Delivering Positive Online & Superb In-Store Experiences to Increase Repeat Business – Part 2
In our previous post “Delivering Positive Online & Superb In-Store Experiences to Increase Repeat Business – Part 1” we discussed:
- Taking advantage of your customer is bad for business
- Championing customers service with your in-store experience
- The correct stock in the right place at the right time
Part 2 continues with information on empowering staff and making the experience more personal.
Intuitive Systems Empower Staff to Focus on What Matters
In-store, customers also expect accurate information about product availability. But the retail industry has a high turnover of part-time sales staff, limited resources, and narrow profit margins, so provision of information to customers is an ongoing challenge.
Your technology at the till can empower staff to properly engage with customers over product lookups, real-time stock data, and transactions such as gift card redemptions, or click and collect.
The best POS technology should accordingly be intuitive and simple to customise, with on-screen prompts and workflows to enforce procedures and allow multiple payment options (including contactless) – all of which is designed to provide flexibility, accessibility, and speed to free up your staff to focus on customer service.
Remember, a customer can be “recognised” at the till no matter where they started their buying journey and with the POS system, staff can personalise their approach to each customer by accessing their order history, contact data and preferences.
Fast data capture and order taking, especially for order-only items, can be achieved with features such as postcode lookup to speed up the order process. And of course, underlying everything is the ability to fully integrate online and in-store data collection to avoid any duplication of records.
Making The Experience More Personal Generates Positive Feedback
From our experience, Futura’s retail customers use data collection functionality to offer customers special offers, newsletters, and Loyalty schemes. Coming this year, Futura will build on their current loyalty offering with a new improved points-based system. Additionally, some Futura users are amongst the early adopters of technology used to deploy email receipts.
These facilities can offer real benefits to both consumer and retailer, whilst not betraying a customer’s trust. A major fashion retailer fell foul of this recently as compulsory email receipts were introduced. As you can imagine, customers voiced their irritation on social media when being forced to give away personal information in this way.
With further technology advancements, the use of mobile POS showing availability and pricing can also now aid customer retention by enabling in-store customers to make an online sale for those non-stocked items and outsizes.
Excellent Online Experiences Generate Higher Footfall
So whilst human behavioral insights can drive algorithms designed to encourage more online sales, they can also make the buying experience more impersonal, creating a disparity between the in-store and online brand experience, a disparity which can undermine brand loyalty generated by hard-earned customer service in-store.
Still, few retailers would survive without an online presence and the important thing for retailers is to seamlessly integrate brand values both online and in-store. While online offers fantastic convenience, shopping for fashion and lifestyle brands on the high street remains a national pastime.
What is clear is that consumers are moving effortlessly across different channels on their way to a transaction, making it is increasingly difficult to pinpoint what is an online or offline sale. In turn, worrying about which channel the sale is coming from is becoming an almost pointless exercise.
Increasingly it is the combination of channels that is important and in this scenario, the influence of your in-store experience should not be underestimated.
