The Retail Champion by Clare Rayner

Author:Clare Rayner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page Publishers

This is far from an exhaustive list; you would need to build up a list relevant to your business.

Putting all of that aside, the most important requirement in a world where consumers can spread news of their good and bad retail experiences to literally millions of others within minutes using social media is service. I would advise you to invest most effort in ensuring that your service promise is clearly expressed at every touchpoint with the customer. Make sure that through all your communication media your customer understands what to expect from you in terms of service experience. The investment in articulating your message will remove the risk of complaints about poor service, which typically have more to do with the retailer not managing the consumer’s expectations than about the retailer failing to deliver on their promises. We’ll look at this in more detail in the last part of this chapter.

Be where your customers are

This is a bit of a mantra for me; and it should be for you too. It’s rather obvious when you say it, yet so many people are surprised by the concept. You want to make sure that you’re not just overwhelmed by footfall, website traffic or phone enquiries that exhaust all of your resources but don’t convert to sales; you want to make sure you’re getting the right kind of traffic. We’ll explore this with an example in Step 7 – because attracting the right kind of customers is part of the overall customer engagement piece.

Of course, as with many of the 10 steps to retail success, they are heavily interrelated: learnings from one step informing another.

Being where your customers are requires you to think back to Step 3 – ideal customer – you know the customer so well, like an imaginary friend. So where do they go? How do they shop? What do they want?

I’ll give you an example. I have a client launching a menswear brand – he’s designing, producing and then retailing his own range of products. He’s done his research – if he wants to engage the guys who will actually wear his clothes he needs to market to them with a fun, relevant online TV channel. His customers don’t read magazines. If he were developing ladies wear it would be completely different. He needs to be where his customers are, and that’s watching TV or surfing the net, not reading fashion magazines!

Knowing your customer will enable you to identify where you need to place yourself in terms of which channels, and when you are thinking about stores, which local areas – which towns, streets and positions are ideal for your stores based on your customers’ expectations.

In the next part we’ll review the channel options, then there is an exercise for you to complete that will get you thinking about which are right for your business and your customer.

What are the options?

As listed in the introduction, there are numerous possibilities, not all of which would be relevant to all retailers. I’m

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