In-house trainingRetail Customer Experience

Retail Customer Experience: Serve, Advise and Sell on the Shop Floor

Participants learn to greet, understand and advise shoppers so they leave with the right product and a reason to return. They leave with a shop-floor routine for greeting, asking, advising and closing.

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Retail Customer Experience course cover
Key Outcomes
Greet and read the shopper
e.g., open with a helpful comment about what they're looking at, not "Can I help you?"
Ask and advise
e.g., ask who it's for and the budget, recommend two options and explain the difference
Close and add value without pressure
e.g., suggest a matching item only after the main choice, and mention warranty
Handle objections and invite them back
e.g., "I can hold it for you until Saturday"

Why teams need this

Retail staff either hover or ignore, and shoppers leave without advice. Others push products and shoppers leave without trust. When customers can compare prices on their phone, the experience in the store is what remains. Pine and Gilmore wrote in HBR (1998) that "as goods and services become commoditized, the customer experiences that companies create will matter most".

Experience economy
Pine and Gilmore describe a progression from commodities to goods to services to experiences. Participants redesign one step of their own store experience.
Nordstrom case
Nordstrom's employee handbook is a card with one rule, "Use good judgment in all situations". The case appears in a management textbook citing Chatman and Cha (California Management Review, 2003). Participants decide which judgment calls their staff can make without asking.
Service and selling together
Jasmand and colleagues found, for call centres, that aligning service and sales raises satisfaction and sales but lowers efficiency. Participants test whether this holds on a shop floor.
Group work and role-play
Teams walk through their own store, or photos of it, as a shopper and list each moment. Then they role-play a shopper who is "just looking" and another who compares prices on their phone.

Exercises use your store layout, products and returns policy.

HRDC/HRDF training that builds confidence and drives growth.

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