Retail Marketing Solutions Must Include Retail Customer Experience Management

Customer experience management has become one of the most important retail marketing solutions that both retailers and brands are investing in today. There are many factors that contribute to a positive customer experience. The customer experience begins at the point when a customer becomes aware of a brand or product and extends through the life of the relationship that the customer has with the brand or retailer. 

The goal of customer experience management is to move customers from being satisfied to loyal, and then from loyal to being advocates of the brand. Customer experience management involves strategy, process modelling, technology, design, strong management and optimization of the end-to-end customer experience process. 

Today’s consumer experience must include service, convenience and product availability. The pillars of the customer experience that must be considered with a customer experience management strategy include: 

How easy are you to do business with? The way employees of brands and retailers interact with customers is very important. A customer’s experience at retail should leave them feeling that they have been treated as an individual and genuinely cared for. Product knowledge is important in this area, and ensuring that representatives in-store are able to knowledgably speak with and answer questions about your promotion asked by prospective customers is very important.

How attractive is the proposition that you are making to your target customers? Are you running competitive promotions and marketing them in-store and online so that customers are aware of them?

Are your products accessible and are you ensuring a smooth purchasing process for your customers? Systems and processes are important because they make the purchasing process smooth, convenient and organized. This means that your products must be consistently accessible to customers, both easy to understand and to purchase.

Here are some interesting statistics to take into consideration:

1.       Companies that committed to service excellence demonstrating strong capabilities outperformed their competition by 81%. Source: Peppers & Rogers Group

2.       The top two drivers for investing in customer experience management are: improve customer retention and brand loyalty (42%), and improve customer satisfaction (33%). Source: Aberdeen report – “Customer Experience Management: Engaging Loyal Customers to Evangelize Your Brand”

3.       A customer who has a bad customer experience will tell 9 to 15 people about their experience. Source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC

4.      80% of North American companies plan to use customer experience as a form of differentiation. Source: Forrester’s The State Of Customer Experience

5.       86% of customers who had a bad experience with a company stopped doing business with them altogether. Source: Harris Interactive, “Customer Experience Impact Report”

6.       For every customer complaint, there are 26 other customers who have remained silent. Source: Lee Resource Inc.

7.       Customer churn is caused by customer feelings of poor treatment 68% of the time. Source: TARP

8.       It takes 12 positive service experiences to make up for one negative experience. Source: “Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner

9.       91% of unhappy customers will not willingly do business with your organization again. Source: Lee Resource Inc.

10.   Attracting a new customer costs 5 times as much as keeping an existing one. Source: Lee Resource Inc.

Retail marketing solutions that enhance the customer experience can include:

·         Ensuring that your products are in-stock and on the shelf at all retailers where they are available to be purchased

·         Ensuring that your products are in the area where a customer would expect to purchase them

·         In-store promotions through product demonstration and visual marketing displays

·         Mystery shopping to identify issues at the retail level that could be impacting your customers’ experiences

·         Additional sales support at the retail level, and more

Retail marketing solutions should be considered by brands and retailers because the stakes are so high. There have been studies that draw a direct connection between the customer experience at retail and the profitability of the retailer and brands that sell their products there.

For more information about how you can improve your customer’s experience or for information about our retail marketing solutions, please contact Storesupport at 1 (877) 421-5081 or visit www.storesupport.ca