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Customer Experience Mistakes

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Most retailers are faced with customer experience mistakes. With so many aspects to consider, retailers find areas where they let their customers down unintentionally.

The best thing to do is to minimize as many customer experience mistakes as possible.

Customer Experience Mistakes All Retailers Should Avoid:

Treating Regular Customers Better Than New Ones: New customers notice how your regulars are treated and expect the same courtesy and respect when interacting with you. If you don’t treat your new customers just as well, if not better, they are more than likely not to return to your store and go elsewhere.

Being Distracted When Serving Customers: You build trust with customers when you take the time and effort to engage with them. Leaving them to answer a phone or talk to someone else after you have established this trust breaks that bond. As a result, the customer is made to feel unimportant and may leave your store and not purchase anything.

Being Too Pushy: Time is money and most retailers don’t want to be tied down to one customer for too long. However, hurrying the customer along by asking too many questions too early can put the customer on the defensive and make them feel uncomfortable to the point that they may leave empty-handed.

Not Knowing Your Merchandise: Most customers research catalogues or online before coming to your store. If you don’t have the particular item that the customer wants, they will leave. Ensure you know your stock and offer other options you have that will do the same thing or suggest a premium model that works even better.

Having Long Queues at Checkout Counters: Customers will question whether it’s worth standing in line to make their purchases if the cash registers are understaffed and busy. You have to staff for the rush, not the schedule.  If you find items “dumped” around your store, it’s more than likely that they were abandoned by frustrated shoppers.

Not offering Multi-Channel Options: In today’s world, if you restrict customers to limited support channels, you are offering a bad customer experience and run the risk of losing their business. Customers want multiple options of ways to communicate with you. They want to be able to phone, email, tweet or Facebook you.

Over-Communication: As our modern world is hectic, don’t annoy your customers by over-communicating with them. Your customers are busy people that get hundreds of emails per week. You just want to ensure that they receive your message without overdoing it. Too many emails or messages can turn customers away.

Creating the Perfect Customer Experience Is Not Easy

Customers are becoming more demanding each day. They now have high customer expectations and as a retail business you need to adapt to these expectations or run the risk of losing them to competitors.

To truly deliver an exceptional experience requires the focus to be solely directed to that customer who made the effort to walk into your store. Remember that no customer experience is 100% perfect. However, if you can avoid these common customer experience mistakes, you will go a long way to increasing customer satisfaction and building long-term customer loyalty.

4 Ways to Embrace Channel-less Customer Experience

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