How to Make Your Merchandisers Better Serve Your Customers

Customer service is especially important for retail companies, which rely on mobile workforce. Offering customers the highest quality of service is a simple way to stand out of your competitors. Good service provides customer satisfaction and loyalty, while poor service impacts company’s bottom line.

Merchandisers are people, who communicate with your customers every day, performing regular retail visits to make sure that your products are correctly displayed on shelves and also efficiently promoted and always in stock. Therefore, it’s critically important for your business to make this communication productive and pleasant for customers.

Poor customer service is often caused by the fact that merchandisers have to spend most of their time on traveling between retail locations and filling out paper forms, having a little time and enthusiasm to communicate with customers. That’s why one of the simplest way to meet customers’ requirements and expectations is to implement innovative techniques of customer service among merchandisers that enhance the speed and quality of service and make customers feel that their needs are the top priority for your company.

The up-to-date merchandising software solutions provide merchandisers with the tools that simplify data collection at points of sale, allowing serving customers more effectively. With merchandising software you will be able to improve your merchandising team’s bottom-line by reducing their time traveling to appointments, planning routes, accessing information and automating reporting, so they do not have to visit the office to get the tasks and report back and can spend more time interacting with customers.

Below you’ll find some examples of how merchandising software can improve customer service. When your merchandisers have all necessary tools to perform tasks at points of sale on their mobile devices, they are able to:

1. Reduce service time while minimizing errors. Mobile data collection forms, fast numeric keypad, instant photo reports and barcode scanning save a lot of time, allowing merchandisers to serve customers more quickly whole maintaining high quality of service. Merchandising software also helps to minimize data-entry mistakes and provides instant reporting opportunities for merchandisers. Accordingly, instead of doing a lot of paperwork and visiting the office to get the tasks and report back, your merchandisers spend maximum of their time interacting with customers and can focus on their requirements to provide exceptional customer service.
2. Respond ASAP to customers’ requests. Merchandising software provides real-time data workflow along with instant notifications on the activity in the field, which allow reacting to customers’ requests and requirements in real time. All the information, collected by merchandisers at retail locations, including numbers, notes, customer survey data, photo-reports, electronic signatures, is instantly transferred to corporate database and is available to managers. Real-time reporting empowers managers and supervisors to identify situations that require their attention and take urgent measures to resolve them.
3. Demonstrate concern. Merchandising software provides your merchandisers with 24/7 mobile access to all customers’ information, including contacts, history of visits, past orders and returns, survey and retail audit data, and managers’ notes, so they can better understand the whole situation at each point of sale. When merchandisers are empowered with mobile access to corporate data, they are always able to be specific and show the customers that they care.

Adopting a merchandising software solution allows companies to improve customer service by reducing service time and increasing the quality of service, responding quickly to customers’ requirements and servicing each customer’s specific needs. To learn more about how to improve your merchandising performance, or get free access to merchandising software, visit www.visitbasis.com.