Is your Christmas customer experience ready to sparkle?

For every retailer, and supplier, Christmas 2022 is hugely important: it’s a last chance to counter the genuinely unprecedented prevailing circumstances with a God-given sales spike. Customer experience is so important this Christmas in particular because it's our chance to make sure we are able to deliver real value, which is so important to every customer right now. As we’re all aware, we've had a very dramatic, accelerated adoption of online shopping (due to the pandemic) and so businesses don't have that personal contact with customers that they previously did, and were able to exploit.

So, how do we focus in on every customer's experience, and maximise every interaction this Christmas season to get maximum value out of it, both for your customers and for your business?

The best thing you can do is to implement a truly joined-up approach between your marketing, operations, finance and strategy. Do not focus on your idealised customer segments: what really works is getting out there, and getting stuck in, talking to your customers and seeing who's coming in, and what they’re saying; how they’re feeling. This will allow you to…

1. Understand
   Break your customers down into recognisable subsets through the development of customer personas. A good way to do this is to ask yourself, "If this group, or this couple, or this individual was a celebrity, or a band, or a team, or a character in a soap, who would they be?" You’ll find that as soon as you’ve identified that persona, then you can really start to layer your customer experience, e.g.  "How would we treat this person? What would they want from us? What kind of communication would they appreciate? What would make them go, "Wow"?". Then you’re ready to map your customer’s journey.
   

2. Map
   Identify all the touchpoints that the customer will take through your shopping experience; that is, all the interactions between the customer and your business, both on- and offline. Start with ‘before they visit’ including advertising, your website, or review sites, right through to checkout and after sales care. You’ll then be able to identify, what we call your ‘Moments of Truth’, which are the make-or-break touchpoints; the points at which you could really deliver on the value proposition or not! Now that you’ve identified all those crucial opportunities, tell your team - better still, involve your team in identifying them, and taking ownership of the experience, and their part in it.
   

3. Train
   The most powerful thing you can do for a customer is treat them the way they would want to be treated. And, the only way you can do that is if you are able to look and listen, and observe, and take that time to engage, and, again, keep listening, and give that customer the response they're looking for. Whatever the size or scale of your retail space, it's still the human interaction that's the most powerful element in the experience. So giving your team the confidence to talk to customers in the right way is fundamental. Bring your team together this month and say, "Let’s work through the customer experience that we're going to give to our customers.” Think about how to add something extra to make customers feel extra special. That doesn't have to be something very expensive, it doesn't have to be something high-tech, but it just has to be something that is appropriate to the brand and relevant to the customer. 

Remember, your shop is your event space - an activation or extension of your brand experience. Every journey that a customer takes through your store, both on and offline, should immerse them in your values and heritage, and leave them wanting more. And if you need some help, we’ll work through these steps with you to trigger human emotion at every level, because when people love your brand as much as you do, they become engaged followers and loyal customers.