Crafting your In-Store Experience

[Kpay]

Over on our TownSquare blog, we listed out some tips to help drive sales by giving people a unique experience when they walk through your doors. What steps have you taken to make sure your store is memorable and to keep customers returning? 

Above and Beyond Customer Service 

Stores like Nordstrom have concierges to help you through your shopping experience, and some boutiques offer one-on-one consultations on everything from sizing to styling. Giving customers this extra attention builds loyalty and gives them even more of a reason to choose your store over your competitors.  

What you choose to emphasize should relate to your business - if you're selling outdoor gear, are there hikes or campsites in your area you can recommend? Can you help your customers meet one another to form hiking groups? 🏕  This could be as easy as putting up a community white board or cork board where folks can post flyers and comments.  If you're selling makeup, an you offer a free tutorial or even a flyer with the latest trends? 

What other types of high-touch customer service do you provide? 

Entertainment 

Some stores will bring in live music, or other forms of entertainment to make the experience of shopping with them more enjoyable. Yes - this has potential to get expensive, but what if you look at it as an opportunity to give back to your community? Is there a local high school with a jazz band that could be interested in a side gig? 🎺  🎶

Creative Use of Space

Think about upcoming holidays and use your retail space to support what your customers need. If you sell cards or gifts, consider partnering with a flower shop to arrange for a pop-up stand for Mother's Day or Valnetine's Day - that way you're making yourself a one stop shop for what your customers are looking for.  💐

Some stores that sell workout clothing offer in-store Yoga or dance classes, sometimes taught by employees. This could be a great way to recognize employee super stars as well, and give them an opportunity to do something outside of their normal day-to-day work.  

💡  What ideas do you have for creating a unique and memorable in-store experience? What do you already do and what have you been thinking about trying out? 

[pessosices]

This is such a great thread and question!

We spend so much time crafting our In-Store Experience, it's our most important piece of branding. While our Ice Cream is amazing, it's not quite as awesome as our experience.

The Customer Service Game

There are so many different ways make a great Customer Service Experience. In sports there are two main types of Defense, Man-to-Man or Zone. The same can work for the way your employees interact with guests. You might choose to play Zone have a greeter, a couple of people walking around each department, and cashiers, who each stay in their spots and don't move. Or you might choose to play Man-to-Man, with each employee working directly with each customer from start to finish. There are pro's and cons to each, but finding the right one for you makes all the difference.

At our shop, we play Man-to-Man. It creates an immersive and high-touch experience for each customer that makes them really feel incredibly valued and not at all rushed. While each employee needs to know a lot more, it creates a much more seamless experience without multiple employees fumbling because they don't know certain things about the customer interaction.

Try Before You Buy

We have 100 flavors every day, and another 100+ that we rotate through, and we're always making more. This can get incredibly overwhelming for customers, so we encourage them to taste as many (or all) that they want. This makes their decision more manageable, gets rid of the dreaded Analysis Paralysis, and helps prevent some Buyer Remorse. It also adds to the fun atmosphere of our place, and makes an amazing experience for kids and adults. They love collecting our colorful tasting spoons.

Community Engagement - Donations

We're a local neighborhood Ice Cream store, and we credit a huge amount of our success to our deep connection to the Community. We host fundraisers with local schools and sports teams just about every week. This creates a ridiculously loyal customer base made up of our immediate neighbors, and directly hits our target audience of kids and families. The cost of donating a percentage of the night's income is negligible put against the benefits of turning a slow night into a busy one, and getting a tremendous amount of publicity for us. We also donate gift cards to different fundraising events as raffle prizes which gives us night-of publicity, and usually gets us some new customers.

Community Engagement - Local Businesses

We started with a corkboard and have upgraded to a wallmounted business card rack right by the door where local business can put up their cards and be seen by all of our customers. It's become a really great thing that our customers constantly check up on new local shops and services.

Community Engagement - Celebrate

We used to do a Summer Block Party for a few years, but while the majority of our neighbhors loved it, unfortunately because we're in such a neighborhood setting, we got a few complaints from a select group of our neighbors and decided to stop. But it was a blast while it lasted!

Building Loyalty

From the day we opened we've been doing Punch Cards. It's built up an incredibly loyal customer base and made coming for Ice Cream into a game. With the new Square Loyalty system, we jumped into Digital Punch Cards, and our customers have absolutley loved it. While there are still a couple of issues with it here and there, we're so glad we made the tech jump, and so are our customers.

Holiday Seasons

We love sprucing up our store for the holidays. We break out some Halloween & fall decorations, bring out a tiny decorated tree with ice cream ornaments, and more. We make new flavors for each season like Pumpkin Pie, Apple Pie, Candy Cane, Egg Nog, and put together new cool Sundaes and Milkshakes each and every month. We do Gift Card specials like a Free Sticker with any Gift Card purchase around the Winter Holidays, and other fun things to keep us in mind any time we can.

And So Much More

There are so many more great things that we've done that I know I'm forgetting. We're always on the lookout for little fun ways to improve our experience and our shop. Aside from the product itself, the Experience is the most important thing you can create to draw in and keep your customers happy and coming back.

Things We Want To Do:

There are so many things we dream of and are planning:

1. There's a pretty sweet Donut Popup guy in town and we're looking to work together and have some donuts in the off-season.
2. I dream of starting a Run Club which I think can go really well with the Ice Cream theme.
3. We've been dying to get a new mural done on our blank wall, and I'm thinking of doing a contest and getting submissions from customers

Hope this helps y'all get some new ideas! Always happy to chat improvements!

[Kpay]

Thank you for your post, @pessosices - love hearing about all the awesome things you guys are already doing and your focus on making your store a fun experience for everyone! I also liked hearing about your upcoming ideas - that mural on your blank wall sounds great, and asking for customer submissions could be such a cool way to include your community in the process. Thanks again for sharing with us! 

[LocavoreStore]

How fun!

We try and engage every customer who comes into the store, by meeting them on their level. If that means that they are the quiet type who does not want to be bothered we will respect that... If its a customer who wants their hand held as they walk around the store, we'll do that too (figuratively speaking).

I think most notably we excel in customer experience by keeping a clean, and tidy store. 7 out of 10 first time customers will trip over themselves explaining just how nice the store looks, and how comfortable they are in it. 

We also try to treat our employees well. We want to be a business that someone is glad to show up to work for. So we respect them and treat them like we would ourselves (minus the sharp self-criticisms of course). Happy employees = happy customers. 

We've recently started taking "field trips" with our employees to the farms that we sell products for. That way they can more accurately talk about the products to customers. Knowledge of the products that we sell is one of the things that people seem to like the most about what we do. Plus we get to know our employees a little bit more (and they get to know us even more), by spending time together outside of a work environment. 

We encourage our employees to learn all of our regular customers by name and to use it at least 1 time before they leave.

Mostly we try and craft an experience where the customer leaves the store knowing more than they did when they came in. 

[Kpay]

@LocavoreStore, love to hear what you do with your store! So true that happy employees = happy customers. That's something we try to live by at Square too. Also love the idea of field trips to the farms where you source your products - what a cool opportunity for your employees to get to do something out of the ordinary. Thanks for the post! 😊

[pessosices]

These are so awesome! Some things that I didn't even realize we did that make a customer experience better, and the focus on creating a great experience for your employees is even more awesome. Love it all! We're totally going to borrow some of them. Thanks for sharing!