Getting Control of your Product Distribution and Retail Merchandising Over the Holiday Season

We all know how busy the holidays get at retail, and we all know how detrimental maintaining good customer service best practices are. For a brand at retail, keeping the customer happy is crucial, especially with regard to product distribution and retail merchandising. 

We have all heard those retail merchandising holiday horror stories that illustrate just how “fun” holiday shopping can be – but if you are a brand located in a retail environment, you know that keeping control of your product distribution and retail merchandising over the holiday season is critical for your bottom line. 

For example, it is undeniable that the holiday season often results in empty shelves or un-stocked product. So how can you combat this? Working with a merchandising company can help you deal with your holiday product distribution woes. By providing access to staff that can navigate the retail space and ensure your product is located on the shelf and accessible to clients helps to alleviate the stress of dealing with holiday hardships. Regular run-throughs ensure that retailers are not letting your product distribution fall to the wayside during the holiday rush, meaning your bottom line does not suffer from distribution issues.

Also important is making sure that there IS stock in the back. If a customer comes in during the holiday season looking for your brand only to find it out of stock, they often have no choice but to switch brands. Working with a merchandising company can help eliminate this by sending consultants to retail to ensure product distribution is up to date and that sufficient product exists in the storeroom.

Yet another important part of product distribution and retail merchandising during the holiday season – pricing. With so many sales taking place over the holidays, sometimes your brand pricing may be lost in the shuffle. If a customer comes in looking for the best deal and your product has not be marked down as you expected, this could result in lost sales or lost customer loyalty. Working with a merchandising company eliminates this by sending out consultants to check pricing and product placement. Ensuring that prices are marked down may not be a retailer’s top priority, but it is yours, and thus it becomes the top priority for your merchandising company.

Another issue that arises during the holidays to negatively impact product distribution and retail merchandising is having too few staff on hand to handle customers’ needs. We all know how difficult it can be to find help at retail during the busy holiday season, but think about the impact of this if you are a brand at retail. Enlisting the services of an experienced merchandising company that can provide the staffing necessary to keep up the customer experience will allow you to ensure that your brand is receiving the recognition it needs and that your loyal customers remain happy.

Even during the holidays – or especially during them – it is critical to keep customers happy to maintain customer loyalty and brand recognition. It does not take much for a customer to switch brands if they feel ‘wronged’ by a brand that they were previously loyal to.

For more information about product distribution and retail merchandising over the holiday season, or at any point during the year, please contact Storesupport at 1 (877) 421-5081 or visit www.storesupport.ca.

Merchandising Companies Ensure That Brands Keep at the Same Pace as Their Customers

There are many challenges to be faced by brands who locate their products at retail. Good customer service, product location in-store, and employee compliance are just a few of the things that merchandising companies deal with in order to help you secure your place at the top.

The role of merchandising companies is to show you how to be the most effective in selling your product. 

When you are trying to keep up with the changing retail market, it can be difficult to know which strategy is best to adopt. Knowing which route to take in order to keep current customers loyal, while at the same time attracting new customers, can be a challenge. Merchandising companies can help you ensure that you keep your brand current.

Customer satisfaction research studies show that those customers that are loyal to a certain brand will continually purchase that brand, even if there is a slight increase in price. However, if a brand fails to keep up the pace and meet the needs of a constantly evolving market, customers, especially younger customers, will grow impatient and quickly move on to a competitor’s product. Merchandising companies work with you to make sure that you are keeping pace, and meeting the needs of the changing market.

The human mind is both emotional and rational, and so it is important to keep emotion as part of your overall merchandising strategy. Relying solely on fact-and figure-based strategies can severely limit your ability to reach your target market. Merchandising companies will show you how to implement merchandising solutions that employ both a fact-based and emotionally driven merchandising campaign that is much more appealing to consumers.

An engaged customer is a loyal customer. Merchandising companies ensure that brands keep pace by catching the attention of a brand’s consumer by making sure that product placement is efficient, that brand presentation is effective, and that staff at retail are promoting your product well. 

Keeping up with the newest trends and appealing to what is current is essential, and merchandising companies will show you what kinds of strategies to implement in order to do this. By working with a merchandising company, you will be more capable of appealing to the customer through the adoption of the newest market tactics, ensuring that you do not fall behind.

In-store demonstrations or samples, product placement and mystery shopping are all ways that merchandising companies work to make sure that your brand is receiving the attention in needs at retail. Helping you maintain control of your retail presence is an important part of your business, and merchandising companies will help you achieve it!

Falling behind with current trends can spell disaster for your brand, but utilizing the services of a merchandising company will help keep you a step ahead, meaning more brand loyalty and a bigger consumer base.

For more information about the benefits of working with a merchandising company and how it can help you keep pace with customers, or to learn about any of the services provided by Storesupport, please call 1 (877) 421-5081 or visit www.storesupport.ca.

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

Canadian Mystery Shopping Providers Tell Brands What Is Really Happening At Retail

Relying on retailers to keep you informed about how your brand is doing at retail, or waiting until your sales profits come in, can be very problematic. A good way to avoid this is by relying on Canadian mystery shopping providers, as Canadian mystery shopping providers tell brands what is really happening at retail.  

