A Game of Retail Snakes and Ladders

It seems that our analogy of the retail customer experience being a game of snakes and ladders really struck a chord with many of you. Thank you for reaching out.

Having your retail sales leaders and teams understand the customer journey and where they are falling down (snakes), or where they have opportunities to fast track the buying process (ladders), seems to be a big gap across different retail industries and sectors. Many of our recent conversations with retailers have been to help them fill this knowledge gap and improve their Retail Customer Experience results.

Retailers are often over-focused on new technologies and improved store layouts, hoping to support and improve the customer journey. However, these changes have not always had the desired effect and it still feels like, as a customer, there is a disconnect between brand aspiration and the end result we experience.

Unless your teams and store leaders really understand the customer journey and all of the touchpoints they can influence with the support of technology, then the interaction will just become transactional. Opportunities will be missed to achieve your key metrics – conversation rate, average order value and basket size to name just a few (see our earlier blog on this topic).

As we have said before, getting a customer into the shop is the hardest thing to do. Once they are inside, we need to be able to deliver an experience that helps them buy (and one they will remember). We believe that a great Sales through Service approach is simply about knowing how to take a customer through their buying journey. The snakes and ladders gameboard/tool provides retail sales teams with the understanding of key touchpoints, ensuring that they have a good conversation with the customer, helping them during the selection phase and supporting the buying decision. All of these will effortlessly move the customer towards making a purchase. The tool is tailored for each customer and we ensure it is supported by psychology and techniques that store leaders can use to really help their teams connect sales metrics to the customer journey, and influence customers’ decision making.

To bring this tool to life and give you, the Retailer, the opportunity to understand where you may be falling prey to the snakes and not using the opportunities to climb the ladders to better customer buying success, we invite you to Imparta’s game of snakes and ladders.

To give you more context, at the end of 2017 we partnered up with Cate Trotter, Head of Trends at Insider Trends, to collaborate on a report highlighting the top 50 retail experiences. After the popularity of the report, we decided to bring the report alive with an event:

Enable Your Retail Teams to be Transformed by Technology. Not Replaced by It.

This exclusive breakfast event will explore how we can use the insight from the report to drive amazing retail experiences. Chief Product Officer, Nigel Webb, will discuss how to avoid disjointed, revenue-sapping customer experiences that take place when retail teams are not trained to work seamlessly with new technologies, with a game of Snakes and Ladders.

This event is ideal for retail and CX leaders looking to make improvements to their organisation’s retail customer experience. Is this you? Join us on 9 May at 9am at the Museum of Brands, London.