3 Ways To Compete On Service
By Erin Harris, Editor-In-Chief, Cell & Gene
Follow Me On Twitter @ErinHarris_1
Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in a webinar for Vend, and the topic was how to win customers without competing on product and price. It’s a great topic; here are some of the points I covered during the webcast.
With very few exceptions, retailers cannot compete on products and price alone; the merchandise can be found elsewhere easily and for less money. Smart retailers compete on service. According to Harvard Business Review, customers who have the best experiences spend up to 140 percent more and remain a customer up to six times longer compared to those who have the poorest experiences.
There are many ways that retailers can compete on service, and here are three of them.
- Training and Retaining An Engaged Workforce
Do you want to provide better customer service? Treat your employees better. But how do retailers actually do that?
Hire the right people. Hire people who hustle. Not hustlers, people who hustle. Train them, and train them well; just because they have retail experience does not mean they have the exact experience needed to address your customers’ needs. For instance, train them to greet customers within 10 to 15 seconds of when they walk in the door. Associates should ask if the customer needs help and react accordingly to the response. They should make connections with customers without being obtrusive. Consider equipping them with digital devices that give them the ability to quickly access the same information your customers are seeing.
And while a pleasant customer experience depends on many things — having the right product and the right place and the right time for example, a pleasant customer experience that maintains and drives loyalty is critically dependent on an informed workforce who feels they are treated fairly and compensated accordingly for their performance. An employee who feels appreciated will deliver a better customer experience, which will move the sales needle. The alternative is missed sales opportunities and bad exposure for the brand.
Create a great employee experience so that employees create a great customer experience. Ask yourself: Do workers have to jump through hoops to get a day off? Is HR doing all it can to support them? Are their paychecks coming on time? Are they properly incentivized to do better, be better employees?
There’s a technology component to this. Again, with little exception that includes the smallest of retailers, there’s no excuse for paper and pencil and spreadsheet-laden anything in retail anymore, especially labor scheduling and task management. Automating labor scheduling, task management, etc. will not only put the right people in the right place at the right time, it will keep you complaint with labor laws.
- Shop Your Brand
Assign checkpoints throughout the year to shop your brand in the same way your customer does to see where you can improve and to determine what is going well. That’s brick-and-mortar, e-commerce, mobile, catalog/call center. Shop each one and take note of the wins and misses. This is an Exec-team task, and the wins should be championed as loudly as the misses are addressed.
I recently talked to an executive from a major Tier 1 retailer who said that he and members of the executive team review the various channels about once a quarter. He said there’s always something to address. Sometimes its minor, sometimes it’s not. But it’s a good way for the executive team to ensure the brand’s delivering on its claims and exceeding the customer’s expectations.
Further, do you offer what your customers want? Do you offer buy online, pick up in-store options for consumers that enjoy the convenience of browsing online with the speed of same-day pickup?
Do you allow easy in-store returns for online purchases? Do you manage turnover of all inventory effectively. Loyal customers will want to see new and updated merchandise each time they return to the store.
- Retail Technologies
Technology and back-to-basics retailing matters. As I said earlier, technology for technology’s sake won’t work. A business case for each technology needs to exist. But the digital transformation that is occurring in retail will help retailers adapt to the evolving needs of the consumer. Hopefully you’re already doing some of what’s necessary to stay ahead — cloud, mobile, personalization, social, etc.
Mobile devices in the store. This is not bleeding edge technology. In fact, modern retail strategy is incomplete without a comprehensive approach to mobile consumer engagement.
Beacons. Retailers such as Macy’s and GameStop have been using beacon technology for a while. But they’ve made exceptional learnings along the way that can help other retailers and also continue to advance how the beacons are being used.
In fact, the Sept/Oct 2015 issue of Innovative Retail Technologies covers GameStop’s innovations in beacon technology. Visit www.innovativeretailtechnologies.com to read all about it.
Social Media. Engaging your customers through social media is essential. Get local with your engagements. Whether you’re a chain retailer with 1,000 locations or a small to midsize retailer, you have your own ecosystem, your own community of people and consumers who shop your brand. Let them know what you’re doing in the community. Be top of mind for them on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. The louder and more positive retailers are on social media, the better connection they’ll have with your consumers. Stay positive and stay active on social media.
To compete on service, retailers must have the right mix of technology plus a firm belief in back-to-basics retailing. And, the measure of a great retailer is how they react when things go wrong. Anticipatory customer service is helping customers based on all your previous learnings. One of my coaches from back in the day used to say, “Soon is not a time, and some is not a number.” Craft the plan, put someone in charge of it, and assign benchmarks and deadline dates to it. Sometimes retail professionals need to do right-angle checks about what’s working, what’s not, and why. The 30,000 foot view here is that it all comes down to the customer. Reviewing the customer service offerings on a regular, recurring basis can get lost in the daily and common when customer service needs to be the primary objective.