JULY 22 NEWSLETTER
With new faces on the team, some great new clients, a new website and new classes added to the class roll 2022 has been a great year so far! We’re excited to share all of this news with you in this month’s newsletter!
Claire, Aba & Janelle
Customer Experience Series
This three-part series focuses on freshening up the skills of your retail leaders and head office teams giving them new insight to step into your stores and inspire your teams to create a great customer experience.
Powerful Store Visits
Making great store visits is an essential, practical skill that great retailers have down pat. Our Powerful Store Visits class explores methods to making a visit a great experience and one that improves customer experience.
INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
After being in lockdown for the better part of the last 2 years, shoppers are craving IRL experiences, including in-person shopping in physical bricks and mortar stores.
Before then a lot of the narrative was around brands building their online presence, it's refreshing to see brands who started off as purely an online offering, investing in pop-up and new physical store openings to connect and engage with their established customer base on a whole new level.
We've recently started working with one such brand - The Memo, who are about to open their very first store on High St, Armadale. They've built an incredible online business to date, offering new parents real advice and tried and tested information on the must-haves vs the nice-to-haves to support their journey into parenthood. And they're not the only ones.
A recent report released by Shopify with insight from their customers stated that "32% of brands said they’d be establishing or expanding their use of pop-up and in-person experiences in the next year, while 31% said they planned on establishing or expanding their physical retail footprint."
This is music to our ears here at the School of Retail as we know the power of human connection and what this does for both the customer and team experience and ultimately the positive impact it has on sales results.
Welcoming Jane to the School of Retail team as a class tutor.
Passionate about creating an excellent customer experience you’ll find Jane working on the floor to connect with customers any chance she can get.
Welcoming Leah to the School of Retail team as a class tutor.
Passionate about the learning process, Leah’s goal is to teach and inspire people to take their professional development further and enjoy every minute of it. process.
Retailer of the Month
Camilla and Marc have been working hard to offset their carbon emissions by installing solar panels in all of their standalone stores where possible, producing 180% of the energy consumed in their stores and Head Office.
CRAIG - BRINDLE GROUP
For his exceptional leadership in each class.
BRITTANY - BRINDLE GROUP
For always taking part and contributing in group discussions.
HOT TIP
Knowing that a Mystery Shopper would be visiting a store would typically strike fear and dread in a store team! But in our experience, we've seen the exact opposite where store teams are excited by the opportunity to showcase the incredible customer experiences they can create.
In these businesses, Mystery Shopping is used as a way of recognising their retail stars rather than being viewed as a way of catching unsuspecting team members out for providing a less than perfect experience.
Make Mystery Shopping a positive thing in your business by using it as a tool to reward the great work your store teams do.
Call these great examples out and share them with the rest of the business to encourage other store teams to follow suit. What gets recognised, gets repeated! It's a fantastic way of truly setting your store teams up for success and making what they do all about the most important people in-store - the customer.