How can you determine how well your brand is doing, and how it is perceived by your targeted demographic? Canadian mystery shopping providers can find out. By placing mystery shoppers in the retailers where your brand is being sold, you are able to determine how well that retailer’s staff knows your brand, and what they are telling your customers about it. Are they giving the correct information to the consumer? Is your product being re-stocked in appropriate intervals? Is your product kept in the most efficient location? A Canadian mystery shopper will answer these questions. 

In the retail food industry, the retailer’s primary concern is not always your brand, and very often no incentives exist to push them to see that your brand is being marketed effectively. Canadian mystery shopping providers will solve this problem by identifying any problems in-store, and giving you the intelligence required to address them.

Canadian mystery shopping provides invaluable retail intelligence that helps you stay on top of the competition. Those companies that do not utilize the services of Canadian mystery shopping providers often have no idea how their product is being marketed to consumers, meaning they then have very little ability to influence how their products should be marketed. By taking advantage of services offered through Canadian mystery shopping providers, you can ensure that your brand is receiving the attention it needs in order for your business to profit.

Keeping customers happy is the key to consumer loyalty and retaining customers. Canadian mystery shopping providers allow you to determine the level of customer service being delivered by the retailers who sell your brands. Canadian mystery shoppers can reveal whether or not employees are following procedures, and can also help you to identify and measure how effective staff training programs are.

Canadian mystery shopping providers can also give you valuable information about how consumers feel about your product. Canadian mystery shoppers can find out why your current customers choose your product over your competitors’. They can also determine how potential customers feel about your product allowing you to cater to meet their wants as well. How well does the packaging advertise what customers are looking for? Is it attractive and eye catching? Canadian mystery shoppers can find out.

Thanks to Canadian mystery shopping providers, your ability to know the customer’s perspective can greatly impact your ability to increase sales and build your customer base.

Finding out about what is really happening at retail is a crucial component in keeping customers happy and loyal, as well as increasing your overall profits. Mystery shopping providers are an important part of this process.

For more information about Canadian mystery shopping providers and how they can tell you what is really happening at retail, or to find out about the retail merchandising services offered by Storesupport, please call 1 (877) 421-5081 or visit www.storesupport.ca.

Is Service Intelligence Mystery Shopping A Must Have For Brands?

Mystery shopping or secret shopping at retail is service intelligence that a retailer simply cannot do without. Service intelligence mystery shopping focuses on providing a brand with much needed intel about what kind of service their customers are receiving at the retail level. Service intelligence mystery shopping is also important to retailers because it lets them know how their staff members are performing. 

The worst thing that a brand or retailer can do is to wait for sales to take a dip to realize where areas for improvement are with respect to the customer services that they are providing to their customers. Top notch customer service leads to brand loyalty which results in life-long customer relationships. Establishing brand loyalty takes significant effort and once you are on top of your game, staying there requires even more focus.

Service intelligence mystery shopping measures people and product performance in-store.

Where brands are concerned, utilizing service intelligence mystery shopping enables you to understand product endorsement at the store level. A great example of this is when consumers approach employees at the retail level and ask about a particular product, asking “which shampoo is the best” for example? Mystery shopping can determine whether the employees are recommending your product? Are your promotional offers being communicated to the customer? Service intelligence mystery shopping also enables you to ensure that the delivery of your brand messaging is correct. When employees are asked about your products, is information being communicated accurately?

Service intelligence mystery shopping can also reveal other issues, like the location of your products in-store, how pricing is being received by other shoppers, planogram compliance, and secondary display compliance issues.

Where retailers are concerned, service intelligence mystery shopping can enable you to measure customer service and manage behavioural issues in your store, and is an opportunity to improve customer retention and loyalty to your store. This ongoing measurement raises the bar and shapes and improves your staff’s performance.

The result of service intelligence mystery shopping delivered through a sales team compliance audit can be eye opening and can reveal issues that could be having a direct impact on your bottom line. Issues in-store that negatively impact the customer, such as long line ups, poor customer service, or staff that lack the required knowledge about the products sold in-store, will reduce sales and brand loyalty. A sales team compliance audit will tell you if you are achieving your customers’ expectations in store.

At the end of a day, when customers are not having a good experience at retail they simply will not choose to visit a particular retailer at all the next time they need to make a purchase. Grocery stores are an excellent example of a type of retail where service intelligence mystery shopping is very important. In many cases, consumers will go to their local grocery store weekly, so the cost to a retailer who has in-store performance issues will face severe financial consequences if a customer has a bad experience and decides not to come back.

Investment in service intelligence mystery shopping is a very important piece to the puzzle that leads to the success of a brand at retail and retailers in general.

For more information about service intelligence mystery shopping or mystery shopping services provided by Storesupport, please call 1 (877) 421-5081 or visit www.storesupport.ca.

The Key to Brand Loyalty is Effective Brand Management and Customer Retention Strategies Where Aging Consumers Are Concerned

Customer retention occurs when businesses conduct themselves in a way that results in repeat business, thereby retaining their customers. 

