Imagine stepping into a well-maintained store with appealing music, nice lighting, free samples, and knowledgeable staff. Now, think of the opposite: a retail store with dusty shelves, surly salespeople, and a confusing layout. Which one are you likely to want to go back to?
For customers in physical stores, a positive retail customer experience would likely include great products, helpful staff, and a well-designed space, as well as additional benefits, like a loyalty program and a hassle-free return policy.
And while most brands recognize the competitive advantage in offering superior customer experiences, there are serious consequences for getting it wrong. Per PwC, 32% of consumers will walk away after just one bad experience with a brand, even if they love the company or product.
This guide shares what a great retail customer experience looks like, with 12 practical tips to improve the retail experience and generate more sales.
What is retail customer experience?
The retail customer experience describes the interaction a customer has with a brick-and-mortar retail store. It encompasses everything from initially discovering the brand and interacting with the retailer after their first purchase.
Components of a retail customer experience
Different stores seek to create different customer experiences. For example, a pop-up shop is going to have a different focus than a big-box chain, and they’re both going to aim for a significantly different experience than a small online boutique.
While each of these businesses may have a wildly different style, their goal is the same: to have happy customers who make purchases and are likely to return. After all, a store that builds customer loyalty is likely to be more successful than a store no one wants to revisit.
Here are some core elements to consider if you’re rethinking your customer experience strategy:
Products
Customers’ primary reason for shopping, in-store or online, is to purchase goods or services. For a positive customer experience, the products in a retail store should meet their target consumers’ needs, whether they’re luxury goods or necessities.
Environment
Whether it’s the smell of coffee beans at your local roastery or energizing pop music at the youthful boutique, environmental factors play an important role in how retail customers feel at a store. Architectural design, color schemes, displays, music, lighting, and even smell are part of the environment and should be tailored to create a positive shopping experience.
Online stores operate in 2D rather than 3D, but the same design concepts (layout, visual appeal) and centering on the target consumer still apply.
Customer support
Knowledgeable, professional, and helpful support, whether that’s salespeople and store managers at brick-and-mortar locations or a call-in or chat customer support for an online business, can give stores a competitive advantage and impact customer retention.
Customers have choices where to buy; if they have a negative experience with unhelpful, rude, or overbearing staff members, they’ll likely shop elsewhere.
Efficiency and speed
Anything that impedes instant gratification—out-of-stock items, long lines at the register, incompetent salespeople—can hinder customer satisfaction and negatively impact the retail customer experience.
Similarly, unreliable supply chain issues, problems with delivery mechanisms like poor delivery tracking systems or frequently late deliveries, and problems at checkout and payment pages can impede operational efficiency for ecommerce stores and lead to a negative retail experience.
Convenient policies and perks
Hassle-free return policies, generous customer rewards programs, special promotions, physical or virtual events, and informative newsletters are all part of the customer experience and can help build brand loyalty.
How to improve the customer experience in-store
- Offer comprehensive employee training
- Speed up the checkout process
- Personalize the shopping experience
- Blend online and offline channels
- Manage inventory effectively
- Speed up fulfillment cycles
- Host in-store experiences
- Offer store amenities
- Be consistent
- Launch a customer loyalty program
- Improve store accessibility
- Leverage new retail technology
Brick-and-mortar stores looking to improve the retail customer experience can do so through the strategies below.
1. Offer comprehensive employee training
If shoppers can get retail customer service quickly and reliably, whether they’re looking for information or need help with a problem, they’re more likely to have a positive experience.
Store personnel are often the face of a business in the minds of customers. Offer comprehensive customer service training to help staff deliver outstanding experiences to everyone who visits the store. Cover topics like:
- Policies and procedures, such as how to process refunds.
- Product knowledge to help customers find the right product.
- Effective communication, particularly when handling objections or dissatisfied customers.
Companies often use a combination of humans and bots to offer support to customers. Whatever combination you decide to opt for, optimize for wait times, efficiency, and usefulness.
2. Speed up the checkout process
A recent report found that almost two-thirds of shoppers feel impatient, bored, annoyed, frustrated, or disrespected when they have to wait in line. And if they’re left hanging around for too long, three in five will ditch their spot in the queue entirely.
Speed and convenience are clearly important to shoppers. Practical ways to offer this at checkout include:
- Customizing the POS interface. Applying discounts, redeeming loyalty points, and scheduling local delivery—these extra taps can add precious seconds onto the checkout flow and elongate lines. Use Shopify POS UI extensions to customize the Smart Grid and find what you need quickly.
