Customer Experience Officer, VP in charge of Consumer Delight, Chief
> Customer Enhancement Officer; these new titles and positions underscore the fact that in today’s retail market space, consumers rule.
It’s no secret. Retailers no longer control their brands, customers do. If customers aren’t satisfied with a brand encounter, they are quick to take their business elsewhere. Often they take friends and family with them. The penalties for disappointing a customer are higher than ever. Prior to the internet, if a customer wasn’t happy with your store, they simply stopped coming. Now an unhappy customer can cascade their displeasure throughout their entire sphere of influence with one post on Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, and other social networks. The need to please and delight the customer is so critical, there’s even a professional organization called the Customer Experience Association.
According to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive-
• 86% of consumers will pay more for a better customer experience;
• 89% of consumers say they will switch to a competitor if they are not happy with the customer experience at your store
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Delivering a pleasant customer experience can be as easy as having the right item, in the right size and color, readily visible on the sales floor when the customer is ready to buy. Sound simple? With RFID it is. So it continues to surprise me that so many retailers who want to enhance the in-store experience for their shoppers, overlook the profound capabilities of RFID for creating a positive experience.
To begin with, RFID eliminates out-of-stocks and helps retailers maintain a perfect sales floor at all times. RFID technology tracks each item as it travels throughout the supply chain, and throughout the store. Items are always visible in real time, whether in the backroom, in a shopping cart or on the dressing room floor. Any merchandise missing from the rack or shelf, can be quickly replenished. Knowing the location of everything in stock saves time and effort for your sales staff, freeing them to provide more personalized services for customers.
Beyond inventory management, RFID tracks what styles, colors and sizes are selling—or not selling– in specific stores or locations, enabling you to be more targeted in your ordering. This translates to more personalization for shoppers, with greater customer happiness down the line.
RFID gives you, the retailer, the ability to understand your customer better by tracking customer behavior, for example, did they pull it off the rack, then discard, or did they buy? RFID’s tracking technology delivers critical conversion metrics that can help lift your sales and profit margins, for example, what happens to items that customers bring into the fitting rooms? Are these items purchased, or do they end up back on the sales floor? By using this data to understand what the customer is looking for, you can leverage suggestive selling, and move the customer to purchase.
For stores operating across the channels of e-commerce and bricks and mortar, RFID solves the challenges relating to availability. When customers order online and arrange in-store pick, you can “see” where that merchandise is (or is not) in real time. This means no more disappointments for shoppers. Too often, online buyers who expect to pick up an order at the store, find that the item never arrived due to a shipping error. Even worse is the order that was never filled because it was out-of-stock but the computer logged it as “in stock” at the time the order was placed. We could go on to talk about wrong size, wrong color or wrong style and all of the other variables that can disappoint a customer, but you get the picture. RFID ensures every item is visible and that all data relating to that item is accurate, every time. Importantly, accurate inventory at the store level turns each location into an efficiently operating distribution center, saving on shipping time and money— or maybe even getting the customer into the store in the first place.
RFID can even improve the appearance of the store and speed the check-out process when used for loss control. EAS systems enabled by RFID can operate with wireless sensors embedded in the carpet or ceiling, thereby eliminating the need for alarm gates. And with RFID enabled EAS, there are no noisy alarms to disrupt the shopping process. RFID tags, which can double as the sales tag, are easily read, and unlike bulky EAS tags, are easily removed, saving time at POS. Advanced applications, such as virtual and interactive fitting rooms and automatic payment with the “wave” of the RFID tag, take customer engagement to even higher levels of “delight”.
In today’s cluttered marketplace, exceptional customer service can be a compelling point of difference for your retail operation. RFID plays an important part in delivering that competitive advantage. If your store is already leveraging RFID to keep customers happy, we’d like to hear from you. If you are not yet using RFID, and want to learn more or give it a try, drop us an email at success@truecount.com. Our team of experts will show you how to get up and running right away.