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Magazines Archives - 2008 March
What do customers want from the
shop floor?
Story 19
IT is an old story that continues
to plague retailers whose sales staff forms the single biggest
driver of lost sales, reported a study by The Verde Group, a
Canadian research company, based in Toronto.
The research was conducted both in the US and Canada with the
same results.
Of the top 10 problems identified, nine were linked to sales
associates, with shoppers taking issue most with: The “it’s not
my department” attitude; being made to feel they are intruding
in floor staff’s private conversation; being shadowed and unable
to browse freely; staff showing lack of interest to help find an
item; impoliteness; staff not listening to a request;
insensitivity to long checkout lines; staff not making eye
contact or smiling; and the absence of sales assistants.
Out-of-stock merchandise was the only non-staff-related issue in
the top 10.
Verde president Paula Courtney suggested that many of these
issues could be resolved with better training. Noting that
dissatisfied customers would tell their friends over and over
about what they considered to be bad experiences, Courtney cited
survey data revealing that the shopper unable to find an item
would tell it to 2.5 people while another who has to wait to be
served and the one who has to wait at the checkout line would
each tell 1.4 people.
The research, which also studied shopper attitudes by age and
gender, found older female shoppers more likely than older men
to have issues with salespersons, while men were observed to be
most annoyed by out-of-stock situations.
In the study, younger shoppers, brought up on instant response
from the Internet, tended to encounter problems with sales
associates. Their impatience stems from the belief that they
have more options shopping via the Internet, text-messaging and
e-mail, Courtney explained, adding that “the younger they are,
the more demanding” they get.
Retailers, she concluded, need to pay more attention to customer
experience in their stores. “Collecting information about
behaviour that dissatisfies shoppers is as important as
understanding what merchandise they might want.”
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