How Store Staff Can Increase the Number of Transactions
Happy customers are the thing. Keep your sales floor staff focused on that.
Why a picture of a stapler? You will note that this stapler was inventoried and tracked with its very own serial number. Yes, a single stapler. I got this at a thrift store and as far as I can tell Fry’s is out of business. Oddly enough this isn’t the only stapler I have that has an inventory sticker from a defunct business.
No offense to the accountants, but really?
It would appear that the top priority there was protecting company assets. To a point a reasonable expectation.
What does staff pick up on when even a stapler has to be accounted for? The “this is what matters here” message comes through loud and clear. For front-line staff, in particular, a big focus on things that aren’t about customer service and sales hurts both.
What are the “stapler” items in your operation that are a distraction from the business of making customers happy?
How does front-line staff create more transactions and more sales? Glad you asked.
It begins with leadership that doesn’t unduly bog customer-facing staff with duties that don’t relate to customer experience. Every job has some administrative and operational aspects, managers have to protect the sales makers from other departments’ wish lists of to-do items.
Focused retail sales floor staff can move the needle by consistently doing these things:
Making everyone feel welcome has turned into a secret sauce in the retail and service industries. Our world has become so transactional and impersonal, that the value of a simple greeting and smile works wonders.
My sister has this pet peeve about cashiers acknowledging her. She won’t complete the payment part of the transaction until the cashier looks up at her and says something. It’s surprising how often she has to wait. Some even seem a bit put out. I find it amusing and sad at the same time. You might try it.
It’s been a long time since I worked for Wal-Mart, but one lesson has stuck with me. Every time I traveled with senior executives they were always deferential to customers. When we were on a sales floor and a customer walked up with a question everything stopped and the customer was taken care of. It happened dozens of times in dozens of ways. People got the message that the customer was the thing. As big as Wal-Mart is on expenses I don’t remember anyone checking staplers.
I even shagged shopping carts with a senior leader at one store because they were all over the lot. We never even mentioned it to the manager.
Value people’s time by making shopping simple and seamless. Good merchandising is also good customer service.
Just like traditional retail, customers want to find everything in a category they are looking at in one general area. A tougher job in thrift retail.
When I moved to traditional thrift from for-profit retail the stores I was responsible for didn’t separate sizes or styles in pants or bottoms. (except for denim) In the Women’s department that meant as many as a hundred running feet of women’s bottoms assorted however.
We leaped to dividing by size and colorizing. Sales in that subcategory essentially doubled. The tiny amount of time that was added to processing was more than made up with additional sales. To be honest, we were a little inconsistent with colorizing, but we got the sizing thing down fairly fast.
Customers rewarded us for making their shopping experience easier.
We also rejected, or ragged, out a lot fewer items, raising the overall earned value of donations.
Another piece of this is to keep pricing obvious. When a customer can’t find a price, if they are on the fence about making a purchase they will likely walk away. With the mix of constantly changing goods, it’s easy to miss a price from time to time.
The single most important thing thrift operators can do to increase transactions is to keep a steady stream of fresh goods coming to the sales floor. Thrifters are bargain shoppers and they hate missing a bargain. When they see the same stale stuff visit after visit they quit coming in as often, and eventually at all.
When they know they will see stuff today that wasn’t there yesterday they almost feel compelled to come in more and more often. Then everyone wins!
There are your best customers, resellers.
Good resellers and re-purposesrs have a deep knowledge of their category. They make bank on that knowledge. More than anything they want to quickly know what you have, how much it is, and how easily they can finish up the transaction. They are “on the clock”.
At Habitat/ReStore we see a lot of house flippers and landlords. Some spend north of ten thousand dollars a year in our stores. If they stop shopping it’s noticeable.
Our lowest volume store had one remodeler/flipper/landlord in particular that spent hundreds or more almost every single week. I could actually tell the day he stopped in based on sales totals. Then he missed a few weeks. It turned out that he took an extended family vacation, it was a lesson to me how important those customers are.
One of my other favorite resellers only did women’s shoes with an occasional side trip to men's or purses. She earns a nice living by knowing more about women’s shoes than anyone working in a thrift store. She regularly visits over a dozen thrift stores in the region. She has a route.
When she quits seeing fresh goods at a location she visits that store less often. Occasionally she drops a store from her visit list because they aren’t rotating goods through the system.
Over a year resellers spend more money than a dozen regular shoppers. If your store is full of fresh goods, well organized, and priced right everyone shops there more often. Especially your high spenders.
Happy customers are the thing. Keep your sales floor staff focused on that.
Thanks for reading!
Tim Gebauer — Thrift Merchant
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