As the country begins to lift social distancing orders and retailers begin to reopen their doors, it’s important to keep in mind that customers, while itching to get out, are still very cautious to do so. They’ll make safety a priority and choose businesses that do the same.
In order to encourage customers to return to in-store shopping at your location, it will soon become necessary to implement contactless solutions. These reduce human-to-human contact and minimize the risk of transferring harmful pathogens, helping to thwart the spread of coronavirus and improving customer safety.
Kiosks and fixed tablets meet this need, especially when there are frequent sanitization efforts in place. Beyond improving safety, these contactless solutions can even increase sales. Here’s how:
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Provide endless aisle capabilities in-store
Now that everyone has been cooped up in their homes for months, they have gotten very used to purchasing items online. They are familiar with endless aisles, which is a customer experience that has been difficult to replicate in-store until kiosks and fixed tablets emerged.
By placing kiosk and fixed tablet technology throughout your store in strategic locations, you can effectively provide customers with the same endless aisle capabilities that they have grown accustomed to. They’ll be able to search your inventory easily and place orders for curbside pickup or delivery on their own, right in your store if you don’t have the sought-after item in stock. You can also use this technology to upsell and cross-sell with automated prompts, further boosting sales.
Elicit customer feedback
With so many brands fighting to win back business, customer satisfaction is more crucial now than ever. The best way to ensure that customers are satisfied is by communicating with them and asking them for their insight on how you can better serve them.
Kiosks provide an easy, comfortable way for customers to share their feedback with you. They can act as a registry that can ask survey questions. Surveys can be included at the end of transactions right at the store, rather than asking customers to go home and fill out a survey online long after their experience has ended.
You can then harness this data and analyze it to help you improve your customer service, and create more effective promotions that increase sales, foster loyalty, and keep customers coming back for more.
Help customers find their way
Even before the lockdown, customers wanted easy, quick transactions. They don’t want to spend a lifetime looking for a handful of items they need. Post-lockdown, customers will be even less likely to browse. They’ll want to reduce the risk of contracting the virus, which means they will be more likely to get in and get out as soon as possible when it comes to visiting retailers.
By strategically placing kiosks throughout your store, you can ensure that customers have a way to quickly look up the location of the items they are searching for, without having to find an employee and risk more face-to-face interactions than necessary. Instead, they can use a kiosk to answer their questions, which gives them more control over their experience and leads to increased customer satisfaction.
Reduce overhead
You can naturally increase your profits when you reduce your expenses. It’s one of the first lessons you learn in retail management. As one of your biggest expenses aside from inventory, it can be easy for your labor costs to get in the way of business growth.
When employees can’t work due to illness, injury, vacation, or other reasons, kiosks can. Kiosks never get sick, never need a vacation, and can work consecutive shifts without ever needing a break. While it’s important to keep your store well-staffed, kiosks can handle many of the responsibilities that employees handle, such as:
- Answering basic customer service questions
- Checking the price on items
- Offering sales and promos
- Helping customers locate products
- Encouraging customers to apply for a credit or loyalty card
- Allowing customers to self-checkout
Your employees are still vital. Kiosks cannot completely replace real, personal human interactions and the value they hold. However, kiosks and other contactless solutions can take over many small day-to-day tasks that take time away from more important responsibilities that your employees could be tending to. By implementing kiosks solutions in your store, you can reallocate your labor to more profitable areas and ensure each customer still receives a positive, and more importantly, a safe experience.
Make customers feel more comfortable in-store
With proper sanitization methods in place, contactless solutions reduce human-to-human contact, thereby reducing the spread of viruses. This isn’t just important in a pandemic. It will remain critical long after. The population as a whole is more focused on health and hygiene, and will be on the lookout for safer alternatives. Customers, initially, will feel more comfortable interacting with contactless kiosk technology than they will with a staff member.
By ensuring that you have kiosks in place for tasks like checkout, inventory lookup, placing orders, etc., you can improve the customer experience and increase sales in your retail business. Customers are already comfortable utilizing kiosk technology and conducting business transactions online. Make them feel more comfortable and safe by implementing contactless solutions in your stores.
Touch Dynamic offers powerful industry-leading kiosk technology that can help you boost profits, and more importantly, keep your customers safe. Contact Touch Dynamic to choose the kiosk solution that is right for your business.
