Establishing a Productive Store Environment

It is important to have a customer focused sales and service strategy, but without the necessary resources to effectively implement it, your strategy is of little value.

Allocating resources should not only focus on implementing your service strategy, they should be focused on any and all of the customer related activities in your store. In other words, every aspect of the store's operations should be appropriately resourced. Customers are reluctant to shop at stores that are not clean or are poorly maintained. The appearance and atmosphere of the store must be consistent with the store's image and the customer's expectations if it is to be successful.

 

A tidy, well maintained store that meets the customers expectations is essential to a productive store environment.

In addition to encouraging customers to shop in your store, ongoing maintenance enables a store to extend the life of its current facilities before they must invest in new ones.

The process of establishing a productive store environment includes:

Each of these issues will be influenced by the policies and procedures of your store.

Planning Resource Levels

Having the appropriate amount of resources to compliment your store's sales and service strategy is essential if you are to meet your customer's requirements.

In addition to merchandise, you must provide your team with any other resources they need to ensure that quality customer service is provided. For example, a new product line may require product knowledge training if your team is to present it to customers effectively. Alternately, if you are selling paint you should provide a colour mixing service and sample paint colour cards for customers to take home and compare to their existing decor.

Resources that could affect your sales and service strategies are the:

• Condition of shelving, its location, height etc.
• Standard of lighting in the store, too bright or dull etc.
• Effectiveness of security systems, do customers feel uncomfortable?
• Condition and appearance of professional staff uniforms
• Efficiency, location and number of cash registers in the store
• Condition and supply of customer trolleys or carry baskets
• Pallet jacks or other internal carriage and storage equipment
• After sale pack and wrap materials used
• Clarity of the Internal communication system
• Number of staff on duty during peak trading times

Appropriate resources should not be seen as just large pieces of equipment. They include items like:

• Pens
• Documents
• Wrapping materials
• Cleaning supplies.