Back to Basics: Elevating customer service
A tenet of retail is good customer service—and for good reason. According to Kantar, brands only derive 25% of their equity from marketing, like paid advertising. The remaining bulk of brand equity—three-quarters—comes from the experience consumers have with a brand, namely its products, services and customer service channels.
For grocers, those channels include traditional checkouts, self-checkout terminals (where a worker is usually on stand-by to provide assistance) as well as staffed food counters, from food service to the butcher to the bakery.
Here, Amar Singh, senior director, retail insights at Kantar, outlines how to stay on top of your customer service game.
Recognize the changing role of store workers
Pre-pandemic, workers dedicated their time to fulfillment and procurement, like ensuring proper inventory levels and everything is displayed as it should be. But that has been changing. With manufacturers increasingly sending retailers ready-made curated island displays and the advent of AI-powered solutions in areas like inventory management, employee time is being freed up for customer interactions.
“The main role of the associate isn’t about stocking and organizing anymore—it’s about helping deliver information to the customer,” says Singh, who notes this change coincides with many shoppers, especially Gen Z, looking for a more enjoyable shopping trip.
READ: Back to Basics: Keeping your grocery store clean
Singh says this shift from fulfilment to customer service should be impacting everything from hiring (“Grocers need associates who are more interpersonal,” he observes) to employee appreciation initiatives (see below). He suggests grocers look to their in-store pharmacies for inspiration—this is where grocers tend to have the strongest one-on-one relationships with customers by nature of the interaction with pharmacists, nutritionists and other staff in this department.
Reduce shopping journey pain points
A pain point in the customer shopping journey comes at self check-out, a route that is meant to empower their desire to get in and out of the store quickly. “About 80% of the time, however, the customer ends up needing help,” says Singh, such as with an item failing to scan. “And because sometimes the customer has to wait a minute or two before help comes, the customer is already at a point of annoyance.”
“This is where customer service, like a good recommendation or just a friendly face, can go a long way,” says Singh. While helping solve the issue for the customer, the worker could note the great price the customer got on a product or recommend another product from a brand already in their basket for their next purchase. Customers remember positive, feel-good interactions.
READ: Futurist Doug Stephens on why the physical shopping experience matters
Incentivize your staff
Workers are being empowered to take customer service modules on their own time, “and the cost of those services has come down greatly, with new options like from LinkedIn,” says Singh. Called LinkedIn Learning, it’s a library of courses—some of them free—for employee training and development, from “online customer service training” to “de-escalation conversations for customer service.” Grocers also need to remember that the talent pool “isn’t by and large highly engaged—this isn’t a career path for most”—and so, incentivizing, celebrating and acknowledging workers “is very important, but often overlooked,” says Singh. “Experiential retail isn’t going to happen with a new layout—it starts with your people and how they’re treated. If they’re happy, it’s going to reflect in the service they provide to customers.”
Personalize customer interactions
Loyalty customers are being served up personalized offers in-store based on their purchasing history and factors like demographics, behavioural, emotional, transactional and POS data. But now, the mobile channel and geotargeting is being used by grocers like Walgreens in the U.S. to also enhance customer interactions with sales associates, who are being equipped with tablets. “Retailers are integrating in-store facial recognition technology with loyalty programs to identify high-value shoppers. This allows associates to personalize the shopping experience by accessing shopper information on their handheld devices or tablets as customers move through the store. Walgreens calls it ‘extreme personalization,’” says Singh.
He notes such personalization can help create a store-within-a-store shopping experience for the customer, with recommendations provided by sales associates in the health and wellness area to the bakery to the butcher shop. While still early days, “this is not futuristic stuff, it’s happening now, including in Canada with Shoppers Drug Mart,” says Singh. They’ve done an excellent job of notifying associates when loyalty customers enter the Beauty Boutique section, enabling them to increase basket size by highlighting personalized offers that resonate with those customers."
As inflation cools and grocers break free from crisis mode, Canadian Grocer's Back to Basics series provides practical advice for the small but crucial aspects of operating a food retail store, like cleanliness, customer service and inventory management. Have a pitch? Send it to digital editor Jillian Morgan at [email protected].
