How to Improve Customer Experience With Sensor-Based Technology
According to a study by Walker, customer experience will overtake product superiority and price as the key differentiator between brands in 2020. As the year progresses, more customers will prioritize exceptional buying experiences over other considerations. Another study, this time by PwC, corroborates Walker’s prediction. PwC says that 86 percent of buyers are willing to pay more for better customer experience.
These studies highlight the importance of superior customer experience to a business’s success. If you want to retain your old customers and attract new ones, you need to keep them satisfied. The question is: how do you do that? Most businesses don’t even know their customers’ preferences; how then will they boost satisfaction? Luckily, V-Count’s sensor-based retail technologies provide a viable solution.
Below, we outline how our software can be used to improve customer experience:
Identifying Trends With People Counting Technology
Before you can satisfy your customers, you need to understand their shopping habits and preferences. The most effective way to do this is to track customer behavior and identify prevalent trends. With these trends, you can adjust operations and make shopping more convenient for customers.
V-Count’s People Counting technology is effective for tracking in-store behavior and identify customer trends. The counting software is connected to a network of sensors that are placed strategically in—say—a retail store. These sensors monitor customer traffic patterns and collect data. Afterward, the data is analyzed, providing key customer insights. Insights obtainable from the software include overall customer footfall, store peak hours, store conversion rate, draw-in rate, staffing levels, etc.
Each of these metrics carries valuable information about customer trends. For instance, if you can accurately identify your store’s peak hours, you can put measures in place to maximize the extra traffic. By deploying more attendants and opening up temporary checkout counters, wait lines can be kept to a minimum, ensuring higher customer satisfaction levels. Satisfied customers mean more sales and better conversion. This translates to more profits and better business performance, and it all starts from the sensors and our Counting Technology.
Using Customer Behavior Analytics to Track Shopper Preferences
In addition to people counting software, in-store sensors can be connected to other technologies. Doing so amplifies the functionality of the devices, and they can be used to collect other key customer behavior analytics. The sensors can be integrated with our Heatmap software to identify customer preferences.
Analytics from Heatmap technology can be used to track how customers move around the store. It can also be used to identify their favorite sections and the products they interact with the most. These insights can be used to improve customers’ in-store experiences. For example, you may optimize store design/layout to make the favorite sections more accessible. You may also create selling combinations around products that customers interact with frequently, e.g., a small discount for customers that buy perfumes and deodorants together.
With customer behavior analytics, businesses get to understand what their customers like. The information can then be leveraged to provide the customers with tailored shopping experiences. Consequently, the customers make more purchases, enjoy a satisfying shopping experience, and are likely to visit again in the future.
Optimizing Operations for Improved Customer Experience
Behavior analytics identifies preferences, and it’s effective for creating tailored shopping experiences for some customers. However, you can improve the experiences of most store visitors by streamlining operations. When a business runs efficiently, everybody is happy. Customers can walk-in at any time, find the products they want, and move to checkout without wasting any time.
If they don’t find their favorite products, attendants are on hand to assist and help them pick a suitable alternative. At these streamlined stores, there are no checkout queues (even during peak hours), and product listing/placement is optimal.
This type of optimization is only possible by pairing sensor technology with V-Count software. Our Queue Management system allows businesses to streamline their operations and get real-time notifications when things are not running efficiently. Data from the system can be used to optimize staff scheduling and deployment, ensuring that there are enough attendants on the sales floor at all times.
Via the sensors, the software monitors checkout queues in real-time, tracking how long each customer spends on the line. If the average wait time is too long, managers can take steps to shorten it. Short queues reduce cart abandonment and lost sales, and it boosts customer shopping experience.
Conclusion
Improving customer experience is a step-by-step process. Mostly, it involves implementing small changes that make it easier for shoppers to buy from your store. It starts by listing the products that they like to optimizing store layout to ensure easy access. After that, you need to maintain an optimal customer-to-staff ratio at all times. With this, customers can always find an attendant to complain to or seek recommendations from. Lastly, you need short lines at checkout. 1 of 3 shoppers will abandon their carts if they can’t pay within five minutes.
If you can design your store to run this efficiently every hour of every day, you are assured of a steady stream of satisfied customers. At V-Count, we make this type of optimization possible with our suite of customer analytics solutions.
To learn more about our solutions or to leverage them for your business, visit V-Count.com.
