Top 14 Customer Experience Tips for Retail

To celebrate my 200th article on LinkedIn Pulse since June 12th, I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about the Retail experience from the perspective of the customer. 

Customer experience (Cx) is a term we've been hearing a lot of the last few years in Retail. How did this come to be the trending benchmark, or the single most important factor of your product/brand? Customer experience optimization (CXO) is then, the endeavor of boosting this relationship with the consumer that embodies and encapsulates the entire buying cycle. 

In the mobile digital age, and in the coming Internet of Things retail reality, the difference between offline and online is phased out, in that, the customer experience is "always on" and this includes in-store.  Not only won't there be an offline, but with greater personalization & retention SaaS tools the relationship with the customer becomes optimized with better analytics, smarter campaigns and a level of Email marketing and SMS marketing that previously was not possible. In a sense, this is really omnichannel optimization. 

The customer's end to end journey is a digital experience, and it's a social experience and that's a very salient point. With greater immersion of technology embedded in our lives, the social experience becomes a valuable commodity.  It's an experience where branding, identification, product displays by other customers (User Generated Content) and feedback (social listening) is an interactive event between customers and brands. Dare we say, it's part of the fun of shopping in the digital age. This transactional relationship must be optimized and as authentic as possible. 

Every point of interaction with a customer, those "touchpoints" are relevant as critical moments before purchase, at time of purchase and after purchase. The customer touchpoints may differ from customer, demographics type and other customer segments. Pay special attention to the touchpoints of your 20% biggest & most loyal customers. Optimizing the experience of your most vocal brand advocates, to maximize the reach of your User Generated influencers online. Namely, consider campaigns that harness and boost brand advocacy as an inbound lead generation strategy and part of your digital media community outreach and integrated marketing strategy.

A big part of CXO is gaining the trust of your prospective customers. This necessitates you know what your customer personas want at every touchpoint, from every channel. As you gain multiple frames of reference about your target audience, you can truly improve their experience. If Retail truly believes the "customer is always right", it's not enough to try to please them on an case-by-case basis, but as a brand, to appeal to the strategy the consumer expects, anticipates and responds best to & every point in the journey of the retail experience. 

The Customer Experience Optimization Shortlist (CXO)

Let's make a list while we're at it, that SMB Retail can use to focus on their Customer Experience that can help stores improve the experience of their real customers. 

1- Listen to your individual customers: Practice social listening on all channels with impeccable support in person, on the phone, on social media and on IM Chat. The best relationships require listening, so why should Retail be any different. 

2- Survey those top customer that are open to communication to help your brand target the benchmarks your customers require, expect and would prefer. 

3- Create Emotional connections in your digital campaigns that appeal to the demographics of your top personas. Story-telling, visual marketing, video content and User Generated Content are implicated in this. 

4- Establish a high standard of Customer Service. This standard must include qualities of empathy, clarity, knowledge of the customer, adaptability, patience, consistency, and an ability to put positive spins and respond tactfully to negative feedback. Be compassionately responsive and responsibly pragmatic to all feedback. Answer ever comment on social media in a positive way as promptly as possible. 

5- Demonstrate your brand's competence in sending smart personalized offers, based on analytics, buying history, business intelligence and if possible predictive analytics. Having a means of personalization. This demonstrates that you care about your customers as unique consumers. 

6- Reinvent your brand and your loyalty campaigns, if they are not working. Since CXO is implicitly related to how you reduce churn by creating engagement, identification, positive brand associations and trust.  Brands need to be constantly tweaking their content strategy and their online reputation management. In the digital age, how good companies are at reinventing themselves will be paramount, so get used to it and know how to identify when this is required. 

7- Offer an enticing in-store environment. If you are technology adopoters, your in-store environment could have device-recognition enabled, and have a scheme opt-in customer (device) recognition can be enabled to give real-time deals when they are near or in the store itself. By optimizing Geo-targeting of the store, you are demonstrating to your customers that they can be rewarded for just showing up. Here in our CXO process, in effect, we are also creating new touchpoints for mobile interactions and real-time engagement. 

8- Use Social Media campaigns to gain socially shared endorsements from real customers. Create an uplifting ambience, celebrate your products with contests, innovative campaigns for social good in the local community. Find influencers (on Instagram, YouTube, etc.) that mirror the demographics of your top customers who can vlog (user generated video content) about your products and your brand.  Tap into the B2C new wave of digital media, whatever it may be. Be where your audience is, and do as they do, even if that means Snapchat campaigns and viral video (Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube) marketing, then embrace it. 

9- Conduct seasonal campaigns that target Millennials, to ensure your market includes young people who will have increasingly have buying power in the next decade. Create fresh campaigns that get the attention of prospective customers and embody & mirror the values of your target audience. What do they actually care about?

10- Identify early which customers have the potential to become high-value (top 20%) customers, so they can be earmarked for "VIP" status so employees are extra vigilant in interactions with them. For SMB retail, the emphasis on the top 20% of loyal customers is key. Conduct CXO audits for this segment and take the time to get their suggestions in real conversations when they visit the store. Invest in how to boost sales in your top customers. This is a high ROI strategy. 

11- Create company wide human to human H2H guidelines for employees, so the human experience of the CX is optimized to a new level. Establish a company tone, associated keywords and the resulting emotional experience of satisfied customers you are seeking to produce. At the end of the day, shopping and products are an emotional & tactile experience, where the human element is especially important in each interaction, whether in-store, digital or hybrid. 

12- First Impression Management (FIM): First impressions matter, provide FAQs, pamphlets and advertisements that are solutions to real problems, so new customers can be totally informed about the most typical questions customers generally have about your products, service and customer journey. This will reduce the need for your staff to provide repetitive information. If possible, have a video version of these as well, easily accessible on your website, and social video media channels. Having a friendly face explain the most common questions will streamline the human interface and impression management of your brand. 

13- Consumer Advocacy Amplification (CAA). Have a plan for identifying, rewarding and creating incentives (that your audience truly values) for online brand advocates on social media. Consumers trust other consumers most of all, so your marketing strategy has to include improving relations with the social sharers, the prolific brand influencers, that you may not have even realized exist that add to a positive portfolio of your brand and products. Invest in reaching out to brand advocates, in recruiting more and fostering a social media atmosphere of inclusion, celebration and the shared journey of being human. 

14- Differentiate Your Brand: Create a shopping experience and a digital search experience (your website, app, content, SEO) that differentiates yourself from your direct competitors and makes you memorable on a product level, on a human level and on an emotional gut level. What does your service or brand offer that others cannot, what's your tag-line, your MO, your unique selling point that is understandable in half a second? If I can't understand in under 3 seconds what your brand does from your website, it's not CXOed.