5 Tips for Making Your Retail Business Stand Out
Small Business Saturday recently brought me to the retail shops along the main street of my small town. The stores entertained us by hiding elves on their shelves for customers to find — you had a stamp book full of stamps for every elf you found. My eight-year-old daughter participated gleefully and I went along for the ride, using it as an opportunity to survey the different customer experiences delivered by these retail businesses. One shop in particular stood out. The lighting in the store, the layout, the way the sales people engaged with customers, the eclectic collection of items for sale — they clearly knew who their customers were and why they were shopping in their store. The feeling I got from the shopping experience was “classy and comfortable,” and it distinguished it from all the other stores that soon became a blur in my mind.
A recent Harvard Business Review article discussed the competitive advantage businesses create when they build an experience for their customers, including “enhanced customer satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee satisfaction.” The experience you deliver not only increases customer loyalty, it’s also how you stand out from competitors.
Consider a retail business that sells clothing. Customers come into the store to buy a pair of jeans, right? Wrong! They visit your store because they want to look good or because they need something warm and comfortable to wear as they work outside. They have a job to be done, whether it is to dress for a date or to nurture their garden, and they are “hiring” you to help them successfully complete it. If you just try to sell jeans, at best you will have a customer who views you as identical to every other store that sells jeans; at worst, they will go somewhere else.
How to Differentiate YOUR Retail Experience
Imagine instead a retail business that delivers a service experience. They develop a value proposition for their customer, something like, “We help 40-year old men be comfortable and look good as they transition from working outside to casual dinners out.” They envision the ideal customer journey, from considering a new pair of jeans through purchase, wear and care, and finally, replacement. They delve into the highs and lows of the journey and commit to helping the customer be successful in their journey. They capture the key emotions they want their customer to have as they go through that journey — comfortable, confident, reliable. Then when the customer approaches their store, every aspect of the experience delivers those emotions.
Think this is just for big companies? I have seen this very successfully done at even the smallest main street retail businesses. Next time you gather your employees together, try out this exercise:
- Use our value proposition canvas to capture how you envision your service is contributing to your customer’s success.
- Capture your customer’s journey — grab a few post-its and map out each step they take in an ideal service interaction with you.
- Think about everything you can develop to deliver the experience — the store layout, your salespeople, online interactions, back-end systems, etc.
- Capture this service experience in our “service experience design” worksheet.
- Repeat for another customer you serve and look for common experience emotions — this is where your niche lies.
If this seems overwhelming, don’t be disheartened — start small. The idea is to get your desired experience captured and then implement it iteratively. Place your journey and service experience maps in a visible place and every week or month, review your progress and think about where you can make your next improvement.
Tip — involve your whole team in this exercise to reap the “greater employee satisfaction” gain that Harvard Business Review discovered.
Imagine how much fun your sales … I mean service … people will have the next time a customer walks in the store. Once they discover that the customer is looking for jeans, they’ll be ready to deliver the journey and the experience, giving it their own personal twist.
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