Engaging Customers Beyond the Transaction

A retailer’s ultimate goal is to sell, right? Simply stated – yes. But both before and after a transaction can be made, how else can you engage your customer? With so many shopping options – including brick and mortar stores, online, in-home events, TV and catalog (just to name a few) – it’s vital for retailers to engage their customers whenever they can.

Here are 3 tips to incorporate into your customer engagement, helping you create more dynamic, more loyal customer engagements… which naturally will lead to more prosperous transactions.

1. Use Social Media For Customer Support 

While many retailers have begun to incorporate social media to help promote sales, events and total store awareness, only the savviest have started to use social media for customer support. Encourage customers to ask questions about your  products and / or services, as well as give detailed, timely responses. If you sell something such as jewelry, for example, provide tips on cleaning it, repairing it and taking care of it. Any category of retail can lend itself to offering advice and helpful information, so be sure to do this. And always, always, always encourage questions to be asked with the guarantee answers will be shared.

2. Build Personalized Customer Relationships

Among the many beautiful things about being your own boss or working for an indie merchant is that there is the opportunity to really shape customer experiences authentically. Take the time to listen to your customers, and build experiences around them that make sense just for them. If you have a customer who suddenly can’t get to your store due to family, weather, business or anything else, offer to deliver their purchases directly to their home. This may not be in your business model, but then again, you have control over your business model. The idea is to get creative and to get personal with how you support your consumers.

3. Dedicate Your Attention to Your Top Customers

Now before you dismiss everyone else, remember to take this with a gain of salt. You want to engage your top customers the most because these are typically your top spenders and your top “word of mouth” advocates. Offer this crowd some extra TLC through VIP shopping events – 0r just make all their experiences VIP… or do both.

Finally, remember that customer engagement is truly only half of the total equation of customer service, though. The other half is the employee themselves. According to the Gallop Business Journal, “stores that performed well (those that scored in the top 50% of all stores on the measure) in employee and customer engagement — even though they may not have had the highest scores on either metric — tended to deliver considerably better financial results than those that scored poorly on the two measures. Furthermore, stores that performed well on both measures also outperformed those that scored high on one but not the other of these metrics.”

With this in mind, remember that it takes two to tango, and this tango is led by your employees first. Sure, your customers may be the stars – but be mindful to how your employees measure up. Without this, transactions surely won’t be made.