One of the fundamentals that turn good retailers into great ones is making the sale easy for the customer by putting themselves into the customers shoes and thinking “Would I like this?” Now, there’s a whole range of activities that can be undertaken to achieve this including going on-line with a standard shopping basket portal – but that’s not for everyone.
Yesterday, I had to visit a government department to buy a book.
It took me half an hour to make a simple transaction, visit 5 different floors of the building and complete 2 different forms.
What is there to encourage me to buy more books? Will I recommend them to others?
You see, one of the things that many marketers forget is the PROCESS of the sale and how that affects the customer. The harder it is to make a purchase, the less likely the customer will return.
Having the best salesman in the country with sparkling sales figures will come to naught if the customer has to spend half an hour trying to pay for what he’s been sold. Think of all that money spent on recruiting and training the salesman when a lot less could have been spent on tweaking the purchase process.
This is a salutary lesson learned by a UK insurance company who couldn’t work out why they were losing policyholders at a rate of knots. Turned out there were problems in the claims payment department who were taking months to process a claim. As soon as the policy renewals came round, the customers were off.
It’s a case of looking after the cents and letting the Rupees look after themselves.
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