Guide to Personal Retailing in Modern Stores
The Modern Store Experience
Today, store shopping has evolved beyond just purchasing products. Modern stores now offer a complete shopping experience that goes above and beyond, with personalized omnichannel store services that cater to all modern shopper needs. These integrated services delight customers, making their shopping experience convenient and memorable.
The modern store experience unites seamless selling, personal retailing, store fulfillment, and store performance, empowering store associates to provide exceptional service that satisfies customers, elevates the retail brand, and improves sales. The modern store reflects the evolution of present-day shoppers’ behavior, where customer value is increasingly measured by the in-store experience.
Modern Shoppers Value Personalized Store Experiences
In today’s digital world, customers still value the human interaction and personal touch provided by physical stores. They appreciate the product insight and individualized attention provided by knowledgeable store associates.
By offering highly personalized service in retail stores, retailers can create more immersive and meaningful shopping experiences, ultimately boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty. Moreover, personalized retail experiences increase the value of physical stores for modern shoppers, encouraging them to visit frequently and spend more.
In a world where online shopping is increasingly the norm, personal retailing enables modern stores to stand out and provide value to customers beyond just a purchase transaction.
60%
of consumers will become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience.
Source: https://learn.segment.com/state-of-personalization-2021/
How to Unlock Personal Retailing in Modern Stores
Modern retailers can enhance customer relationships and realize increased sales conversions by adopting five essential personal retailing techniques in stores.
- Empower store associates to expertly and personally engage customers anywhere on the store floor.
- Employ rich omnichannel customer profile, history, and preferences to personalize shopper interactions.
- Turn store associates into trusted product advisors through effortless access to rich product information.
- Leverage advanced customer engagement tools, like appointments, to create emotional connections with customers.
- Enable continuous customer engagement outside the store to nurture relationships and sales.
Empower Associates to Personally Engage Customers Anywhere in the Store
Personalized retail experiences are most effective when store associates can effortlessly access customer engagement information, as well as product advisory data and tools from anywhere in the store. This way, they can personalize customer engagement and provide expert advice at any moment during a customer interaction.
When store associates are equipped with mobile solutions, they can easily access what they need to engage customers in a personalized manner. Personalization through mobile capabilities includes leveraging insights to offer personal greetings, individualized appointments, product recommendations, purchase guidance, and more.
However, many retailers fail to identify their customers before checkout, which is too late in the buying journey for a store associate to build a meaningful relationship or influence customer purchase decisions. Mobile customer engagement capabilities solve this issue, empowering store associates with personalization insight and tools at their fingertips, anywhere and anytime in the store.
Business Outcomes
Improved Responsiveness to Customer Needs: When store employees can easily access real-time data of customers, products, promotions, and inventory from anywhere in the store, they can respond more quickly and accurately to customer inquiries. This helps them provide informed responses that satisfy customers.
Elevated Customer Service: By having access to a complete understanding of the customer and their buying journey, store associates can provide more value during any customer interaction. This leads to elevated customer service that sets the store experience apart from others.
Enhanced Customer Convenience: Mobile devices can help store associates use one-on-one time more efficiently and effectively, thereby enhancing customer convenience.
Personalize Shopper Interactions with Omnichannel Customer Profile, History, and Preferences
In today’s retail industry, it’s crucial to provide shoppers with personalized interactions and tailored experiences that exceed their expectations. To achieve this, store associates need fast and clear visibility into customer profiles, histories, and preferences. By leveraging customer insights, associates can provide personalized greetings, show appreciation for loyalty, and confidently answer customer inquiries.
However, merely having access to customer information is not enough. Store associates require the right tools to capture valuable customer insight easily, which retailers can use to build stronger customer relationships. Updating customer preferences, capturing electronic notes, and maintaining wish lists are all critical capabilities that can enhance customer personalization across all of a retailer’s sales channels.
By empowering store associates with the right customer engagement tools, information, and insight, modern stores can deliver the kind of meaningful and differentiating service that shoppers expect. Modern stores will invest in the capabilities that enable associates to personalize customer interactions through customer insight to build enduring customer relationships.
Business Outcomes
Increased Sales Conversions: Enabling and empowering store associates to personalize customer interactions creates customer trust, confidence, and goodwill, increasing sales conversions.
Improved Customer Loyalty: Personal retailing capabilities can position store associates as trustworthy ambassadors of a retailer’s brand and products, creating a positive and compelling shopping experience that drives repeat customers.
Enhanced Data-Driven Insights: The ability to gather and analyze customer data is central to personal retailing. By capturing customer insights during store interactions, retailers can better understand customers’ preferences and behaviors to make informed decisions on improving the shopping experience.
Turn Associates Into Trusted Product Advisors Via Rich Product Info
The way people shop has changed in the digital era. Retail stores need to adapt to this new reality if they want to remain relevant and competitive. To achieve this, modern stores must offer tailored and immersive product advisory experiences that online channels cannot provide.
