Managing multiple points of sale presents a number of challenges, not least of which is maintaining a harmonized customer experience from one address to the next! Find out why this is important, as well as 5 top tips for delivering an (at least somewhat) consistent customer experience across all your outlets.
The importance of the customer experience in retail needs no reminding. In fact, it's the number-one battleground for retailers today, and the trend is only growing. According to this study by Gartner, 64% of customers consider the experience more important than the price when making a purchase.
For multi-store brands, a successful customer experience will generate numerous benefits. Every retailer is evolving in a context where brands are seeking to forge emotional links with shoppers, enriching customer journeys to the point of becoming a love brand. Reinforcing the customer experience is bound to bring benefits: greater loyalty, increased footfall, higher average basket size, higher CLV(customer lifetime value), etc. But to achieve this, it's essential to dose an essential ingredient when designing a multi-PDV customer experience: consistency.
Naturally, several outlets require effort to maintain this coherence. With one particularity: a successful multi-PDV customer experience often relies on a subtle balance between overall consistency and a local touch for each address. This is what enables certain networks to offer different experiences, while maintaining overall cohesion.
In Paris, for example, this is what the Big Mamma group offers, with restaurants that apply the same deliciously offbeat concept in a thousand different ways: East Mamma, Felicita, Popolare, Biglove, etc...
Far from copying and pasting, you need at least enough consistency to feel you're in the same universe. No easy task? We take stock with the first of our 5 tips, which is also the most essential: maintain consistency between your points of sale.
If there were only one tip left, it would be THE one to remember: the key to harmonizing the multi-PDV customer experience is to make the coherence of the concept sacrosanct. Far from duplicating the premises identically, this cohesion will instead infuse a number of elements.
Consistency applies on several levels: within each successful outlet, there is inevitably a unity between mission, service, décor, history, etc...
Secondly, if you have online contact points with your customers, they need to capitalize on this consistency. And finally, if you have several points of sale, they must offer a harmonious customer experience.
Consistency isn't just about the customer experience. It also applies to some of your procedures. Some retail networks will seek to unify management and inventory as much as possible; others less so. On the other hand, it's in everyone's interest, without exception, to offer a harmonized customer experience. This is the key to building a strong identity, which will build customer loyalty and set you apart from your competitors.
The customer experience is fueled by interactions with your in-store staff. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many other contact points that can enrich your customers' experience of your world. You can unify them with the tip below.
A successful customer experience is based on multiple factors: the brand's culture, its mission, its vision, its ethics, its history... All this infuses the sensitive elements of your store, such as the choice of products, the atmosphere, the behavior of employees. Everything in your outlets must reflect this culture and brand identity.
Have you expanded your points of sale recently? It's never too late to put these brand values down in writing! Whether in a manifesto, a document, a charter: it doesn't matter what format. Some publish it on their website, others make it an internal document for new recruits. The choice is yours! The most important thing is that the fundamentals are there, clearly stated and easily appropriated by employees. Distributed to each of your outlets, these values will harmonize the customer experience on a daily basis.
This measure is a reminder of the importance of having cross-functional tools, common to all your sales outlets. In particular, they concern customer relations and enable you to get to know your customers better.
Customer customer knowledge "is essential in retail. It enables you to be more responsive and adapt to what your shoppers want. By analyzing data from one store to the next, it helps you understand which products or services are needed at each point of sale - and thus harmonize the customer experience.
In a micro way, it also allows you to personalize the customer experience. This has a number of applications: it helps you reward repeat customers, reinforce brand loyalty and increase repeat business.
Among the benefits of a personalized customer experience, you can propose new products based on purchase histories. You can also develop intelligent loyalty based on your customer database. If you plan to communicate (by SMS, email, social networks or other means), this enables much more targeted and less "spam" interactions, all the more interesting if you have diversified points of contact (in-store, online, via smartphone...).
And ultimately, a personalized customer experience will be more consistent, from one point of sale to the next.
When it comes to customer knowledge, it's essential to centralize data between all your points of sale. This means creating a unified database across all your stores. For this, there are simple tools (like Pongo) to centralize info - collected in a clear and consensual way, in compliance with the RGPD.
What data do you need to centralize? In a multi-store environment, you're naturally going to collect information on your operations and sales. This comes from checkout data, with a checkout system designed for multi-store operations. This gives you more accurate data for predictive marketing, sales forecasts, reporting, statistics and accounting.
Depending on the case, some blinds will also collect enriched information as part of a customer database. The type of data may include general or demographic information, such as name, contact details, preferred point of sale... It may also include key marketing data such as purchase history, preferences, survey responses, and possibly interactions relating to a loyalty program across all your points of sale.
This is the advantage of new-generation loyalty: digitalized, it unifies your points of sale in a common loyalty program for all your stores, making it even more attractive for your customers.
Today, you can deploy a loyalty program that encompasses as many points of sale as you like. This type of approach is no longer reserved for major brands and multinational corporations! The initiative has become very simple thanks to easy and accessible tools, such asPongo's marketing and loyalty assistant.
Among the benefits, a loyalty program consolidates and unifies your customer experience from one point of sale to another. It rewards your loyal customers, and encourages them to visit any of your outlets. Interactions are stored in the loyalty program and earn rewards. The program encourages customers to continue shopping with you - regardless of the store they visit.
To consolidate your multi-point of sale customer experience, you can also enrich it with online contact points. The interweaving of the physical and the virtual can take many forms, with varying degrees of depth: it can go as far as digitizing points of sale.
You don't have to go that far, but you can develop your online presence very effectively - without necessarily having a lot of hours or resources! Social networks or online marketing assistants can help you extend the customer experience online, with very little investment.
How do you extend a multi-point-of-sale customer experience online? There are plenty of possibilities! Social networks (especially Instagram) offer a wealth of interaction opportunities. Playing the game of online reviews can also boost your online presence - provided you centralize them across all your points of sale. Advantage: customer satisfaction is reflected in all your points of sale, thanks to your ratings on recommendation sites.
To take this a step further, it is possible to develop the customer experience on your website and/or with intelligent loyalty programs backed up by SMS marketing. Using interactive kiosks, there are also many ways to harmonize the customer experience from one store to another, in a connected way.
In the end, all these tips don't just harmonize the customer experience between your outlets: they also enhance it, making it richer and more fusional. As a collateral benefit, this should boost the growth of all your stores!
To find out more and develop a cross-functional, multi-PDV customer experience, contact us today and find out what the Pongo Marketing Assistant can do for you!
