Retail is one of the most honest tests of customer experience. Customers walk in, compare, leave and come back (or don’t) in plain sight. The retailers that keep winning over decades tend to share a handful of habits, and very few of those habits depend on having a shop floor.
Look at Harry Rosen, Uniqlo, Lululemon and, closer to home, Good Neighbour. A Toronto menswear house, a Japanese basics giant, a Vancouver athletic brand and a Leslieville lifestyle store sell to different people at very different prices. Underneath, they share a set of habits that any business with customers and staff can use.
1. Remember the person, not the transaction
For more than 50 years, Harry Rosen’s personal advisors have prepared for client appointments in advance, pulling together head-to-toe outfits based on what they knew about each client. When the company built its digital tools, it modelled its customer records on the recipe-card system advisors had always used, and set out to give the same personal service online as in its stores.
The lesson isn’t the technology. It’s that knowledge about a customer lives in a shared system, not in one person’s head. Before a customer calls you, what does your team already know about them? And can everyone who needs that knowledge actually see it?
2. Treat your front line as experts
Lululemon calls its store staff educators. The company has explained that their job is to help guests understand how the product supports their goals, rather than simply to sell. Its own description of the role centres on authentic connection and technical product knowledge.
Job titles and job design tell staff what you value. Train people on scripts and upsell targets, and that is what customers will feel. Train them on knowledge and judgment, and customers feel helped.
3. Make the basics effortless
Uniqlo stores are rarely described as exciting. They are described as easy: clean layouts, broad size ranges and categories that are simple to navigate. Finding your size in a plain T-shirt should take seconds, and it does.
Most experience problems aren’t a shortage of delight. They are friction in routine moments: booking, paying, getting an answer. List the five things customers do most often with you and time each one. Fix the slowest before you invent anything new.
4. Listen at scale, and include your staff
Uniqlo’s parent company, Fast Retailing, reported collecting about 27 million opinions in 2020. More of them came from store staff (16 million) than from customers (11 million), and the same report credits customer opinions with more than 50 new or improved products in a single year. The company also moved its Customer Center into its Tokyo headquarters so feedback reaches management directly.
Two things stand out. Employee observations count as data, not anecdotes. And feedback travels to the people who can change things. Plenty of businesses collect comments. The ones that improve route them to someone with the authority, and the habit, to act.
5. Give people judgment, not just rules
Nordstrom became famous for an employee handbook that was a single card reading “Use good judgment in all situations,” as a company spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider. It sits alongside the usual formal policies, but the message is clear: staff are trusted to solve the problem in front of them.
You don’t need to throw out your policies. Decide which problems a frontline employee can fix on the spot, and up to what value, without asking a manager. Then tell them, and back them when they use it.
6. Give people a reason to return that isn’t a discount
Lululemon describes its stores as community hubs and has hosted yoga classes and events in them for years, connecting guests with local partners. Harry Rosen frames its CLUB HARRY loyalty programme as part of a more personal client experience, not just a points scheme.
You don’t need a global footprint to do this. Good Neighbour opened in Leslieville in 2014 after its owner, noticed the neighbourhood had few shops for young families. It now runs several Toronto stores, each with its own house candle; the Summerhill one is designed to smell like the store itself. Small, specific touches like these are what make a shop feel like it belongs to its street.
Belonging costs less than discounting and lasts longer. A workshop, an evening for regulars, a genuinely useful newsletter or simply being remembered can all do the job.
The six criteria, as a checklist
Score your own business from 1 to 5 on each question:
Do we remember customers across visits, channels and team members?
Are our frontline people trained, and titled, as experts?
Are our five most common customer tasks fast and consistent?
Do we collect feedback from customers and staff, and does it reach someone who acts on it?
Can our team fix common problems without asking permission?
Do regulars have a reason to come back beyond price?
One system, not two
Every one of these criteria sits on both sides of the counter. Remembering customers depends on staff having good tools. Empowerment depends on trust and training. Listening only works if employees feel safe passing on what they hear. That is why your customers can feel how your people are treated, and why we treat CX and EX as one system.
Want to know where your business scores? Book a discovery call. We’ll start with the moments that matter most to your customers and your people.
Want to talk this through for your business?
Most engagements start with a short discovery call. No pitch deck, just a clear next step.