something good out of the visit: what is known as "customer experience", running alongside the use of a POS programme to manage the retail shop. Let us look at what this customer experience strategy actually is, how far it makes running a retail shop more effective, and how it can draw customers in — so they leave impressed and come back to buy again.
A closer look at customer experience
Customer experience (CX) means taking what you know about consumers or your target group — their buying behaviour, their lifestyle, their preferences, and the various channels through which they reach the brand — and analysing it person by person. Every consumer has different interests and a different way of buying goods and services. Once you can analyse that customer data, you can put forward products or services that answer a far wider range of consumer needs. It also helps with how the retail shop itself is arranged, so customers feel good, leave impressed, and get more of a fresh experience of your brand.
How does customer experience help with running a retail shop?
In business the customer is plainly the variable that matters, the one that decides whether your business succeeds and grows. Let us look at where customer experience builds a good experience for a customer.
- It shifts how consumers see the brand in a better direction, and puts the brand more firmly in their minds.
- A retail business can gather the data itself, without paying other channels to promote it.
- It lets you communicate with your target customers far more effectively.
- It gives you consistency in building a good image and a good experience for customers on every channel.
- It lets you use your own platform to communicate with customers directly.
Six strategies for building customer experience and leaving customers impressed
1. Care about creating products that are good quality and safe
The heart of retail is inescapably the quality of the product and the service, which always has to come first. So the first rule in winning customers over and getting them to buy again is keeping the quality of your products and service consistently good — and working to analyse and build on what you learn from customers, so you can produce new products with more variety that land better with your target group.
2. Put good products forward alongside an interesting promotion
Running a promotion alongside a good product lifts sales in the short term and gets customers deciding faster. It does long-term good too: building a customer base by getting new groups to try the product, building the brand's image, raising brand awareness, and leaving customers impressed.
3. Make customers feel special with personalised marketing
Everybody wants to feel like a valued customer. Personalised marketing around your brand's products or services helps you reach your target group the way you intend, and — importantly — reduces the chance of a customer switching to a competitor. It also builds a good relationship with your existing customers, one you can grow until they become genuinely loyal to your brand over the long term.
The strategy lifts sales as well, because plenty of customers take the view that the more a product suits their lifestyle, the more they want to buy it — and the faster they buy, and the more they will spend.
4. Pair products with services through bundling
If your business sells products alone but you want to impress customers more, try adding a special service. If you sell electrical goods, for instance, you could offer free installation at the customer's home, which leaves a better impression and gives them a stronger sense of having had a good experience of the brand.
5. Draw customers in with a strong social media strategy
Every business knows a marketing strategy on social media reaches the target group quickly, and builds awareness and sales along with it. But there is more to it than putting products or services forward: it is about conveying what the brand is and reaching more of who the customer is — content about what they like, what interests them, or how their day goes, which lets you communicate exactly on point and leaves customers feeling attached and loyal to that brand.
6. Lift sales and impress customers with retailtainment
Plenty of people take retailtainment for a new strategy, but it has in fact been around us for a long time, and businesses of every kind, retail included, can apply more of it. The word comes from "retail + entertainment": marketing strategy folded together with entertainment, which builds a more memorable experience for the buyer. You might have customers guess the scent of a new perfume the brand has not put on sale yet, letting them smell it first, so they feel special for being among the first to try it.
Deliver an experience through service that works, with a retail POS programme from Qashier
Now that you have the customer experience techniques for impressing customers, do not forget to make the selling itself more effective with a tool that matters: the POS programme for retail shops from Qashier. A retail POS programme helps you run your shop comprehensively, fully featured across stock, orders, customer data analysis, payments, accounts, promotions and more — answering more of the day's work than before. Whatever the business, it is easy to use and certainly worth the investment. To order or ask for more details, reach us on LINE: @qashier.th or call 02-544-0267