Retail touchpoints encompass places your brand impacts, communicates with, or serves your customer throughout your store. These touchpoints (or lack thereof) can build or destroy a brand. You likely want your retail touchpoints to be universally in column A: Brand-building and customer retention.
Walk with us through several innovative retail touchpoints that may improve your customer experience and increase your sales revenue immediately and in the long run.
At Storeworks, we’re Retail Technology experts in Store Automation, Smart Warehousing, and Omnichannel fulfillment. Our genius is to be your guide to improve customer experience, and we know every retail client has a unique set of needs, challenges, and goals.
Our customized solutions help you build success by gaining deep insight into your audience’s searching, visiting, and buying behaviors. We win when YOU do for your customers.
Contact Storeworks today to set up a consultation and discover how our array of technological and human integrations can help you win more customers through excellent in-store user experiences.
Retail touchpoints defined
Your customers start relating to your store even before they hit your parking lot. They notice the neighborhoods surrounding your shop, the condition of the streets, the cracks and potholes in your parking area.
You may not have control over the look and feel of the surrounding areas. However, you can continually ensure that all the elements that attract (or repel) customers on your store property present a professional and welcoming vibe.
You want all your retail touchpoints to align with your brand values and hallmarks to magnetize your ideal customers to your store.
Other touchpoints your customers encounter are (in sequenced order as a customer enters your establishments:)
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- Storefront: your signage, logos, architecture, design features, and landscaping
- Store layout: the neatness and design of your product displays, the ease with which products can be located.
- Employees: Disengaged employees who lack product knowledge, or do not want to interface with customers present a massive customer turn-off. It pays to reward customer service such as walking a customer to their desired product, or ensuring a customer can access up-to-date inventory information from other stores.
- Informational and directional signs: In the face of rapidly evolving crises like the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw many stores using regular masking tape on floors and walls to preserve customer flow with social distancing in mind. However, these emergency measures must give way immediately to branded, focused signage that communicates a tone of safety and authority as well as compassion.
- Check out lanes: It’s tempting to cram a bunch of impulse-buy items near the register. While strategically placing a few items most customers may want to grab at checkout, design this part of your store with your brand values in mind. Create a check-out experience your customers will want to repeat. Conscientious automation and quick-response human help when needed can decrease wait-times. Thoughtful placement of essential items near the registers can give a message that you thought of everything precisely when your customer forgot an item from their list.
- POS strategy: If you serve a broad audience of buyers, you must learn to ride the technology line with aplomb. Some customers want human interaction at the check-out, and others want to get through the line and “go.” Employing a blend of efficient self-check-out lanes with enough people to handle customers’ help requests is crucial to nailing this retail touchpoint.
What to do today, and what to do tomorrow
It’s crucial to embrace both a “crock-pot” and a “microwave” mentality when you optimize your in-store experience. Some of the changes you implement have an immediate positive effect on your business, and some will take longer to play out in business gains.
Keep in mind that implementing a POS overhaul will likely take several weeks to plan, execute, and troubleshoot, and that’s only the internal transition. Your customers may take longer to adapt fully, and that’s okay.
Immediate gains in audience trust and loyalty become visible when your signage and logos are on point, and your employees bring their A-game to work. Improving your inventory and fulfillment services may also lead to more immediate increases in sales revenue and customer satisfaction.
Imbue your retail touchpoints with your brand values
Every brand is governed by a set of values, whether intentionally crafted, or implied in real-life. Updating your brand values regularly gives you a “backbone” on which to build your touchpoints.
For example, if your top value is customer success (like ours is at Storeworks), you must ensure that each customer gains a sense of “I did it!” with every purchase. Communicating your “success” value could mean employing intuitive software solutions in-store, simple omnichannel purchasing options, and helpful employees who love solving customer challenges.
Always have your audience in mind
Creating your retail touchpoints with your ideal buyers in mind helps your audience identify more deeply with your brand and products.
Analyzing your buyer personas for demographic elements like age group, gender, ethnicity, common problems you can solve, price-point preferences, or whether your ideal client loves a “good sale” can direct your retail touchpoint priorities.
Steeping your retail touchpoints in care and attention to the people you most want to attract is paramount to your success as a retailer.
Storeworks creates retail touchpoints that convert lookers to buyers.
Expanding your retail footprint or retaining a robust customer base means catering to what your people want. Using leading edge technology, strategic store automation, and optimized fulfillment systems to increase customer satisfaction is our genius at Storeworks.
Our team of architects, designers, and software specialists carefully listen to your unique retail touchpoint challenges, and craft the solutions that center you as the store your customers can’t live without.
Contact Storeworks today to discover and implement the end-to-end store experience your customers demand you provide. We promise to listen, to guide, and to celebrate with you when you win at retailing with each product sale.