Store Experience Enablers

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

PROCRASTINATION

Timeliness in all our actions, whether in our personal matters or in official decisions, will yield the best results. In other words, timely actions and decisions executed promptly can result in the desired changes. Delays in making the right decisions, and actions not taken on time on any critical issue will be counterproductive. Some people may always defer actions or decisions or tasks without attending to them on time, having the habit of postponing matters to attend later. Such practice of deferment of important actions is known as procrastination. Trivial matters and issues of no great significance, if not attended to, may not have any significant impact on outcomes and such delays are not considered to be procrastination – say, for instance delaying one’s face make-over by a few days when one is at work continuously is a matter of postponement and not procrastination unlike a delay in paying the monthly instalment of a bank loan, which can have serious repercussions. So goes the saying: A stitch in time saves nine.

Kumar was cleaning the attic in his childhood home when he came across a claim ticket from the local shoe repair shop. The date stamped on the ticket showed it was over eleven years old. He asked his wife, "Do you think the shoes will still be in the shop?" "Not likely," his wife said. “But it's worth a try." They drove to the shoe repair shop and, with a straight face, handed the ticket to the man behind the counter. The man looked at the ticket and said, “Just a minute. I'll have to look for these." He disappeared to the back of the shop.Two minutes later, the man called out, "They will be ready on Thursday!"

Delayed responses to our customers may not bring them back to us and that is the bad result of procrastination. Among the many business transactions we do, at times there may be unavoidable delays in delivering a few of our customer orders, but it is our responsibility to call them over phone and inform them in advance so that they are not disappointed when they come to our store with the hope of getting delivery. Let’s not procrastinate but act on time, for procrastination is an act of intentional delay, which shows lack of caring causing serious damages to business relationships.

- Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani