If you’ve got a business on your hands, you’re probably doing everything possible to attract customers towards you. You’ve got marketing campaigns coming out every year, friendly and talented staff to help any potential customer that walks into your store, properly stocked shelves that allow anyone to take full pick of your inventory, and you’ve got a website with a secure e-commerce section.
And that all works out for you! You’ve got people milling in and out of your store 7 days a week, and plenty of traffic and user retention via your online platform. But all that means you’ve got a few rushes to cope with, and if you don’t do that right, you’re going to seriously harm your prospects.
So here’s a few ways you can help your business to deal with customer rush, especially now the season’s are changing and there’s going to be some festive rushes soon!
Get the Queue Moving
If you’ve got what looks like a hundred or so people within your store at once, you’re going to have to focus most of your efforts on the checkout area, and leave a couple of your staff milling about on the floor to answer queries and use their sales tactics. And because of this, if you get a broken or unmanned till at any point, the queue is going to slow down and your customers are going to get bored.
And when they do, they’re gone! People will either decide to come back later when it’s less busy, or they’ll simply take their business elsewhere. It’s hard to convince someone to stay when you haven’t got anything they’re interested in compared to the wait they’ll have to stand through! So make sure you’ve got some portable card readers to hand out to those extra staff on the shop floor and accept credit cards on phone. Servicing people at the back of the queue as well as at the front is the best way to work through a sales rush.
Make Sure You Have the Staff
They don’t even need to be full-time workers either – if you hire on seasonal staff or a part-timer for a few months only, you’re going to find it a lot easier to manage both the rush and the payroll. You won’t be overspending and you won’t be losing any business either, and that’s the perfect combination for these later months in the year.
Put out a call now for people to start working in November and December, and get the ball rolling early. You don’t want to be rushed to find the staff, and there’ll be plenty of people on the lookout for a part-time job currently. Post online and in your shop window, and watch the offers flow in.
Don’t Forget the Website!
If you’ve got a retail section on your business’ website, you’re going to need to make sure the traffic to and from it during the busy season is never going to crash your servers or slow down checkout. People don’t like it when a company they’re giving their details to over the internet takes any longer than a couple of seconds, and it’s a good way to guarantee they won’t come back. They won’t trust you after all!
So you’re either going to need to boost your server ability by buying more room on the net, or you’re going to have to move people in and out of the online checkout faster than ever before. So why not implement a bag reservation, meaning anything a customer puts into their baskets is only there for a few minutes before it’s released back into the store again. Make sure you’ve got someone manning the live chat feature at all times whilst you’re open during operating hours, as this allows a real employee to assuage any worries a potential customer has about this and anything else.
So, Can You Cope With Customer Rush?
Don’t worry, every business manages to in their own way. And any customers you do lose will end up coming back tenfold with all the new business you bring in over these next few weeks. You’ve got plenty of time to prepare for this rush as well, so get started right now and reap your rewards later on.
There are few moments in a business where customers rush in and out of the stores, so make sure you’re enjoying this moment as much as you feel stressed over it.
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