HARDISON’S TIPS – MAY 20, 2021 – HOW TO WELCOME PEOPLE IN YOUR STORE DURING COVID 19
3. Improve Follow Up Conversions and Reduce Returns by Connecting Customers to Store Staff
The first two scenarios are focused on the pre-sale period but very often customers have queries about the purchase they made or have follow-up questions on an item they are considering purchasing.
Post-purchase queries are more frequent with electrical products and the likes of flat-pack furniture. Customers often have difficulty getting something to work or assembling it. Many of these products end up being returned at great expense to the retailer and inconvenience to the customer, even though there is nothing wrong with them.
What if the customer could message a product expert in a local store and ask a question? How impactful would it be if the same person they bought the product from or someone from a local store in a delivery context, sent them a short video explaining how to connect a device to WiFi, for example?
When a customer has follow-up questions on a product they have already researched in-store, both the customer experience and the probability of a sale being made can be greatly improved by connecting the customer to the same staff member.
4. Resolve Complaints Quickly at Store-Level to Improve Customer Loyalty and Wallet Share
Resolving customer complaints quickly is one of the most effective ways to improve customer loyalty. The results of this study published on Harvard Business Review shows how customers who have complaints resolved quickly are willing to pay higher prices to the company going forward. It also suggests speedy complaint resolution can result in NPS increases of up to 59 points, which is staggering.
There’s one use case where messaging really comes into its own regarding complaint resolution. Many of the complaints retail chains receive on social networks like Twitter relate to something that happened in a particular store. This creates a challenge for the social media team. How do they efficiently handle the complaint when they have no idea what happened in the store? The standard operating procedure is to tell the customer to return to the store or to ask them for their details (i.e. phone or email) so the store manager can contact them. Neither option is particularly satisfactory from a customer point of view. They didn’t contact you via Twitter to get fobbed off onto email.
An alternative and much-improved option would be to have the customer send your social media team a direct message and then transfer the chat to the store manager. He can then resolve the complaint via direct messages with the customer. This is more efficient for your staff and a significantly better experience for the customer.
