By More businesses are beginning to remove themselves from the high street and put their presence online — so much so, that consumers are expected to spend a collective $2.842 billion online by the end of this year. As more ecommerce websites continue to rise in numbers, spend is set to increase further to $4.878 billion by 2021.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that more and more businesses are closing their doors on our streets; especially with the likes of Toys R Us closing earlier this year. With more people venturing online to do their shopping, no business is safe.
The expectations of your customers
Online shopping has made the shopping experience easier in many people’s eyes, so now shoppers expect the same level of service when walking into a 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.
Studies have shown that shoppers will only wait 13 minutes in the store before being served by a member of staff. 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.
Businesses must have an understanding of this customer perception and tailor the service to them appropriately to ensure they receive the best experience from your store.
According to some research, businesses lost 75% of their customers because of long waiting times which led to a decrease in business prospects. Customers that do not have an enjoyable experience with your business will not likely return.
If your business does not have the right queuing system in place, you will see wait times increase. 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
Now, customers expect your service to properly represent their needs, so you must begin focusing 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 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.
As well as this, you need to think about what makes your business stand out from the competition. 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.
If you invest in better systems to better your retail performance, you’ll better the initial customer experience while enhancing the role of your employees. 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 streamline the flow of customers and this can be achieved through effective queue management. 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.
Following the implementation of these methods, you’ll grasp more control over your inventory. 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.
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
