Tag Archive for: company development
What does your perfect customer look like? What sort of customer would walk into your business and make your day? This is the sort of customer that we all dream of, the impossibly easy customer who not only spends plenty of money, but is easy to help out. The unicorn customer. The ideal customer, the one we are all looking for.
Who is the unicorn customer?
In marketing, we use buyer and customer personas to represent the would-be targets of marketing campaigns. These are people that the department is charged with winning over. They are carefully researched and constructed to portray not the ideal customer, but the realistic ones.
Unicorn customers, like unicorn anythings really, are the ideal. They’re the customers who are easy to service, make plenty of purchases, and come back regularly. They’re advocates for the brand and products, and are more than loyal. They’re the customers we all want, the ones you can always count on.
If you worked in the automotive industry, for example, your ideal customer might be the one who has no finance issues and wants a brand new car every year, upgrading their old one consistently.
Unfortunately, unicorns are rare – or nonexistent, depending on your point of view. They’re castles in the sky that we look for because what’s life without a little bit of magic?
Why discuss them then?
Unicorns might be mythical creatures, but customers certainly aren’t. What’s wrong with daydreaming? Nothing. In fact, knowing who your ideal customer is will help you develop strategies to create them.
Creating the Unicorn Customer
Before you start thinking about kidnapping your favourite regulars and stitching unicorn horns into their foreheads let’s pause for a minute – that’s not what I mean, and I’m pretty sure it’s not legal.
Knowing what a business’ ideal customer looks like means that strategies can be implemented to strive towards them. We’ve established that a unicorn customer is an ideal, a idyllic thing that doesn’t necessarily exist, but it should always be worked towards. Treating customers as though they are your ideal customer will make them feel as special as unicorns really are.
In other words, don’t think of a unicorn customer as an actual customer – think of them as a standard. A Unicorn Standard, as it were.
The Unicorn Standard
Over the course of the articles in this series, we’ve discovered some very basic truths. At the end of the day, they all come down to this: The Unicorn Standard. All of the types of customers we’ve discussed have things in common, and this concept covers all those things. In essence, there’s one fundamental rule: the customer is right. More than that, the customer is to be treated with full honours.
By making it clear to customer service staff that all customers should be treated as though they are the ideal customer, will generate a powerful surge in any customer service department. It’s about treating your customers the way they should be treated, not dependent on who they are or what kind of customer they prove to be: treat them right, and they’ll do right by you.
After many intense hours of fieldwork, quality analysis, intrinsic research, and valuable insights market research companies proudly deliver the Mystery Shopping Report to your company doorstep. This valuable data is there to help you develop strategies to increase your service and sales performances. It eventually finds its way downstream to one of the many shops that has been visited by one of the many mystery shoppers! And of course, both the sales team and the Shop manager are awaiting this moment with excitement!
So why are we so curious to see this Report?
One of the reasons for this is because many have been working hard, because of less successful previous Reports or because they want to match or even surpass them! Whatever reason the company employees have for being so exciting about all of this, it all comes to the conclusion that Retail is detail!
It will always be a challenge, how to become more detailed and what details need the main focus. And every detail counts obviously! Detail about what shoppers experienced or not experienced in your specific shops or details about what the shopper thought about that big Christmas tree in the middle of the main entrance? All questions that can be answered by that extensive report lying on the coffee table in the canteen.
What to do?
To get to all of this, the shop manager needs to decide what the next step will be and how to address the employees with the new findings of the report. After a short briefing of the shop manager with the exciting news that “it” has arrived, everyone strives for a glimpse of the report. You, the shop manager…Are you going to take the Mystery Shopping Report as a starting point for a training session, are you going to evaluate it step by step, or is it just a reminder of what to do right the next time?
No matter what way you choose as a shop manager, always be reminded of the fact that mystery shopping is a measurement tool for your service delivery and the report is a summary of how your company is doing on delivering service to your customers. And most important question what is your company aiming at? You need a basis that will lead you towards your main service objectives.
Here are five components needed for a better understanding of your Mystery Shopping Report:
- Intrinsic motivation
- Participation
- Commitment
- Awareness
- Rewarding
To succeed, you need full participation and interaction of your employees and thus do not make your employees see this whole process as spying or as a performance evaluation! With this mixture your sales department will use the Mystery Shopper report in the most efficient way and you will be able to realize change!
Also read this article: Retail Customer Service: Reality of Retail Industry
On this journey we will take you further into many other steps that will lead us to the best practices for the best service delivery!
In the previous articles in this ‘Imagining the Future’ series, I talked about technological advancements and how it may impact the retail industry. How it can help train employees, or establish the customers’ journey in stores. How it can offer detailed insights at a level previously impossible, and how that can that affect customization, which is so important.
In this article, I would like to imagine how the brick-and-mortar stores will be affected by these technological advancements. After all, if you ask a customer about their shopping experience the first thing that pops into their minds is still the last physical store they visited.
Let’s start with the beginning: What is the current state of the brick-and-mortar stores?
Well, they are still important, that’s for sure! How do I know? Look at Amazon! With pop-up stores and bookstores all across USA – and the new launch of Amazon Go – as a physical location, the largest online retailer has performed a reverse psychology on very unsuspecting customers [Source]! Sure, there are no cashiers and no check-outs, but the question remains:
‘Why does Amazon need to open a real store, in the real world?’
It turns out that customers are not as unsuspecting as we thought! One of their retail cravings is the experience, and nothing creates a better experience than something that reaches all our senses. We live in the real world and although the digital one offers many wonders, at the end of the day we go to sleep and wake up in the ‘here’ and ‘now’!
So what will the ‘here’ and ‘now’ look in the future?
Our lives are cyclical! We wake up, we go to sleep…every day! We look at the ‘kimonos’ from the Edo period and Alexander McQueen transforms them into the new ‘it’ in his ‘Haute-Couture’ Collection [Source]. We look at how food preparation 200 years ago, and Jamie Oliver starts advertising the benefits of growing your own food and eating local products [Source]! If those people from long ago could look at us they would think:
‘What’s so different?’
Would it be so surprising if, in the future, brick-and-mortar stores look just like they do now? Would have the ‘vintage’ feeling? With so many service interactions turning into digital experiences, at one point we will want to go back to the roots of what ‘service’ used to mean. That’s what Amazon is anticipating [Source].
When we analyse the retail brick-and-mortar landscape we notice that stores offer two types of experience designs – boutique self-standing stores, or as part of department stores. The first one offers the sense of exclusivity. ‘No other customer, but you, will ever experience this in-store journey! We are here to make your day special and unique!’. The other conveys the sense of choice.‘You can eat, you can drink, you can shop, you can go onto a roller-coaster! And you only have to move two feet to do these things!’
The truth is that brick-and-mortars must add multiple layers to create the level of complexity that a customer desires to experience. It’s like an onion. The customer enters and assesses the ‘atmosphere’ of the store, forms a first impression, filters the products available, analyses the services and after all this peeling, in the centre, the holy grail of all retailers – the Purchase!
In my opinion, this ‘onion’ is perpetual, simply because customers expect it, anticipate it and desire it! Whereas for the digital customers, if the buffering screen pops up you’ve lost all chance of Purchase!
The transformation of brick-and-mortar stores through technological advancements assumes that technology will help us create a better customer experience. For example, the insights provided by Big Data, as well by the biometrics that start being implemented [Source]. The augmented reality devices designed to help customers make a purchasing decision [Source]. However, the core customer journey will still take place in the brick-and-mortar stores. It’s like Disney, we come back again and again even after fifty years!
This post is brought to you by one of AQ’s Undergraduates, Laura Susnea. As part of our internship programs, undergraduates and classic interns are encouraged to take part in company culture. Laura’s primary project focusses on training programs and eLearning and how best to adapt this to industries under pressure.
