Do you miss long lines and crowds of people who were craving to get in Your store and buy Your products? Or maybe your business that used to receive five stars, now only gets four at best. All of these are probably the sign of a decrease in customer satisfaction.

Dissatisfaction may be either a result of a decline in the quality of your products or services, or your business might have missed something innovative that was already implemented by your competitors.

Fortunately, there are many efficient methods to increase customer satisfaction and even bring back those customers that you lost to your competitors. Here is the list of five tips to improve the satisfaction of your customers that you ought to consider.

Target indirect buyers

One of the ways to improve customer satisfaction is to make indirect purchasers happy. Children are the best example of indirect buyers whom you should try to please. For instance, if your company wants to boost satisfaction among adult customers, then you may focus on keeping kids excited while they are in the store.

You can offer candy or some merchandise that children are fond of today. It will make children excited about visiting this store, and they will drag their parents with them. And if kids are happy, then their parents are also happy. Thus, targeting indirect buyers can sometimes be beneficial for improving direct buyers’ satisfaction.

Conduct Employee Training

Employee coaching is commonly falsely considered as a waste of time. Indeed, it is not that efficient in a company with high staff turnover. But for customers, there is a great difference between an untrained employee who knows and cares little about anything beyond their basic responsibilities and an employee who provides quality service consistent with the retailer’s brand.

There are many instances when customers need something that differs from the traditional buying process. For example, one would like to throw a big party and needs a huge amount of liquor for it. In this case, a retailer must have trained employees who are able to see a bigger picture and understand what customers need. An experienced employee will agree on providing a discount with the manager and offer a lower price to this customer. This will likely help the retailer to establish a long-term relationship with that customer and lead to mutual satisfaction.

Introduce Self-checkouts

Long lines are a major factor that affects customer satisfaction. Installing self-checkout machines is the best solution to this issue. Thus you will also decrease the overhead and staff of the store and provide customers with new interesting activities.
This approach is still quite new and only begins to establish in a retail business. That is why it ought to excite customers and provide them with a brand new shopping experience. The installation of self-checkouts will definitely make your business stand out and help to improve customer satisfaction.

Consider going mobile

Smartphones have become a part of the human body and an inherent element of their lifestyle. Retailers could not but take advantage of this convenience. Mainly, mobile devices may allow consumers to make purchases wherever and whenever they want, which essentially contributes to the satisfaction factor.

While in the past, people often hesitated about buying something online, nowadays it became a matter of one click. What’s more, many people prefer shopping online to in-store since it eliminates the need to communicate or interact with other people.

Yet, though launching a mobile app is an effective weapon against customer dissatisfaction, it may also cause a backfire. When pushing on with the development process to please customers as soon as possible, you can end up launching a poorly optimized app that will only cause even more dissatisfaction among customers. So you should pay a great deal of attention to the UI/UX design to make it a win-win.

Admire Loyal Customers

Last but not least, if you want your customers to be satisfied and continue being your customers, then you should reward them for their loyalty. Of course, there is no need to drop a red carpet before them, but you can come up with some benefit programs to express your admiration.

The most common approach is to provide devoted and lucrative customers with discount cards for all production. By doing so, you make a reasonable argument on why they should buy products at your stores instead of a competitor.

You should also strive to discover at least some general information about your customers and make offers based on their needs. But try to do it discreetly and unobtrusively. Remember about their birthdays, for instance, and offer bonus points that they can use when shopping this day.

Evaluating Customer Satisfaction

If you still don’t know whether you are losing customers or not, or you need a precise estimation of loses, then you may think, how does one actually evaluate customer satisfaction? This method is called mystery shopping. Generally, there is a mystery shopper who visits stores and acts as usual customer or employee, but, at the same time, collects information related to business activities.

Some companies try to cope with this complex process by themselves, but many prefer to entrust it to professionals.

Originally published: https://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/5-ways-to-improve-customer-satisfaction-in-retail-business-02265506