Details Make a Difference
By David Pfeiffer
Introduction: In the aftermath of the COVID-19 shutdown, reopening a retail business must involve safety precautions for employees and customers . Despite the health risks, visiting retail stores will remain important for many people. This article outlines 7 customer experience considerations when reopening retail businesses.
Developing a level of expertise with the Reopening Up America Again guidelines and the variations of the state and local guidelines is valuable. This article describes some of the most fundamental customer experience ideas that should be considered in the reopening process. These experience fundamentals are important as the human mind often skips past fundamentals when in crisis mode. It’s important to become informed and formulate a plan to bring back, not only loyal customers, but gain new business as well.
Best practices from the Whitehouse Task Force:
Get the word out about the business reopening:
Here are some resources that you might find useful:
Customers want to know any new rules and your approach to safety.
Here are some resources that you might find useful:
One way to demonstrate your commitment to customer health and safety is the rigor you apply to keeping things clean. Carefully consider possible airborne and fluid exchange scenario and call out your precautions to build trust
Adding social distancing floor markers is the simple and expected thing nowadays. One “caring” difference is the handling of money and payment methods. Customers are not used to thinking about how germs might be transferred in the payment process.
Some businesses require waiting areas for fulfillment of the customer’s purchase (coffee shop, car repair, etc.). Many retail operators are asking customers to wait outside or in their cars for product or service fulfillment. It’s important to have a system in-place to notify the customer when the product is available or the service completed. Text messaging is a good practice in this area using queue manager software.
If the business did not have online sales, delivery, or pick up methods in place, this would be the time to add these services to mitigate further revenue loss in the case of another breakout. In most situations, this will require an inventory or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. I recently implemented a Square.com based website for my sister using their Weebly website solution.
It was pretty easy to set up since they were already using Square.com in their retail shop.
As businesses reopen, there will be opportunities to satisfy a pent up demand for retail goods and services – IF the customers feel safe! Ensuring customer safety will require some changes in the retail experience and may cause some inconvenience for customers and employees. The sensitivity to safety guidelines will vary by region and store type.
I hope the ideas and resources outlined above are useful and thought provoking. Please comment below or email me about this topic.
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Email me at: david@davidmpfeiffer.com