Retail Customer Service: Support Your Business with a Reliable Vendor

What Makes Retailing Customer Service Different

What is retail customer service? It is a customer service that specifically targets buyers visiting or ordering from retail stores. Its characteristics define the store’s further customer strategies. Although every customer service might be relatively similar, distinct aspects do distinguish retail customer services from other industries. If you understand them, you can excel at your own niche and offer experiences that cater to customers in retail specifically. Here are the basics that highlight customer retail services from others: 

• Direct contact with the customer. Unlike most customer services, a part of customer services takes place in physical locations that can require a separate set of skills. Although we will not dwell on this specificity, it’s still useful to recognize that your team present offline should be familiar with the body language, tone, eye contact, and other aspects. 
• A high volume of transactions. Retail environments can witness rapid workflow increases and a skyrocketing number of orders during specific seasons or holidays. As a result, a customer service team might face a need to maintain a high quality of service while also increasing its pace and response rate. Such periods can require either putting additional pressure on your already existing specialists or searching for other strategies. 
• Product knowledge and upselling. Good customer service in retail involves the knowledge of the products that the store offers. This knowledge should be extensive and pair well with a quick information-searching process in the store’s database to answer customers’ questions quickly. Many customer service teams, either online or offline, propose particular items for potential buyers, while it is not a typical requirement for many other sectors. 
• Managing returns and exchanges. Retail customer service is often engaged in handling returns and exchanges. This requires confident navigation of store policies and quality standards in case the sold item is in poor condition. Aside from the theoretical background, this also means that consultants need to transform often negative experiences into positive ones. Therefore, the retail customer support team might need to be well-versed in positive communication, emotional intelligence, and empathetic listening. 
• Building relationships and loyalty. Retail stores are typically focused on maintaining long and secure business connections with their buyers. This means that customer service professionals need to be aware of loyalty programs, personal recommendations, and even specific data improving buyers’ experiences. 

Retailer Customer Service: Best Practices

Offering unparalleled customer service retail requires a combination of strategies that not only react to certain customers’ expectations but also anticipate them. Study the list below to explore steps that can transform the retail experience for your customers. 

Constant customer support & active listening 

Flexibility and a responsive approach among retail workers are crucial for customer service teams on all levels. Typically, customers interact with the retail consultants across several channels: 

• In-person — physical interactions in stores and shops are the hallmark of overall customer service and what buyers often envision when thinking about communication with the retail teams.  
• Via the phones — every retail call center has multiple operators responding to users’ inquiries and accepting the calls; this requires constant availability and quick transaction processing. 
• Via messengers and emails — as the online presence of retail stores grows, messengers, social media, and emails are common communication avenues to reach younger audiences. 

Retail customer services are often associated with negative feelings due to the stereotypes and also because retail locations are among the most stressful. The reason for this tendency is understandable: retail is a place for daily interactions and purchases of individuals going through various emotional states. Due to this pressure, a failure of the company to offer flexible and understanding customer service can heighten your buyers’ emotional overload. 

Being present when the customer has either positive or negative feedback will ensure that they feel seen and heard and build trust. A multi-channel availability and the ability to turn adverse situations into positive ones require skill. It’s crucial to ensure that your team has the same high standards for managing clients’ disappointments. If your online presence is appealing, but your call center consultants are yet to master empathetic listening and the ability to analyze and respond to clients’ requests properly, your overall strategy may fail nonetheless. 

Developing proactive retail customer service skills

Proactivity is a critical feature of bridging the gap between your customers’ expectations and your overall business orientation. Here’s why this measure will guarantee you success from several standpoints: 

• Preventing issues before escalation. By anticipating potential setbacks, your proactive customer support team might prevent a broad range of challenges from ever emerging. A reliable team monitors common complaints and reports them to the managers, who, in turn, scrutinize and address them. Resolving these stumbling blocks deters customer frustration and minimizes adverse consequences for brand loyalty. 
• Building customer trust. Proactivity is a way to demonstrate one’s commitment. This move indicates to buyers that their retailer is reliable and deserves continuous collaboration. This input is crucial for long-term loyalty and will build a trusting client base.
• Creating a competitive advantage. While most retailers are reactive, your customer support team will be a step ahead and win over customers in this highly competitive environment. This key differentiator can be the last step toward securing the attention of those customers who have multiple options available. 

Using positive language

Training your retail support team to use positive language style when communicating with the clients will facilitate problem-solving, improve your brand image, and de-escalate the conflict. Here are the examples of positive language to give you a few insights into how it may look like: 

By shifting the rhetoric, you empower your support team and can transform the most difficult cases to make your customers stay with you. 

Providing memorable and personalized experience

It might be tempting to disregard customized experiences in retail because of how seemingly routine they are. Nonetheless, the data suggests that your store might benefit from finding unique propositions for your clients. According to a McKinsey report, 71% of customers dislike impersonal customer experiences, and 90% of Americans emphasize the appeal of personalization in business. As you use the data to improve customer satisfaction, buyers are more likely to return and also advertise you as a retailer via word-of-mouth or social media. 

This individualized approach perfectly matches retailer customer service: consultants can respond to user inquiries or develop personalized suggestions with the knowledge of customers’ past purchases in mind. 

Managing Retail Support Team Effectively: Key Factors

Managers often directly impact the efficiency of the customer service and how the team performs: leadership is inherent to a well-designed team. Customer support leaders are responsible for having a broader vision of strategy and performance. Certain strategies and viewpoints can make you or other people manage your outsourced support team much better. 

