For every customer, shopping in a retail store is like watching a good movie. In a movie hall we like the theatrical ambience and we are glued to the screen for a few hours enjoying the thrills, the movie offers. We enjoy the experience as good scenes play back in our minds for a few days even after we are done with it. We do not stop with that. We share the experience with others. In short, such an experience is something that we not only enjoy the experience as things happen but we take them back with us to cherish as well, so that we feel good about coming back too, to have the same experience again. Retailing hence is all about directly having a ‘first hand’ interaction with customers, offering them with such a satisfying experience that they would like to enjoy repeatedly.
Providing great experiences to customers can easily be said than done. It involves a great deal of discipline in identifying those ‘experience enablers’ and consistently providing those to customers without fail. In retailing customer experience comes from a variety of factors that eventually would contribute to the store attaining leadership through the store’s delightful product/merchandise offerings or its operational excellence or through gaining intimacy with its customers. It requires building an image in the customer’s mind.
It is worthwhile to understand these ‘experience enablers’ in retail stores:
Product Experience:
If a store is well merchandised with proper displays, the ambience will be complete.
If the store offers new designs of merchandise to customers regularly, they will be happy.
Process Experience:
If the store offers customers product delivery within the promised time-frame, they will be delighted.
If a store allows customers to wait for long in queues either at the cash till or in any place within the store, the customer will be frustrated.
Service Experience:
If the store offers exactly what customers expect, the store is said to be delivering good service.
If it offers something more than what customers expect, the store is said to be delighting them.
Remember, if any store offers less than what customers expect, it will amount to displeasing them. Even very small things make a big difference. If the customer has expected a salesperson to smile and if he/she has not, then the customer concludes that the service in the store is bad.
In retail, one needs to understand the expectations of customers by asking them whether they are satisfied with what the store offers and how it is offered to them. This is important, because we need to understand whether they will return to enjoy the experience of buying from the store again. As customer information plays a major role in any store should take efforts to understand customers well, remembering that each one of us in retail has the responsibility to serve customers using customer information well so that we can delight them at every opportunity.
- Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani
