Friday, May 15, 2009
In an on demand world, specialty retailers face many different challenges. Below, we explain in more depth regarding 2 challenges specialty stores encounter.
2 Challenges Specialty Stores Face:
(1) Maintaining Customer Loyalty
- To broaden their customer base without neglecting their core customers and lower-income group.
- For every retail stores, it is only normal that they want to expand their customer base & try to reach out to other segments of customers.
- For example: From only targeting working adults, a company might now have the intention to attract youths to use their products in a bid to expand their customer base.
- However, when doing so, we tend to ignore our core customers, who are the working adults, in our previous example.
- In addition, specialty store tends to have products with prices that are quite steep and this actually have an impact on the lower-income group. They will tend to avoid from patronising specialty stores.
- One solution to help build customer loyalty for specialty stores could be to have wireless kiosks that allows consumers to browse a "virtual inventory" or learn more about in-store offerings.
- Retail store specialty customers expect high quality service but employee turnover often gets in the way.
- This is due to the fact that every time a new employee joins the store, training has to be carried out every now and then.
- This leads to inconsistency in the service provided.
- For example: Service from a trainee might be totally different from an employee who has been working for 5 years.
- It is rather obvious in terms of product knowledge.
- A trainee would have to slowly adjust to the working style, how to serve, etc, & also has to learn more about the product knowledge; whereas a 5 years of experience employee should already be comfortable with the working style & knows about the products at the tip of his/her fingers.
- This could also minimise time & money that has to be spend on training.
- Upon serving, the 5-years-experienced employee can already apply all the value-added customer service & also gives suggestions & opinions wherever needed.
- This is important as customers that patronise specialty stores tend to ask more questions as they have quite an adequate knowledge of the products through the internet and might already have done some comparisons with other stores.
;2:00 PM
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