We are quickly approaching the end of November, which means many shoppers have already begun their annual Christmas shopping. With ever-increasing customer expectations, Christmas time is a golden opportunity to take your customers on a magical customer journey, with seamless touch points of interaction between themselves and your brand.
Here are some of the top ways you can ensure you’re delivering the best customer experience for consumers, to help capitalise on one of the busiest times of the year for retailers!
In-Store Experiences
The world of retail is highly competitive, making relying on discounts and engaging in price wars a dangerous game. Instead, providing a seamless, enjoyable and unique customer experience is the best differentiating factor you can provide during the holidays.
Creating an amazing in-store experience for shoppers is not only a great excuse to get creative, but also entices shoppers to come in store rather than shop online. As shopping online has rapidly increased over the last decade, physical stores have taken a large hit on sales, making the festive season one of the most important times of the year to make the most out of giving consumers an experience to remember!
Front-Line Employees
Christmas shopping can be a stressful experience, with shoppers bustling through the crowded stores for the best deals and gifts. To ensure customers begin a positive experience as they step into your store, it is important that your front-line employees greet shoppers with a smile and are there to offer their expertise. Being available to customers and displaying positive body language will help to alleviate stress and ensure they have a positive experience.
However, the first step in ensuring your customers are happy, is maintaining a happy workforce. If your employees are overworked and stressed during Christmas, then this will project onto customers and everyone will have a negative experience. If your employees are given the resources they need, including any temporary staff that may be required to deal with the increased demand over the holidays, as well as rewarding staff they more likely to stay motivated and deliver excellent service. Providing fun experiences and activities for your employees over Christmas will help to combat the stress of increased workloads, helping them to feel valued and respected, fostering feel-good festive joy for the Christmas period.
Be Responsive
Good communication is undoubtedly one of the most important determining factors of customer experience. Being active on social media is a great way of staying connected with customers and increasing responsiveness to consumer queries. Communicating with consumers in this way also allows you to quickly acknowledge any issues so that they can swiftly be resolved, which can go a long way in service recovery.
Be Realistic
The aim here is to not over-promise. The worst thing a business can do is be unrealistic for example with their ability to ship items on time for Christmas, potentially leaving a lot of consumers very angry on Christmas Day. At a time where expectations are so high, a poor customer experience such as this can be hard to rectify and recover from. Customers will understand Christmas is a busy time so there may be some delays, however communicating this and through providing updates will help to keep customers happy.
The Result of a Successful Christmas
A positive and seamless customer experience at Christmas will not only drive sales in the short term, but also help to engage customers, building an emotional bond with the brand and in turn increasing customer loyalty. This means the importance of a positive customer experience this Christmas is not only important for the festive season, but also the rest of the year!
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