- Using handheld POS devices. Instead of making customers form an orderly queue at the checkout desk, let them complete purchases from anywhere in the store with a handheld mobile device. Tap to Pay makes this easy: you can turn your smartphone into a credit card reader to process payments on the go.
- Consider appointment scheduling. The same report found that seven in 10 customers would rather book an appointment than wait in line. Appointment scheduling apps like Appointly and Tipo help evenly distribute foot traffic and invite customers to visit when there’s someone on hand to help.
“Shopify helps us to provide a seamless shopping experience,” says Sacha Rose, CEO at Derek Rose. “With Shopify POS, we bring the checkout experience to the customer, so people can relax, continue to browse and explore the store.”
3. Personalize the shopping experience
Building customer relationships—whether that’s by offering personalized experiences like birthday discounts, or just chatting with customers about their needs—can help create a positive customer experience. It can also help you gather customer information and learn about how best to satisfy their needs before they have to ask for help.
Shopify streamlines this process by creating a unified customer profile each time a shopper shares their email address or phone number with you. Any supplementary data you pick up—be that through native Shopify features (like Shopify Email) or third-party apps (such as Smile loyalty points)—funnel back to this profile for an always up-to-date customer view.
Unified customer profiles are accessible from the POS interface. Store associates can ask for a customer’s name to retrieve their profile, then personalize the retail customer experience.
For example, if a customer subscribed to your email list on a pop-up form displayed on your “Skiing” category page, and also opened an email campaign that offered 10% off their first order, retail associates could recommend bestselling skiing products and remind them of their discount code.
4. Blend online and offline channels
The retail customer journey is more complex than ever. The average customer interacts with a brand digitally on three separate occasions before making a purchase.
An omnichannel retail customer experience allows greater flexibility among these multichannel shoppers, accommodating their preferences and needs as they switch between channels. It’s your job to facilitate these omnichannel purchases through retail strategies like:
- Displaying real-time inventory levels at a customer’s nearest store on product pages.
- Allowing customers to scan QR codes at store counters for detailed product information.
- Offering exclusive discounts by downloading the store app.
- Omnichannel fulfillment options like buy online, pickup in-store (BOPIS) and curbside pickup.
- Supporting buy online, return in-store (and vice versa).
Where many retailers struggle, however, is with the infrastructure required to provide seamless omnichannel retail experiences. Patchy middleware, expensive integrations, and time spent training staff how to operate multiple systems can inflate costs and cause operational drag. A unified commerce platform solves that problem.
Shopify is the only platform that natively unifies POS and e-commerce in a single solution. This approach pays dividends for retailers, as evidenced by a recent report from an independent leading research firm that found Shopify POS retailers benefit from:
- 22% lower total cost of ownership on average.
- Equivalent omnichannel sales growth of +150% quarterly on average year over.
- Operational improvements that contribute a benefit equivalent up to a 5% uplift in sales.
5. Manage inventory effectively
Customers expect products to be available when they visit a store. If this doesn’t happen and they’re faced with a stockout, it adds friction to the customer journey. They must either wait until it comes back or find it elsewhere. Most will do the latter.
Proper inventory management helps to reduce the direct financial losses that stockouts inflict, while simultaneously improving the retail customer experience. That means:
- Unifying inventory data from all sales channels into a single system.
- Relying on demand forecasting tools that combine AI with sales data to predict future demand.
- Conducting regular inventory counts to ensure accurate data.
- Automating purchase orders when safety stock levels dip below a predetermined threshold using tools like Stocky.
- Using radio-frequency identification (RFID) to keep tabs on where your stock is.
6. Speed up fulfillment cycles
Most retailers supplement brick-and-mortar with an ecommerce website, often treating physical locations as mini fulfillment hubs for online orders.
Some retailers also use a showrooming strategy, where physical stores act as showrooms to display their products without actually keeping them in stock. Instead, customers browse products in-store, place their order on the POS system, and use a ship-to-home service to receive their order at a later date.
The challenge with either of these options is that almost two-thirds of online shoppers expect an item to be delivered within 24 hours, with expectations for grocery retailers even more stringent (just two hours).
Create a fulfillment cycle that minimizes the time between an order being placed and delivered to improve the retail customer experience. That might involve automating certain aspects of the fulfillment process, placing bestsellers near packing stations, and utilizing reliable shipping partners.
💡Tip: Use Shopify Flow to build custom workflows that automate the order fulfillment process. It has templates to flag high-risk orders, notify your fulfillment team of orders with expedited shipping, and more.
7. Host in-store experiences
Think of your store as a destination—one that provides your customers with something they can’t get online. Perhaps these are in-store experiences, such as demos, events, or consultations, or perks like personalized shopping and free samples.
