Whether online shopping or shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, clienteling is what will make your customers return again and again. If you're not making efforts to build strong relationships with your clientele, your competition likely is.
So how do you know if clienteling is a good fit for your retail business?
This article will walk you through three signs that clienteling is right for you so you can begin improving relationships with your clients today.
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What is retail clienteling?
Clienteling, or retail clienteling, is a technique used by sales associates to develop long-term customer relationships. This involves keeping track of your customers, understanding what their preferences are, and then creating personalized content for them in the form of offers, lists, and recommendations.
Clienteling is the future of the retail sector. It promotes many forms of personalized contact with customers without seeming pushy or desperate. According to Adobe, 71% of customers feel frustrated when their shopping experience is impersonal. Remedy this by offering personalized service through clienteling.
Three signs clienteling is right for your retail business
If you've heard the term "clienteling" before, but you're not sure if it's something you want to integrate into your retail business, keep reading. We explore the ways clienteling will give your business a competitive edge and make your retail store an enjoyable place to work and shop at.
Before you know it, you'll have long-term relationships with your loyal customers and prospective customers and your retail sales will be better than ever.
Below are three signs clienteling is an effective, beneficial retail strategy:
1. You have a lot of clients to keep track of
If your business has a lot of regular clients, it must mean you’re providing a consistently positive customer experience. There are ways you can keep this up through effective clienteling. Client relationships are benefitted when they know they're valued and remembered.
Clienteling includes creating customer profiles to track your clients' customer journey. This allows your retail sales associates to easily remember and customize their customer interactions. This improves relationships with customers and keeps your client contacts organized and categorized.
Tracking clients through clienteling means that you can see their purchase history, product preferences, and other customer data. With this data, you can offer them a personal shopping experience. Key customers will know that they are taken care of and that the sales associates know them on a personal level.
As a retail business, each individual customer is important. Clienteling gives you customer insights so that you can turn prospective customers into high-value customers.
2. You have high turnover in your sales team
The retail sector typically has a high turnover rate when it comes to retail store associates, but maybe you've experienced a higher rate than usual this year (you wouldn't be the only one).
Many sales associates find that the best part of their job is interacting with customers, but often, so many personal interactions are interrupted by other, unoptimized parts of the job. This leads to low retention rates in retail employees as they turn to other jobs that emphasize personal connection.
Clienteling highlights the best parts of working a retail job and streamlines the rest. Personal relationships are at the root of clienteling, and giving your employees the chance to make connections with customers all day, every day will improve their happiness and the likelihood that they'll stay with your business for the long haul.
3. You want to increase customer retention
If you're having trouble retaining loyal customers, it might be time to implement clienteling in your customer shopping journey. Customer loyalty is achieved through personalized experiences. Shoppers want to feel like their preferences matter and that they're taken into consideration throughout the experience.
Clienteling is more than customer service. It's about nurturing strong relationships with customers so that you can anticipate their needs and preferences—not only giving answers to their questions and helping them resolve issues.
The question at the heart of clienteling is: how can we improve our experiences for customers? When you think about ways to improve customer satisfaction, your customers will notice and engage in a more genuine way with your retail store and brand. This will improve customer loyalty and have them coming back again and again.
How can I improve my clienteling?
It can be overwhelming knowing what you need to do to improve your retail business but not knowing how to do it. Adobe states that there's a gap between potential retail personalization and what is actually being provided to customers—69% of retailers say that this gap exists because of a lack of retail technology.
This is where Clientbook comes in.
Clientbook is a tool that makes clienteling a breeze with its advanced client tracking and robust customer profiles. Tracking customers is easier than ever before. Customer information is all stored in one organized place. Customer notes, customer wish lists, customer preferences, and customer purchases are all accessible with a click of a button on the Clientbook app.
Access to customer data means you can improve customer engagement by regularly sending personalized offers, wish lists, or product recommendations based on customer preferences. Clientbook nurtures long-term relationships with valuable clients, bringing benefits to businesses over and over again.
Clientbook is the clienteling toolbox that makes the experience satisfying for both employees and clients. This retail technology facilitates meaningful relationships and helps to retain retail employees and customer loyalty.
Conclusion
If you're looking for retail solutions that will optimize your business, build personalized customer experiences, and lead to positive long-term client-employee relationships, Clientbook is the ideal technology.
It's simple to implement into your retail business and will improve experiences in every department. Book a demo today to see how Clientbook will benefit your retail store.