This article originally published in Retail Customer Experience magazine, Mar. 2008. Click here to download a free PDF version.
Unlike other areas of business practice, customer experience is difficult terrain to navigate by the numbers.In just one month's time, most consumers gather 30-50 retail experience data points with which to evaluate what makes for a memorable experience. If you don't know what differentiates your service offering, and where to spend more wisely (read: "less in a number of areas"), you're going to lose out to competitors who do. Be tough minded; winning is about excelling at just a few key things. Be great at what you're good at and abandon low-return efforts for improvement. To do, that requires brutal self-honesty, the confidence that comes with great business insight and a laser focus on ingraining and institutionalizing those special customer moments.
Don't confuse what high-margin players offer their customers as lessons or standards for your business. You probably employ minimum-wage frontline staff who carry your brand every day. Given that they do so without the empowerment of discretionary dollars to correct service failures, you have to use new technology to reinvent what old-fashioned excellence in retail offered: knowing and staying close to your customers every day. A follow-up call from a local store manager can turn an ambivalent or frustrated customer into a true brand champion.
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If you don't know what differentiates your service offering, and where to spend more wisely, you're going to lose out to competitors who do. |
In today's retail environment, executives must carefully deliberate what critical moments are essential in creating "authentic" customer connections. They also need to understand how to engage their employees in this joint mission.
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Understand what a "wow" experience is for your retail brand, then measure, enforce and reinforce it. |
While every retailer has its unique needs, challenges and opportunities, here are some common threads of wisdom:
- Understand your brand offering, your customers' expectations and what part of your brand offering connects with your customers.
- Focus your efforts on delivering superior service on those connection points.
- Hire people with the right DNA and put them where they need to be.
- Local leadership and store management should be on-the-ground ambassadors for your brand and not corporate bureaucrats. Let them spend most of their day on the floor and don't allow reports, e-mails or other corporate distractions to become a main focus for your local manager.
- Leave it to your customers to report on whether you're winning or losing. Don't rely on anecdotal or second-hand evidence.
- Finally, take advantage of new technology that allows you to keep in touch with your customers. You need the ability to have ongoing store-level results that provide the opportunity to reinforce positive customer experiences while enabling you to act to win back customers when service failures occur.
Gary Edwards is executive vice president of client services for empathica, a customer service consultancy.
