Commentary

How to create a customer experience that keeps bringing people back

Joe Schultz, vice president of sales at Harbor Retail, offers up four specific elements retailers need to consider and assess in defining the all-important customer experience strategy.

Photo by iStock.com

April 8, 2019

By Joe Schultz, vice president of sales, Harbor Retail

Delivering an exceptional customer experience in the retail space requires more than a great product. Much more. In fact, in the discovery phase of CX design, your product or service is probably the least important factor to consider.

In this initial phase of CX design, you should be thinking about goals that enhance your selling probability. For example, are you trying to educate customers, showcase opportunities or attributes, save time or money, or offer differentiation? You have to set the stage for a sale and create a need for purchase, and in a typical retail environment, this must be accomplished in a matter of seconds.

The more time you spend clearly defining what success looks like in the seconds leading up to a purchase decision, the easier it will be to create an environment that makes success possible. Part of that time should be spent identifying purchasing triggers: the attributes of the experience that create or enhance a need to buy. These could be visual cues, or they could come from a customer's interaction with an employee.

Sometimes, the magic of the experience even takes place behind the scenes. For example, Starbucks knows its baristas are key drivers of customer purchase decisions. It recently partnered with Microsoft to equip its brewing machines with an Azure Sphere chip that allows the machines to receive new recipes automatically and notify technicians when they need to be serviced. This frees up baristas to spend more time interacting with customers, which is part of Starbucks' broader business strategy.

As you think about your own customer experience strategy, here are four tips to keep in mind:

1. See your space from a customer's perspective. Depending on where your product is located in a particular aisle or department, you might have to work harder to ensure it gets noticed. This could mean using visual navigation displays somewhere else in the store, but it could also be as simple as enhancing your display more than was originally intended.

You can use lighting to draw a customer's gaze toward a certain item or to enhance product packaging. If you don't want to spend the money on lighting fixtures or LED shelf lighting, you can even pull together products that share a similar color to create an eye-catching display.

Finally, remember that height matters. If you cannot display your products at eye level, know that you will need to work harder to gain attention and purchases. Keep in mind that shoppers often rule out purchasing products that they can't access without help.

2. Give your customers a glimpse of the future. If you want shoppers to buy a product, you have to help them see how that product will benefit them. One way to do this is by providing in-store video of a product in action. Over half of consumers think that engaging video content has a positive impact on their shopping experience.

3. Turn wants into needs. Walk into Target (one of our clients) with a shopping list, and there's a good chance you'll walk out with everything you came for and a whole lot more. The "Target effect" is what every retailer should be aiming for. Target prioritizes scarcity and exclusivity — carrying lots of private-label merchandise and custom takes on national brands. Its turnover rate is high, so things don't sit on the shelf forever. The result is a customer experience that feels exciting, rewarding, and financially responsible — even if your bank account says otherwise.

4. Test, then commit. Thinking about making a major change to presentation, packaging, or product location? Test the change in a handful of stores. This is the approach that Kroger is taking to determine whether its new digital shelves are a CX improvement or a gimmick. If the shelves prove successful in the two remodeled stores it's using as a testing ground, the chain will likely roll out the feature to all 2,780 of its supermarkets.

In today's ultracompetitive retail environment, data can be your best friend. Always test before investing time and money into major CX additions or modifications. Between your customers and your sales team, you'll hear everything you need to know about whether or not change is a good idea.

But don't let a lack of existing data serve as an excuse not to innovate. Each opportunity to remerchandise should be seen as a chance to enhance the experience you offer customers. Humans are attracted to novelty and captivated by things that are different. As a retailer, if you don't use this to your advantage, change might come sooner than you expect.