Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Know What Irritates Your Shoppers

What drives your shoppers crazy? Know what the causes are, since these are the same negative experiences which drive shoppers out the door of your store, never to return. Sidestep prods to craziness by finding out in advance what sorts of things are irritating to shoppers and eliminating those things. But you may need to prioritize because you can’t correct all the problems at once.
     The National Retail Federation magazine Stores featured an article titled “Driving Shoppers Crazy,” which reported findings of a project conducted by Prosper Technologies. The project used a distinctive methodology: Rather than give the 6,000 respondents a list of possible complaints, the researchers asked each participant to write in the name of a store they judged to be providing bad customer service and then write what led them to that judgment. Prosper Technologies used content-analysis software to classify the responses.
     Here are the top four categories:
  • Rude, impolite, unfriendly staff. This was the most common type of complaint overall, although for older shoppers, it took second place to “Problems getting help.” Among young adults, almost 30% of shoppers complained that the person at the cash wrap was chatting on the phone or with another employee while ringing up the sale or was otherwise rude. 
  • Problems getting help. Shoppers are attracted to stores and away from e-commerce by being able to talk with polite salespeople and then by getting personalized help. Other research indicates that consumers are willing to trade away easy access to help if they can get substantially lower prices. But they don’t like it. 
  • Staff who aren’t knowledgeable. When customers know you’re out-of-stock before your sales staff do, the customer might think the sales staff are dumb bunnies. So it’s of concern that more than half of sales associates say that mobile devices and online shopping tools are allowing customers to be better informed than the sales staff are about a store’s inventory levels. 
  • Long waits to pay for the merchandise. Adequate staffing helps avoid this one. In addition, Harvard Business School research finds that mirrors in waiting lines make the time go faster, since people will get involved in looking at themselves. Merchandising the waiting line can also help for the same sorts of reasons. Young adults were notably less likely to complain about this one than other age groups. 
For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

Click below for more: 
Impress Customers with Your Staff’s Expertise
Make Waiting in Line Interesting

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