Creating the Ultimate Customer Experience in Retail

Your first real point of contact with the customer like the sales person who says "hello" is your retail space. The look and feel of your store and sign frames send out signals before the customer even reaches your doorstep. So what signals are your customer receiving and what steps can you take to transform their shopping experience?

Visioning

This is used in kicking off a project. It is a process of gaining a foundation and all the background information to start the design process. Even small to medium sized retails that can not afford to pay someone to help them through this process will be able to do a lot of this themselves. It is really a matter of sitting down and asking yourself a specific questions and developing a vision for your store.

Keep it Fresh

Retail in many ways is about the latest thing, new ideas. To the extend, you can create that new idea in the store. You can do it by changing themes and color of your store, adding gooseneck light fixture, moving your products around for easy shopping experience. Giving your store a fresh look is very important.

Creating Emotional Connection Between Store and Consumer

This is about creating a memorable experience for a customer. Often times, incorporating the five senses are very effective. Try to connect as many senses as possible. Certainly, site is important, texture for touch, interacting with the products, what's the music, what is the lighting like and how does it feel.

Product and Customer Interaction

Anytime you can get a customer to interact with the product, the store experience is much better and much more likely to buy the product.

Create a prototype

Before your really get started with a big lay out, make sure you tested it first. There are several ways how to build a prototype. You can build a small scale model, so you can see what the environment looks like or you can made a full scale model. You can also prototype pieces of the store, like exterior and interior designs, proper location of sign stands and sign brackets, all within eye of mimicking the customer experience before hand.

Being the Customer

You find it really critical and difficult to understand the
store so it is really important to get your employees perspective and it is important to shop on your own store to understand customer perspective and anticipate what's working well in the store and then you can identify what are the opportunities are as well.

Exceeding a customers expectations whether it is terms of value or store experience is extremely important. Everybody likes to be surprised at the idea of getting more than they expect.