Personalizing the consumer shopping experience and enhancing consumer worth go hand in hand. Recognizing customers means not only recognizing their physical presence at the store, but also their needs, desires, and individual tastes.
From the instant customers enter your retail premises to the moment they leave, it is extremely crucial to present an amicable shopping environment to them. Quite unlike a scenario where customers walk into a store in assembly-line fashion only to wheel their shopping carts out again with "need-fulfilling" merchandise, each customer has different preferences and individual needs.
In order to enhance consumer worth, it is first essential to collect specific information that gets inside the mind of your consumers. There are a variety of techniques retailers have invented to achieve this goal.
One of the most basic ways is simply to talk to your customers—get to know them on a one-to-one basis. The simplest and most complete method for retailers to personalize their sales is by listening to customers, finding the best way to serve their individual needs. This not only provides a heartening customer experience, but also smoothes out the sales pitch.
For example, convenience store proprietors know many of their customers' dispositions and habits off the top of their head. Likewise, larger retail stores even have floor concierges who assist shoppers in enhancing their shopping experience.
As a part of this trend, most retail stores train their sales staff to appear polite and courteous so shoppers do not feel neglected or offended while making purchases. Many stores also maintain a guest register near the entrance or exit so customers can record their feedback and describe their shopping experience.
Many retailers—especially those catering to mail-order requests, catalog sales, and online purchases—also include feedback surveys to gauge customer feedback. Retailers always collect information in one form or another to provide more personalized services. Once customers have shown an interest and registered their address, retailers will often send greeting cards for special occasions like Christmas and Easter.
Presently, web retailing has ushered in electronic transactions and plastic money. Consumer shopping has rolled over from a walk-into-the-corner-store experience to a multimillion-dollar shopping-mall business. In this present retail scenario, it is difficult for some retailers to know their customers on a first-name basis. Collecting email addresses, issuing frequent shopper and retailer-specific credit cards, generating loyalty points, and other schemes add to the entire scope and extent of providing a win-win experience to retail shopping. Once retailers know the brass tacks of personalizing the shopping experience, it becomes relatively straightforward to enhance the worth of the consumer. In other words, retailers need to make their customers feel valuable. The simplest example consumers see in everyday life may be to walk into a favorite store and find their order ready to be served or delivered.
Retailer stores in which people behind the counters know customer preferences beforehand rack up sales in the aggressive marketplace of today. Even little things such as informing customers about a new discount, a new offer, or a new variety being added to the store in lieu of an item they intended to purchase go a long way toward making customers remember your store for a long time to come. Every individual likes being valuable, and consumers are no exception. Doing so does not cost much—and keeps the cash registers ringing, too!
