Good customer service can be termed the backbone of any thriving retail business. This is the reason why your retail store staff prioritizes frictionless communication to tend to customer needs in a timely fashion.
We know from research that 83% of customers expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company. As opposed to this, 70% of customers will not buy from a company involving them in long waiting hours. This goes to show that your company’s performance hinges heavily on the quality of service you offer. It helps you stand out from the competition; boosts loyalty and repeated buying, and incentivizes customers to be your brand ambassadors.
Thus, retailers must now invest in technologies such as Shopper Value that can help them build an ultimate retail experience, which can help translate store traffic into better conversion rates, increased cross-selling, and upselling opportunities, and, improved brand loyalty. Let’s dive into the tried and tested people-counting technology for retail stores, that is helping more and more retailers optimize their service quality and staff productivity in their stores.
People counting: a catalyst to quality and timely in-store service
People counting or footfall counting. might seem pretty basic as it provides insights on the number of people visiting your store but does more than just counting people! It has the power to use numbers to provide you with the right insights, crucial to ensure that the right service is being provided in your stores. What is important to know is that both aspects of service: quality and timely availability are what win the hearts of the customers.
Retailers need to bank on regular staff training, optimal staffing decisions, and convenient buying journeys in order to make sure that a visitor who enters the store leaves as a happy customer. Footfall analytics, thus, is crucial to driving this change.
How can you use footfall analytics to optimize service quality
Service quality can make or break a customer’s intent to buy. If a customer is spending money with your brand, they expect to receive a certain quality of service to make their buying experience worthwhile.
71% of customers make buying decisions based on the quality of customer service
When it comes to buying a product/service, many customers rely on customer service to make their final spending decision. For retail stores precisely, the behavior of the sales staff is vital in making or breaking the deal. If you have a lively, helpful staff, it will be a signal to the buyers that you are easy to do business with. Good quality of service will put your product/service in the limelight as it competes in the market. Footfall metrics such as transactions per staff hour are indicative of staff productivity and can help you investigate if your service quality is up to the mark.
If your staff is unable to convert prospective customers, it is a strong indicator that measures such as regular staff training needs to be put in place to improve service quality. Your staff must be polite and should have ample knowledge about the product/service being sold to make it easier for the customer to finalize their purchase.
66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations
When a company helps its customer get the most out of its products and services by offering them great service, it is creating experiences that its customers will be more than willing to come back for. Through dwell analytics, you can gauge the interest of the customers in different assortments in your stores. If you find out that more and more customers are spending more time in the make-up section in your store, you can make sure to leverage that data and make better offers for the popular categories in your store.
Moreover, dwell analytics can also help your business adjust placements and assortments according to the interest shown by customers. You can enhance the placement of the products most in-demand and make sure that you always have inventory for the most popular assortment.
