You can’t deny that more people are beginning to complete their shopping online with some figures suggesting that by the end of 2018, digital spend will equal £2.842 billion. As more ecommerce websites continue to rise in numbers, spend is set to increase further to $4.878 billion by 2021.
Businesses on the high street are not in a great position, especially with the like of BHS, Toys R Us and more closing their doors. With more people venturing online to do their shopping, no business is safe.
What your customers want
You need to match the level of service you offer online with the one you give in your physical store. You need to fully optimise your service to make sure the reality lives up. If not, you could find yourself closing down stores and letting staff members go.
Customers are willing to wait 13 minutes before being served. Although this may seem like a high waiting time, businesses around the world are still trying to improve this area of their operations and make great changes to ensure that no customer is ever disappointed with their service.
As many businesses have not invested in making their customer-wait time lower, brand have reported that they have lost 75% of their customers because of it. Customers that do not have an enjoyable experience with your business will not likely return.
50% of people believe waiting in a queue is irritating, so if you’re not already looking to introduce such systems in place — you could face bigger problems as a business.
The direction for your retail business
If you’re looking to make the most out of your sales process and enhance your retail performance, you must focus on customer personalisation. You should have an aim to deliver an efficient customer experience from the moment someone arrives at a store up until when they leave. Enhancing the customer experience is all about adopting new technologies that can streamline all processes across an organisation.
You’ll already have a point of sales system in place, but is it good enough? You need to invest in a POS that has the ability to drive results and also give you greater visibility over your business inventory; it can often be hard to strike the perfect balance.
On top of this, you need to find out why your business is superior to others in the market. It all comes down to the in-store experience, so you should make it your mission to ensure that someone is always on hand to help with any queries someone may have about a product or service. Although customers do tend to wait a generous 13 minutes before leaving; that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try your best to serve them as quickly as possible.
Install systems that you know will help streamline your performance. This in turn will generate continuous results when implementing new solutions or upgrading current technologies – something which often takes time to adopt.
It’s important to deal with your store visitors in the most effective way possible to ensure customer satisfaction. From this, you’ll be able to create upsell opportunities and offer a more tailored experience to your customers if integrated across different areas of the business.
Through this, you’ll be able to monitor your inventory more closely to ensure operations continue to run smoothly. In effect, it removes the need to go back and forth manually to check the availability of products. As well as this, you’ll be alerted when it’s time to restock your inventory, which can remove the need of constant monitoring; allowing you to always be prepared for popular store times.
It’s crucial that you’re constantly looking at ways you can improve your retail business. This can be achieved through customer identification; knowing why they’re visiting your store and what they want from you. With this, a ripple effect is created and the flow of traffic across the store is improved.
Sources:
https://www.qminder.com/long-waiting-times-sales/
https://www.parcelhero.com/highstreet
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/pos-point-of-sale-retail-system-2890157
