J.D. Associates Retail POS Solutions Blog

The Secret to Making Customers Comfortable in Your Store

  

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Most merchants don’t understand how important it is to properly train sales personnel on the art of greeting customers when they first come into a store. The initial greeting, or lack thereof, can make the difference between converting a “looker” to a buyer or converting a first-time shopper to a future buyer.

Whether the potential customer be a regular, infrequent--but return visitor, or a new face, it is critical to decide what you hope to achieve when that person first walks through the door. These visits should be tracked in your retail POS. If your goal is to immediately try to convert that person to a “buying” customer, it is likely that the effort will fail and may have lasting, long-term negative repercussions.  Our first-and-only goal should be to make the person coming through the door feel comfortable in the store. If a potential customer is made to feel comfortable, they will feel the freedom to browse and possibly decide to buy something.  If they do not feel comfortable, they will likely not feel the freedom or desire to shop then or in the future.  For example, several competing large furniture retailers in the Boston area hand out freshly baked cookies at the entrance to their stores.  When doing this, they don’t ask the potential customer if they want to buy a bed with that chocolate chip cookie.  They simply provide a warm, good smelling and good tasting dose of comfort that sets the stage for the ultimate shopper experience.  You can bet that one of these retailers spent big consulting dollars to develop this winning strategy.  The others probably just copied it.

I’m not suggesting that everyone bake cookies, but by changing your initial focus to the customer experience and not the sale, purchasing barriers will drop and the ultimate goal of a sale becomes a much larger possibility.