20 Ways to Improve Your Customer Experience in 2020

The holiday season is in full swing and you are doing everything you can manage this year to make your customers happy. But it’s also a good time to assess what works, what doesn’t, and what customers want – and taking notes on ways you want to improve your customer experience in 2020. Whether you are already customer oriented or you want to try something different, here are a 20 of the most effective ways to engage customers:

1. Activate customer touchpoints: This is about understanding every point at which customers interacts with the brand and making sure to provide them with exactly what they are looking for at that point. Make it as easy to find the new collection, best-sellers, and the outlet as it is to pick up online orders and process returns – and make their path-to-purchase as simple as possible.
2. Offer and immersive in-store experience: Help customers interact with your products in an unexpected way. Put your products to life and into context and demonstrate your value proposition. Notably, the most experiential retailers change their store often, like a magazine.
3. Invest in employee training: As product ambassadors, trained employees are faster and have greater confidence and job satisfaction, and customers can tell. They should be able to tell customers the differences between products, which brands staff likes best, which ones are their top-sellers, and what products are most suitable in different contexts.
4. Give employees a mobile POS: Use an intuitive POS solution and make sure employees are comfortable using the customer-facing and operational functionalities if you want to speed up operations or help customers faster and more effectively.
5. Personalization: The combination of human expertise and augmented reality technologies are giving retailers even more powerful ways to help customers find what product fits their exact needs.
6. Customize your products: everyone likes to make products a little more personal, whether it is choosing the style or the colors.
7. Build customer profiles: This ties in with their loyalty, personalization and customization. Not only can retailers offer more appealing and cohesive “style matches” across products, but it also enables them to keep track of the products bought and/or sampled, and give customers the option to build a routine or a collection, one purchase at a time.
8. Add mobile POS during peak times: This is a surefire queue-busting technique that will ensure customers don’t leave before their purchase.
9. Start an in-store demo or workshop: Encourage customers to use your products more effectively while giving them a reason to come into the store, and perhaps consider additional products that will complement their initial purchase.
10. Provide a product-related service: I’m sure that as a retailer, you’ve heard this before. Services give customers a reason to come into your store, adding revenue and/or opportunity for additional sales. And they offer what e-commerce sites cannot.
11. Offer an incentive to join the loyalty program: This is the first step in building a customer relationship and driving repeat business. Promoting it should be a priority for employees, and a gift or a discount may help get over the initial step.
12. Host a loyalty-exclusive event: Offering exclusivity to your loyalty members an effective way to drive sales and reward your most loyal customers at the same time.
13. Add digital product displays: Many shoppers like to research and discover products on their own. Add large touch screens where shoppers can browse the collection along with their product information. These can also be used to display items that may not be in the store, but can be ordered and delivered, thus creating an “endless aisle.”
14. Make the store kid-friendly: Parents shop with their kids, so if you want them to spend time looking at your collection, you should include a few related items kids might want too. If your store really is just for adults, perhaps consider a play area outfitted with toy versions of your products and branded coloring books.
15. Open an in-store café: Increasingly, retailers are turning to in-store dining to add to the branded experience in your store while offering customers a place to rest and entertain them while they wait for services, etc.
16. Train staff to diffuse problem situations: An unhappy customer is a hard thing to turn around. Whether it is a return or an out-of-stock situation, how it is handled by your employee is the difference between a good or bad customer experience.
17. Improve your speed: Save the customer time with automated processes and data integration, which also has the added benefit of reducing errors.
18. Offer BOPIS: Giving customers the ability to buy online and pick up in store saves them time and money. For each online order, ensure the item is either reserved from existing stock or sent to the store of their choice from the nearest location.
19. Offer product recycling: Consumers feel increasingly conflicted about the environmental cost of their purchases, and you can help them do their part with and end-of-life cycle solution.
20. Promote a social initiative: This goes along the same lines as the previous point. Consumers today do not want the products they buy to have a negative impact on communities.

Want to know more about how Openbravo enables retailers to enhance customer experience and innovate quickly? Visit www.openbravo.com