Improving Customer Understanding: A Guide For Retailers

As a retailer, there are numerous challenges you must face and requirements you must meet. Many of these are purely practical; from ensuring you have the funds to pay your rent every month to managing the bureaucracy of running a store, there’s no doubt that your attention is likely to be constantly divided.
Given the above, it is incredibly easy to find your time, attention, and resources torn between a number of different points of consideration. In this kind of environment, it is all too simple for certain areas to be overlooked. This is understandable, of course; you’re busy, and there are so many different threads to running a retail store that tracking each individually is almost impossible.
However, there are some aspects of running a retail store that can’t be overlooked, because they are far too influential on your overall chances of success. Below, we will focus on one of these vital areas: the need to understand your customers.
Why is this issue so concerning?
Enjoying a good understanding of your customers shapes decisions regarding a number of key areas, including:

• How your store should be promoted
• The layout of your store and how you arrange your displays
• The inventory you choose to sell
• The quantity of items you are able to sell
• The prices that you sell items at…
• … and thus your eventual turnover and profit

Without a good understanding of your customers, you could find yourself in a situation where you stock inventory that your customers do not want to buy, at a price point that they cannot afford, in a store that is not laid out to their benefit- so, in essence, failure to understand your customers results in a retail operation that is not viable. The issue really is that important.
How can you better understand your customers?

• One of the best ways to improve your understanding of your customers is to ask them directly. Focus groups, for example, still have their place in the modern retail world, and can still provide a useful method of garnering further insight into your customers.
• Market research has long been considered of great benefit to understanding your customers, but working with forward-thinking and futuristic companies such as Explorer Research takes the basics the concept to the next level. Technology such as eye tracking software provides an insight into your customers that previous generations of retail stores would never have been able to enjoy, so this is likely to be an area you’ll want to explore.
• Finally, it is worth considering the fact that, sometimes, the best way to get to know your customers is just to ask them for more information. For example, you can ask customers to complete a customer survey following a purchase. The biggest benefit of this technique is that it provides insight into your existing customers; however, in these data-security-aware times, you may struggle to persuade customers to take part. If this is an issue for you, then you may need to incentivize survey participation – a discount on their next purchase should be effective in most cases.

If you use the three ideas above, you should be able to greatly improve your understanding of your customers. With this heightened understanding in mind, you should be able to make customer-focused decisions that are able to influence your store for the better. Good luck!