Delighting Retail Customers: Collecting Feedback at Every Touchpoint

The traditional retail experience is reimagined. Shoppers don't follow a linear path - they engage with brands through multiple digital and physical touchpoints before making a purchase decision. From browsing products online to visiting stores to seeking advice from sales reps to making final purchases, the customer journey is an intricate maze.

For retailers, providing a stellar experience at each of these micro-moments is critical. Even a single point of friction can potentially derail a sale and damage customer loyalty. That's why it's essential to gain visibility into the full customer experience across all channels and locations.

What is the best way to achieve this? By collecting customer feedback data continuously at every stage of the buyer's journey. With a holistic view of how customers truly feel, retailers can pinpoint areas for improvement and optimize the entire experience from beginning to end.

Mapping the Retail Customer Journey

So what are the key touchpoints where retailers should be gathering real-time customer feedback? Here are some important areas to focus on:

The Website/Mobile Experience

Before ever stepping foot into a physical storefront, customers are interacting with your brand through digital channels like your website, mobile app, social media, and more. Are these virtual front doors providing a positive first impression? Collect feedback on the user experience to identify potential pain points like difficulty navigating, a clunky checkout process, lack of product information, and more. Collect and monitor the feedback and comments on social media and business review sites such as Google Business Reviews to identify and improve the issues at different locations and stores.

The Store Environment

Once customers arrive at your physical location, how easy is it for them to find what they need and get the assistance they require? Gather in-location feedback using touchless feedback kiosks from shoppers on product availability and organization, as well as staff knowledge and friendliness. You'll want to assess this experience across different departments, locations, and times of day.

The Purchasing Process

For many shoppers, completing their transaction is one of the biggest frustration points in the retail experience. Failed payments, long checkout lines, and unhelpful staff can quickly sour the entire buying journey. Collect satisfaction data at points of sale with a touchless feedback kiosk, embedded in POS system, or as a unique QR on receipt to optimize queuing strategies, staffing, and checkout procedures.

Customer Support

Whether through live chat, email, phone, or in-person support desks, customer service experiences have a huge impact on satisfaction and loyalty. Make sure to assess satisfaction levels across all of your support channels including in store, over phone, and digital channels. Identify opportunities to improve response times, representative knowledge, and issue resolution processes.

Post-Purchase

The customer journey doesn't end when a shopper leaves your store or clicks the "purchase" button online. How was their delivery experience? Did they have a tough time returning or exchanging an item? What about ongoing support and communications from your brand? Assess every stage of the post-purchase experience to strengthen this crucial retention phase.

Making Feedback Collection Easy

While mapping out all of these touchpoints is a great exercise, it won't amount to much if your feedback collection methods are complex or frustrating for shoppers. Bombarding customers with tedious surveys after every interaction will lead to survey fatigue and low response rates. You'll only capture a small sample of the overall customer base.

To get a truly representative view of the customer experience across all locations and journey stages, you need a feedback approach that is seamless and intuitive for customers. The best method in physical locations is to use touchless feedback terminals to simply respond just in a couple of seconds. In the digital, SMS, email and phone make it one relevant question to the the interaction point. With this "in-the-moment experience" approach, there's virtually no friction involved.

Placing these seamless feedback terminals throughout your stores, smiley widgets on the website, and other collectors across customer touchpoints makes it incredibly easy to capture high volumes of real-time sentiment data. Customers are empowered to share candid feedback instantly, in their own voice, in the moment of service.

From this continuous stream of feedback data, retailers gain powerful insights into the peaks and valleys of the customer experience. You can validate strengths, uncover areas of friction, and track improvement efforts over time. With these kinds of robust analytics, you're equipped to make strategic decisions to optimize every customer touchpoint.

The Future is Real-time Feedback

The future of retail will continue shifting further towards prioritizing the end-to-end customer experience. Products are becoming commoditized, so the shopping journey separates leading brands from the pack.

Retailers must adopt a data-driven approach to truly understand their customers' needs, perceptions, and pain points at the micro and macro levels. This requires a mindset shift from collecting periodic feedback snapshot surveys with low response rates to facilitating an always-on real-time feedback loop across the entire customer journey with solutions like Press'nXPress .

With a continual pulse on how customers feel at every touchpoint and location, retailers can validate that their experience optimization efforts are resonating and make smarter decisions to meet evolving customer expectations. Those that embrace this real-time feedback mentality will be the brands that thrive in our experience-driven world.

Start now and make capturing the voice of your customers a top priority.