These immersive experiences improve retail CX because they:
- Offer an experience customers can’t get elsewhere (particularly if they shop online).
- Aid product discovery, which can build brand affinity.
- Build a community of like-minded shoppers.
Creating memorable retail experiences can also bring customers in through the door, as well as function as a form of organic marketing.
For example, you could create Instagrammable corner walls, have the store hashtag on changing room mirrors, and create a store layout that’s conducive to selfies. This social media-friendly environment can make customers more inclined to talk about your store online.
8. Offer in-store amenities
Customers want to feel comfortable when they’re visiting a retail store. Basic amenities can help them do this, and most are low-cost to implement:
- Free WiFi
- Restrooms
- Fitting rooms
- Baby changing facilities
- Comfortable seating areas
- Phone charging stations
LIVELY, for example, aims to recreate a clubhouse feel in its retail stores by offering amenities that customers can use—even if they didn’t intend to visit the store. “We’ve even had women who come in and nurse their babies,” says founder Michelle Cordeiro Grant. “They're walking around the city in need of a place to stop, and they know they can rely on our store for that.”
9. Be consistent
Creating unified branding through the aesthetics, music, and vibe of your physical space and the visuals and language on your website can create a cohesive experience for customers.
Whether your style is cottage core or urban funk, carry it through across channels and spaces to create a unified brand identity that customers can easily understand as soon as they walk into your store.
10. Launch a loyalty program
Customers want to feel appreciated by the brands they support—and they’re willing to pay a premium of up to 16% when they do. A loyalty program helps retailers offer this recognition while also incentivizing customers to make repeat purchases in the form of:
- Discounts
- Store credit and gift cards
- Free products
- Free shipping offers
- Early access to new product drops
💡Tip: Use POS UI extensions to build a POS loyalty program that doesn’t elongate checkout queues. The Marsello loyalty extension, for example, can add a tile to the Smart Grid for cashiers to view a customer’s loyalty status, redeem rewards, and award points on their in-store purchase.
11. Improve store accessibility
All brick-and-mortar retail locations are required to be accessible to everyone under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Not only could you be breaking the law by failing to make your store inclusive, but you could be turning away customers and losing out on an estimated $338 billion every year if your store is inaccessible.
Walk through your store and think practically about whether it’s inclusive:
- Is parking easily accessible near the entrance?
- Do you have braille elements on retail signage?
- Are fonts clear and easy to read?
- Is the checkout desk at an accessible height?
- Are doorways wide enough for wheelchair users and mobility devices?
- Do you have quiet zones for people who are sensitive to sensory overload?
12. Leverage new retail technology
Retail technology does more than assist brands in optimizing backend operations. Customers are open to using it during their shopping experience—a recent report found technology such as augmented reality (AR) “significantly enhances consumer engagement, subsequently leading to stronger purchase intentions”.
AR displays a 3D model of a product above a live stream from the customer’s device camera. This lets you digitize the retail customer experience through elements such as:
- Virtual fitting rooms
- Interactive in-store displays
- Digital shopping assistants
Gunner Kennels uses Shopify’s AR toolkit to let customers get IRL-style experiences when shopping online. The feature lets visitors place a 3D model of their products beside a photo of their dog, which solves the main challenge of buying dog crates online: choosing the right size. This single feature increased order conversion by 40% and reduced returns by 5%.
“3D models have served as a tool to further bridge the gap between a retail experience and online,” says VP of marketing Macey Benton. “As we see higher adoption rates with the models, we are also seeing lower return and exchange rates.”
How to measure the retail customer experience
Customer experience metrics
Customer experience metrics can help business owners gain customer insights to figure out whether they’re having a positive retail experience. Those include:
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): How satisfied a customer is at the end of an interaction.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely they are to recommend the brand to others, on a scale of 1 to 10.
- Customer effort score (CES): How easy it was for the customer to complete a task, such as finding a product, locating the store, or making a return.
These metrics are often measured using a simple store survey that customers can take after an interaction, for example, after they’ve made a purchase or spoken to a customer support representative.
Alternatively, if you have a physical store, you can measure the retail customer experience by asking shoppers to simply press a button at checkout to indicate whether or not they’re satisfied.
Customer retention and loyalty
Customers might not always tell you when they’re dissatisfied, but they aren’t afraid to walk away if their experience is subpar.
Track loyalty and retention metrics to check whether this is the case for your store:
- Customer lifetime value (CLV): How much a customer spends during the lifetime of their relationship with the brand.
- Repeat purchase rate: The proportion of customers who make more than one purchase.
- Loyalty program engagement: How many customers enroll in your loyalty program and redeem rewards.
💡Tip: Shopify Analytics tracks these metrics everywhere you sell, giving you an always-up-to-date view of how many customers you’re retaining.
Customer feedback and reviews
To learn about the retail experience of your customers, make feedback collection a standard part of the customer journey. Apps like LoudHippo and Grapevine, both of which integrate with Shopify POS, can automatically invite customers to share their thoughts after making a purchase.
You should also encourage customers to leave online reviews on your website or social media pages after making a purchase. Forums like this are a valuable way of learning about customer experiences you may not get from other quantitative metrics.
Retail customer experience examples
Astrid & Miyu: Unified customer profiles
Jewelry retailer Astrid & Miyu operates 23 retail stores and a thriving ecommerce website. For some brands, the pressure of serving so many customers across multiple sales channels often highlights flaws in the customer experience.
Astrid & Miyu relies on Shopify to create unified customer profiles that collate data it collected on each individual customer. This allows the brand to tailor the experience to each shopper at scale, regardless of whether they shop online, in-store, or a combination of both.
“Shopify POS really helps the store teams to enhance the customer experience,” says area manager Marsha Sharrier. “For me as an area manager, it helps me to be able to get data in real time across multiple locations.”
Astrid & Miyu’s ability to offer seamless omnichannel retail experiences has paid off. It’s noted a 5x increase in customers who purchase more than four times when shopping omnichannel, with those customers having a 40% higher CLV than those who shop online-only.
Tomlinson’s: Omnichannel loyalty program
Tomlinson’s is a pet supplies retailer that operates a flagship store in Austin, TX. It launched the Pet Club Annual Membership program to reward shoppers for their loyalty, regardless of whether they shopped online or in-store.
With Shopify POS integrations, applying these rewards at checkout doesn’t elongate checkout lines that contribute to a poor retail customer experience. Store associates can automatically apply discounts at checkout with no additional taps required—a move that reduced in-store checkout times by 56% and decreased time spent training new hires on POS operations by almost a third.
Diane Von Furstenberg: Bespoke clienteling
Luxury fashion brands paved the way for personalized shopping experiences. Diane von Furstenberg is no different. Each store associate, known as a “personal stylist”, uses Shopify’s mobile POS device to retrieve customer data that enables them to tailor the experience for each retail shopper.
“I love that, with Shopify POS, I can dig into the items my customers have ordered online and bought at our store. That’s something we weren’t able to do as easily before,” says assistant store manager Joanna Puccio.
“We had to build custom reports using data from two systems, but now I can click on the customer’s profile and see it all there. I can see what a client bought, returned, their typical sizing, color preferences, even notes our staff add to their profiles—Shopify makes it easy to view customer information.”
Improve the retail experience with unified customer profiles
The right technology makes it easier to not only measure the customer experience, but take steps to strengthen relationships with shoppers that act as a sustainable competitive advantage.
Shopify has unified customer profiles that collate every piece of data you’ve collected on a customer, which becomes the foundation for personalization. Marketing teams deliver timely and relevant campaigns that drive shoppers in-store; sales associates close the deal by retrieving a shopper’s order history to recommend complementary products naturally and in context.
Plus, because Shopify is the only platform to natively unify POS and ecommerce in the same solution, there’s no need to contend with patchy middleware or custom-coded integrations to offer the omnichannel retail experience that customers expect. That leaves you more time to focus on what you do best: innovate.
“We have gone from spending 80% of our time fixing technical incidents to a number closer to 10%,” says Saül Aleu, chief technology officer at Bobo Choses. “And the time we used to devote to solving technical issues, we now use to add value to the business.”
Retail customer experience FAQ
What is the retail customer experience?
The retail customer experience (CX) describes the experience a shopper has with a retail brand. It encompasses every aspect of the customer journey, whether they’re visiting a store, online shopping, or contacting its support team.
How to measure retail customer experience?
Metrics to measure the retail customer experience include:
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer effort score (CES)
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Average order value (AOV)
- Repeat purchase rate
- Resolution rate
- Customer retention rate
What are examples of retail experience?
Examples of great retail experiences include:
- Personalized support
- In-store events and workshops
- Excellent customer service
- Streamlined returns procedures
- Speedy checkout
- Rewards for loyalty
What does CX mean in retail?
Retail CX (customer experience) refers to the overall perception and feeling a customer has about a brand based on every interaction they’ve had, whether that’s online or offline.
What can improve customer experience in stores?
Tips to improve the customer experience in a retail store include:
- Offering personalized recommendations
- Speeding up the checkout process
- Ensuring stock availability
- Hosting in-store events
- Offering amenities such as restrooms and seating
- Launching a loyalty program
- Leveraging retail technology
- Following up with unsatisfied customers
