Improving the Consumer Experience: Making Buying Easier for Your Customers

No matter how great the product or service is, the customer experience is the most important aspect of boosting profits. So, here’s how to grow your company, focusing on the customer’s needs.

Create a High-Touch Business

Businesses that interact with their customers tend to be better perceived in the marketplace. One of the best ways you can create a high touch business is to listen to what your customers tell you, and create email or regular mail campaigns tailored to them.

Of course, this requires a bit more work. But, the rewards are well worth it. You will probably have to upgrade your current system to some of the best PDQ machines on the market, and integrate with new software that consolidates inventory, marketing, and sales tracking.

Make It Easy For Your Customer To Buy From You

Make it easier for customers to buy from you, and reduce queue time, by implementing wireless payments like ApplePay and Google Wallet. When people don’t have to wait for a receipt and don’t have to sign for purchases, transactions happen quicker, sales happen quicker, and you make more money.

To enable wireless or contactless payments, you’ll need an NFC terminal. An NFC terminal uses near field communication to communicate with mobile devices like iPhone, Apple Watch, and Android (and other) devices.

Credit card tokenization converts credit and debit card information into “tokens,” which are used in the transaction instead of a credit or debit card.

Since the card is already preauthorized, transactions take only a few seconds. In fact, they’re often faster than processing cash payments. Processing returns is easy too. For most systems, all you have to do is look up the device ID that was used to make the payment and issue a refund through the usual process.
For hardware like iPhones, for example, you’d ask the customer to open Apple Wallet and tap on the “i” for the card they used to make the purchase. Then, information about the device would be displayed. You would enter that information into your POS software, and process the return as you would any other.

Incorporate A Rewards System

You’ve probably heard this a million times, but have you actually tracked the success of your rewards system? Modern POS systems can do this for you automatically. And, they don’t require you to hand out cheesy punch cards that will get lost in wallets or chewed up by dogs and children or rained on or thrown away.

Believe it or not, rewarding customers for their loyalty can ignite a sense of appreciation inside them which can ensure that they stay with your company for a long time. You can do so by targeting particular demographics, like the military for example. That is one community in which people strongly identify with one another. By offering special offers and discounts to them, you can create an emotion connection with them and make sure that they use your brand everytime they need a product like yours. However, you should use a military verification service provided by the likes of SheerID or similar companies so that the rewards and offers are being redeemed only by the customers they are meant for.

Similarly, ePOS terminals often come with software that lets you create customer profiles. These profiles can track customer spending for you, allocate points, and help you devise clever rewards that are targeted to individual customers.

Or, you can create simpler rewards based on what’s moving in the shop and what’s not. Have excess inventory you need turned over by the end of the month? Create a sale and then blast it out to shoppers.

Whatever you do, don’t let your old, stale, rewards system limp on in its current form. If it’s not already digitized, do it. It makes it really easy for customers to use, and the easier something it the more people will use it.

Tom Dunn puts his IT experience to good use in a retail environment. He likes to share these insights and ideas with an online audience and writes for several relevant websites on a regular basis.