If you work in retail or any kind of services sector, chances are you will be familiar with the popular phrase ‘the customer is always right’. The quote ‘Le client n’a jamais tort’, is attributed to Swiss hotelier César Ritz, famous for the Ritz in Paris and the Carlton in London, and loosely translates to ‘the customer is never wrong’.

While customer experience is still central to modern retail success, many people today misinterpret the slogan, taking it to mean ‘do whatever the customer asks.’ However, in the increasingly opaque, blended world of physical and digital commerce, the phrase is maybe, more about going the extra mile to understand each customer’s underlying points of friction and providing a unique brand experience at every touchpoint. Knowing that customer service is the ultimate goal, unpicking the strategy to deliver a unique, white-glove service is maybe the more challenging piece of the retail puzzle, as it incorporates everything from sourcing and procurement, warehouse and supply chain strategies all the way through to customer communications, and point-of-sale experience.

Shiny happy store associates

While a frictionless phygital experience across all retail touchpoints is the modern-day equivalent of the shop windows of the past for brands, a fundamental (and often overlooked) element of delivering top customer experience lies squarely with store associates. The happier and more engaged your store associates are, the better the customer experience they’ll provide and the happier the customer will ultimately be. So providing store associates with the tools, software and accurate customer (and inventory) data to deliver that ‘wow’ customer experience has never been more vital than in today’s hyper-competitive retail environment.

The happier and more engaged your store associates are, the better the customer experience they’ll provide.

Unique experiences

Below are four key areas that retailers can focus on when it comes to creating unique customer experiences through happier, more engaged store associates and unified retail systems.

1. The checkout remains a vital area for retailers. Understanding the changeable demographic and regional preferences of customers by providing choice in both payment and checkout options is certainly important. Offering ultra-fast transactions with optimised checkout flows and rapid scanning with locally cached item and price data allows customers to get on their way quickly once they’re ready to checkout.

2. There’s nothing more frustrating as a store associate than having to navigate a ‘clunky’ point-of-sale application. A modern and refined user interface with intuitive navigation, clear information, and a familiar cart and checkout option is a win every time.

3. Rock solid stability through native offline support is so important in an age when downtime is simply not tolerated by consumers. With this edgeless approach to servers, store associates won’t miss a beat and can continue to serve customers, even if the store network experiences an outage or periods of system ‘choppiness.’

4. When it comes to customer interactions, there’s no such thing as knowing too much. By using powerful customer engagement tools to gain insights into a customer’s cross channel purchase history and preferences, store associates can personalise every in-store interaction and make each customer feel unique, at the same time making their role more satisfying and smoother too.

Isabelle Piat, Principal Solutions Consultant at Manhattan

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