Store associates are vital to delivering this kind of experience. They play a crucial role in providing a consultative sales experience and must be a trusted source of product insight and guidance, building fruitful customer relationships through their product knowledge and advice.
Technology is essential in enabling store associates to provide personalized assistance. They must have frictionless access to a complete product catalog and inventory information, allowing quick and accurate responses to any customer query. With the right tools at their fingertips from anywhere in the store, they can even recommend complementary products and locate available inventory for shipping or in-store pickup, improving sales conversions and shopping cart value.
By embracing product advisory technology and adopting a consultative sales approach, retail stores can stay ahead of the curve by becoming invaluable sources of product advice.
Business Outcomes
Increased Sales Conversions: Enabling store associates to give expert advice confidently and reassuringly can improve the likelihood of a customer making a purchase, leading to increased sales conversions in stores.
Elevated Relevance of Physical Stores: Personalized product assistance in stores helps enhance store relevance by positioning it as a touchpoint where customers can get meaningful and unique services that are unavailable in other sales channels.
Rise in Revenue from Cross-Sells and Up-Sells: When store associates are empowered to recommend complementary or new products, cross-sells and up-sell opportunities increase new sales for stores.
Create Intimate Customer Connections With Engagement Tools
Providing personalized experiences is essential to attracting customers to stores and distinguishing a retailer’s brand. To achieve this, modern stores must go beyond using customer and product information to personalize interactions. They must offer heightened individualized services that create emotional connections with customers, inciting feelings of appreciation and value.
One way to deliver this personalized service is through appointment scheduling. Customers who prefer tailored shopping experiences place a high value on appointments. They enjoy receiving specialized support from store associates who cater to their unique needs. By curating product collections based on customer preferences before the appointment, store associates can create a more compelling store experience.
Modern stores must do more than provide appointments to create emotional connections. One effective way of doing this is through digital lookbooks. With lookbooks, store associates can create curated catalogs of products tailored to each customer’s preferences and share them via email or text. This approach is unique, meaningful, and highly effective in supporting a customer's purchase decision.
Through these techniques and more, retailers can provide unique shopping experiences that build a loyal customer base and set them apart from their competitors.
Business Outcomes
Increased Competitive Advantage: Retailers who excel in offering unique personalized services in stores can differentiate themselves from competitors, especially when competing with digital commerce-centric competitors.
Elevated Relevance of Physical Stores: Personalized services help enhance stores’ relevance by positioning them as touchpoints where customers can enjoy meaningful and unique services unavailable in other sales channels.
Improved Customer Loyalty: Personal retailing capabilities like appointments and digital lookbooks help stores nurture customer relationships and create a positive and compelling shopping experience that improves customer loyalty.
Nurture Relationships and Sales With Continuous Customer Engagement
In today’s highly competitive market, providing personalized service to store shoppers is crucial for success. And it doesn’t end when the customer leaves the store. Offering personalized customer support can increase sales conversions and customer satisfaction, even outside the store.
To achieve this, store associates should have easy-to-use communication capabilities to connect and engage with customers remotely. This capability will help them build customer relationships and provide valuable product assistance, even when they’re not physically present.
By capturing critical customer information during store interactions, such as desired products or saved shopping carts, store associates can seamlessly and efficiently support the customer outside the store. Digital conversations via email or text can help store associates share personalized lookbooks of preferred products with customers, leading to future sales transactions.
With remote selling capabilities, store associates can send secure pay-by-link requests to customers, allowing them to complete checkout of a shopping cart directly through a secure payment link from the comfort of their home or office.
86%
of U.S. online adults say it’s important for a retailer’s app to provide a more personalized, relevant experience that adds value to in-store shopping. Source: https://www.forrester.com/report/the-future-of-the-digital-store/RES176283
Business Outcomes
Increased Sales Conversions: By making it easier for customers to get support and complete a sale from a store, retailers can increase their sales conversion rates.
Elevated Relevance of Physical Stores: When stores can elevate above the in-store transaction to a continuous customer relationship, they become more relevant to modern shoppers and attract repeat business.
Improved Customer Loyalty: Personal retailing capabilities like remote selling help stores nurture customer relationships and create a positive and differentiating shopping experience that improves customer loyalty.
Personal Retailing Elevates Modern Stores to New Heights
In today’s competitive retail landscape, providing a personalized shopping experience is a hallmark of success. By embracing the right business capabilities, retailers can offer personal retailing, which allows customers to enjoy unique and informative in-store experiences while receiving one-to-one attention.
Personal retailing presents an opportunity to elevate modern stores to new heights, creating business outcomes that significantly influence top-line business performance.
61%
of retailers cite personalizing the customer in-store experience as a top IT priority. Source:
https://risnews.com/store-experience-study-2024
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