Customer expectations: In-store development

The world has turned completely digital with more online, e-commerce businesses being advertised to us on our social feeds.

So much so, shoppers on a global scale will spend around $2.8 billion online collectively. As more eCommerce websites continue to rise in numbers, spending is set to increase further to $4.878 billion by 2021.

The death of the high street is something that can’t be ignored, with stores like Toys R Us and Maplin going into administration quicker than we could have ever imagined. With more people venturing online to do their shopping, no business is safe.

The view of the consumer

With more people shopping online, consumers now expect a more efficient service when they go to a physical store. You need to fully optimise your service to make sure the reality lives up. If not, you could find yourself closing down stores and letting staff members go.

Believe it or not, customers will spend a total of 13 minutes in your store before they make their way out of the door. Although this may seem like a high waiting time, businesses around the world are still trying to improve this area of their operations and make great changes to ensure that no customer is ever disappointed with their service.

13 minutes is a generous amount of time to be spent in a store with no interaction, so it’s important to make the most out of that potential business lead — and tailor your service accordingly.

Some businesses even reported a loss of 75% of their customers due to long waiting times, which could undoubtedly have negative financial implications. Customers that do not have an enjoyable experience with your business will not likely return.

However, you can reduce waiting times across your business by adopting new queuing technologies. 50% of people believe waiting in a queue is irritating, so if you’re not already looking to introduce such systems in place — you could face bigger problems as a business.

The way forward for your business

Customer personalisation is another area that you should be looking at — telco specialist stores are already doing this. You should have an aim to deliver an efficient customer experience from the moment someone arrives at a store up until when they leave. Enhancing the customer experience is all about adopting new technologies that can streamline all processes across an organisation.

You have a point of sales system already in place, but you need to know that it is working. You need to invest in a POS that has the ability to drive results and also give you greater visibility over your business inventory; it can often be hard to strike the perfect balance.

Understand what makes your business different and use this to your advantage. It all comes down to the in-store experience, so you should make it your mission to ensure that someone is always on hand to help with any queries someone may have about a product or service. Although customers do tend to wait a generous 13 minutes before leaving, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try your best to serve them as quickly as possible.

By implementing better systems across your business, you’ll be able to improve the experience your customers have while also driving employee productivity. This in turn will generate continuous results when implementing new solutions or upgrading current technologies – something which often takes time to adopt.

As well as this, using unique queuing systems, you’ll be able to deal with customers from the moment they enter the store. From this, you’ll be able to create upsell opportunities and offer a more tailored experience to your customers if integrated across different areas of the business.

Not only that, but inventory management will become a whole lot easier. In effect, it removes the need to go back and forth manually to check the availability of products. As well as this, you’ll be alerted when it’s time to restock your inventory, which can remove the need for constant monitoring; allowing you to always be prepared for popular store times.