Customer retention strategies should be executed from the moment that a customer becomes a customer, and should extend throughout the lifetime of the relationship. Retaining your customers long-term will largely rely on your ability to service them. Customer retention strategies and maintaining a standard of excellence through great service will not only improve your ability to retain your customers, but will also result in positive word of mouth which will lead to additional new business.  

The most successful brands put the value of their customer before profits through investing in providing a superior service and striving to not meet but exceed their customers’ expectations. This model leads to brand loyalty that can last a lifetime. There have been studies released that have substantiated the direct correlation between customer retention and a company's overall profitability. While customer retention involves investment, the long-term payoff is immense. One study showed that engaged customers generate 1.7 times the revenue than normal customers do.

Brands need to have different customer retention strategies for different demographics. Older consumers represent the most loyal demographic. Brands must adopt customer retention strategies aimed at targeting these consumers and making their needs a priority. Small considerations like package sizes, legible labels with larger text, and packaging that’s easy to open are some examples of ways that a brand can go above and beyond the call of duty to retain customers in this demographic.

Older consumers are habit driven. They like to visit the same retailers again and again and tend to be very brand loyal. They are also more apt to spend more time at retail locations. The older demographic responds to service. In-store demonstrations and product testing are important if a brand plans to lure a customer in this demographic away from the brands they are currently loyal to.

Retaining these customers is less challenging because they have a tendency to fall into a habit. The fastest way to lose a customer in the older demographic is to allow your products to become unavailable to them. When retailers don’t restock a brand’s product on the shelf, it forces the consumer to try a different brand if they don’t want to endure the inconvenience of going to another retailer to look for the product. If the customer likes the new product that they try, in many cases the original brand will lose the loyalty of a customer in an older demographic.

Brands need to ensure that their products are consistently available across all retailers where their products are available, and counting on retailers to ensure this is a risky proposition. This is one area that brands should invest in and make a part of their customer retention strategies.

Customer retention strategies result in brand loyalty, and in the consumer packaged goods industry brand loyalty is the reason that some brands become a household name. The most successful brands at retail are only successful because of their ability to retain customers.

For more information about customer retention strategies, or if you would like more information about Storesupport’s services for brands, please contact us by calling 1 (877) 421-5081 or visit www.storesupport.ca.

The Most Effective Retail Management Solutions Often Cannot Be Replaced With Technology

Effective retail management in today’s retail market is crucial to a brand’s success. Keeping pace with constantly evolving retail management strategies is so important when you are trying to remain ahead of the competition. One of the current retail management solutions being adopted by different companies is to replace people with technology – but is this effective?  

The limitations of technology - do people still have a role to play in retail management? The current reach of technology for ever expanding business is incredible. However, implementing technology to the point where it can take the place of people can be hazardous in a retail setting, especially in the retail food industry. In some industries, technology may seem like the most effective retail management solution, but in the retail food industry, employees still remain the most effective way to maintain a high level of customer service. 

Take this example as an illustration of the importance of effective retail management:

Karen goes the grocery store with the intention of buying laundry detergent, and enters the isle where it is usually located. Having just purchased a new high-efficiency washer, Karen wants to know if HE detergent is required, or if she is able to purchase her regular brand, which is cheaper. Unfortunately, the HE version of the detergent she normally purchases is on sale, and has been moved to an end-cap. She looks around for a sales associate, but is unable to locate one. All she can find is a digital display which outlines the benefits of a particular brand of HE detergent – but does not tell her whether or not HE detergent is necessary. As a result, Karen decides to buy the competitor’s product. A customer has been lost!

This is an all too common occurrence. Technology as a retail management solution often leaves the customer feeling unsatisfied and unappreciated. The ability to ask questions or to find products that have been moved is drastically reduced by replacing people with technology. When you are relying on retailers for the timely re-stocking of your product on the shelves or on their employees for the ability to provide the correct information about your product, an effective retail management solution is one that does not rely on technology in the place of an actual person.

Many companies have attempted to implement technology as an effective retail management solution, but have found it to be less than ideal. Esso, for example, tried to use digital screens at their gas pumps to market products in-store. However, after finding that it was not profitable or well received by their customers, the project was scrapped.

Maintaining customer loyalty and attracting new customers to your brand is the ultimate goal of effective retail management. However, implementing a technology based retail management solution, such as that of replacing people with digital displays, can have a devastating impact on your bottom line.

Not only does replacing people with technology as a retail management solution not meet the needs of your customers emotionally, it can also inhibit their ability to physically access your product. Building displays, product demonstrations or sampling, and product ‘quick-fixes’ are all unachievable with a retail management solution that puts technology in the place of employees.

Technology may be able to provide effective product information or teach customers about the benefits of a new product, but employees are the ones that ensure customers are getting the information that they want, that they can easily find the product on the shelves, and that they are able to get answers they are looking for.

For more information about effective retail management solutions and how replacing people with technology is not always the best retail management solution, or to learn about any of the services provided by Storesupport, please call 1 (877) 421-5081 or visit www.storesupport.ca.