In almost every business, customer experience is crucial for success and growth. But when it comes to fashion businesses, customer experience should be on another level. The quality of customer service is tied to customer satisfaction, which is crucial for the survival of a fashion business.
Satisfied customers are bound to return to your online and brick-and-mortar store. And customers who come back become loyal customers who bring in more customers and more revenue. So, it’s all tied together.
You need to enhance your customer experience to have a successful fashion business. So, let’s start our little guide on how to improve customer experience. We’ll start by defining what customer experience is.
What is customer service?
Customer experience can be defined as customers’ perception of a business, store, or company. Based on their interaction with a specific business, customers form opinions and gather feelings regarding that business. Basically, your brand and your products/services shape customers’ experience.
As you know, your branding efforts can influence customers’ feelings and opinions quite a bit. Branding implies the way your fashion business looks and sounds. So, you want to always be professional, consistent, clean, and organised as a fashion brand.
However, your brand efforts without high-quality products/services don’t mean much. The quality of your products/services goes hand in hand with the brand, so you must ensure that both are in great shape.
Why is customer service important?
As mentioned, having an outstanding customer experience is a question of business success. In today’s business world, you don’t have the option of not having great customer service. Customer experience is crucial.
Customers who are satisfied with your services will likely return and recommend your business to others. And this is precisely what you need – customer loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing because there is nothing better than word-of-mouth marketing.
Great customer experience is a perfect way to create loyal, lifelong customers who keep returning and spending money in your store.
Implementing effective customer service can help you boost your sales. In addition to being quick and handling issues accordingly and successfully, you can create personalised loyalty programs, discounts, sales and promotions, and so on, to entice customers to buy from you.
This is why having effective customer service is essential. Now let’s see how you can improve your customer service.
How to improve customer service?
For online stores:
Improve your branding efforts
Branding can influence customers’ feelings and opinions about your fashion business. So, improving and investing in your brand should be first on the list of tips.
Ensure your logo, colours, and imagery are simple, cohesive, timeless, and scalable. But to improve your branding, you should concentrate not only on the look but also the voice.
How you sound when you communicate with your customers matters a lot. So, improve your brand voice by reviewing your values, goals, and mission, researching and identifying a target audience, creating buyer personas, and so on.
Optimise customer s
To optimise customer experience, you’ll need to gather and analyse customer data. By collecting customer information, you can create buyer personas to help you create more personalised customer service.
Optimising customer experience also implies improving your marketing strategy. So, work on improving your email campaign, social media campaigns, targeted ads, and so on.
Use tech to improve customer experience
If you want to go further and allow your customers to be autonomous when interacting with your brand, consider using technology. You can implement automated customer service chatbots, and dynamic FAQs, you can also allow customers to customise and design their garments with Unmade software and other similar tech improvements.
This will significantly improve customer service, reduce management issues, and allow customers to create clothing.
Ask customers their opinions
Refrain from assuming to know what your customers want. This is a huge mistake many businesses make. Instead, don’t be afraid to ask them their opinions.
Ask them their opinions about your products/services, what they would change, what they would like to see more of, and so on. Ask them through surveys, comment sections, social media, or wherever you see fit. Also, read reviews on forums such as Reddit; you’d be surprised what you can find there.
For brick-and-mortar stores:
Improve customer service
In-store customer service is everything. It will build an excellent reputation and set you apart from your competitors.
It’s the power of customer service that can make every customer feel special in your store, put a smile on their face, and help them decide to return.
So, ensure that in-store customer service is high-quality and your customers will be satisfied.
Incorporate omnichannel strategy
The omnichannel strategy refers to a sales and marketing approach that unites customer experience on all fronts – brick and mortar, web, and mobile customer experience.
This means that you should provide omnichannel services to your customers. This sort of service allows customers to check information on products in-store, your phone number, address, or anything similar.
You wouldn’t believe how much this strategy can improve the overall shopping experience for all your customers.
Improve store appearance
Unlike your online store, where you have to design a responsive, user-friendly website, you have to take care of appearance in your brick-and-mortar store. Appearance is an essential element that can significantly affect the customer experience.
Investing some money to improve the appearance of your store wouldn’t be bad, but if you can’t do that at the moment, at least make sure that the store is clean, organised and well-lit. In addition to that, make sure that clothing is displayed nicely on mannequins in a way that would attract customers’ attention.
There are numerous tips on decorating and organising your brick-and-mortar fashion store, so don’t be afraid to search the internet!
There’s no doubt about how important customer experience is in this day and age. Practical customer experience can set you apart from the competition, it can help you build loyalty and boost your sales, among other things. So, now that you have all the tips, you can start improving your customer experience.