Hiring the right fit for your customer service in retail 

Some managers are ready to sacrifice the quality of their staff for the sake of a faster hiring process, but it typically backfires. Work with the hiring team on finding those consultants who are suitable for your business and will be ideal for your store profile. Such details matter due to the company’s culture and level of skill. Correct hiring and onboarding serve as the proper stages of filtering candidates and noticing those who will thrive in a chosen environment. If you can’t do it alone, outsource these processes. 

Moreover, an elaborate hiring process with gradual integration and an appropriate overview are the final stages of ensuring that you make the right choice. Hiring and onboarding will allow you to bring your management to the best use with a responsive and reliable customer service team. Even if you need some time to find specialists who are well-versed in the peculiarities of a retail store such as yours, don’t get discouraged. This process will allow you to cultivate a team to stay with you for long. 

Training and coaching your consultants

Even the best need constant improvement; adapt the culture of continuous growth to make sure your team regularly receives novel information and masters the knowledge related to this field. With the constant changes in retail, training should be an instrumental part of your strategy. 

Additionally, assess your team’s knowledge levels during certain periods to encourage keeping one’s progress and knowledge of the key concepts in check. If your specialists demonstrate a slight dip in performance, you will immediately notice it and help them get back on track. Managers’ awareness of their teams’ capabilities sets the right tone for preventing any mishaps. 

Adopting the best training techniques and developing them to your business needs will increase the expertise of your labor resources. By making these choices, you invest in the features and qualities that will provide benefits from the long-term standpoint. 

Conducting regular teambuilding activities

Teambuilding can improve the sense of team cohesion and make each individual worker more adaptable. About half of the workers in a team are likely to stay in it if they have a sense of belonging. Even the best formal environments cannot create an entirely positive and productive team because informal meetings matter. 

What is the best team building for a retail customer service team?

• Communicate in an informal setting;
• Initiate online trivia nights;
• Encourage out-of-work communication;
• Play games that will help the team to get to know each other better.

Although professional communication is vital to productivity and adequate workplace relationships, building tighter relations with positive emotional associations can be a strong supporting factor. 

Choosing SupportYourApp as your Customer Service in Retail

Contemporary changes in staff management have reshaped how store owners see their prospects. Even despite the challenges brought by the coronavirus pandemic and a temporary rise in online purchasing, these habits are already reversing. As a Support-as-a-Service company that provides secure technical, customer support, and CX services to growing companies, SupportYourApp is ready to capitalize on this trend. Here are some of the reasons to work with us on building your future retail support team: 

Performance adaptability

Our company remains in touch with the recent market trends and knows how to adapt our resources to shifting customers’ demands. Regularly updating our familiarity with what the retail business is focused on and evaluating our recent progress, we always build our processes on the principle of continuous improvement. 

Performance-driven hiring and onboarding techniques

Because your future team needs the best specialists to deliver superb experiences, our onboarding and HR departments always seek the best talents from the large pool of candidates. We have an elaborate and comprehensive interviewing process to evaluate every applicant and assess their skill and alignment with our team’s values. Our hiring process rests on the notion that a reliable and diligent team determines the majority of business success. 

During the onboarding, our new consultants deepen their knowledge of progressing within the SupportYourApp structure and study the company’s values. We emphasize client-centricity and place our customers’ needs at the center of our learning model. This integration allows us to later create a team that is already fully operational and responsive to your metrics of excellence. 

Reliable training: Moving forward 

After the onboarding, future retail customer service professionals go through an extensive training program that introduces them to the demands of retail. SupportYourApp builds knowledge from the basics, such as retail support definition, to the most complex strategies of conflict resolution and provides every consultant with the knowledge, empowering them and making sure they understand their professional objectives. Aside from this introduction, we regularly conduct additional training and knowledge assessments to check the strong and weak points of every individual. 

Building trustworthy teams

Despite a specific hierarchy and solid expectations we have from our team, SupportYourApp values individual input and always appreciates opinions that can improve our customer service in retail. By placing your product and customer relations at the center of our service, we cultivate a culture of excellence and trust. This change builds a productive and customer-centric approach that connects the best professionals with the projects where they will thrive. Such adjustments led to the emergence of a novel trend that lies in the constant growth and improvement of our teams to contribute to your communication with the customers.

Security and data protection

Due to the high volumes of data available in the retail industry, introducing reliable security measures is imperative. Most retailers store details of purchases, names and surnames, and even personal facts such as family situations or health conditions. One mistake can be the final blow to destroy your buyers’ faith in you, so guarding against data breaches is always a priority for us. By ensuring secure transactions and communications, your store can protect customers from financial loss and adverse consequences associated with such a mistake.

SupportYourApp handles your data with PCI/DSS & ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification and evaluates any risks to personal information. Always on high alert, it personalizes customer profiles and assesses data while aiming at total safety. Our standards enable us to protect every user and store client from fraud, identity theft, or sensitive information leaks. By doing so, we achieve customers’ trust and ensure reliable operations. 

Connecting People and Your Business

Harnessing your customer service team to promote your store expansion will drive your performance forward. Although it might require time and investments to maximize its potential, a reliable outsourced support team can fill in the gap and meet your needs. The future lies in services delivered empathetically and with diligence. Be among those brands that deliver top-notch support and more. 

If you feel like developing your own team to meet the dynamically changing market trends can be overwhelming, and you can’t find the right consultants for your store, contact SupportYourApp to discuss opportunities and suggestions just for you. We’ll be happy to discuss your expectations and how we can build your customer support team from scratch.