Make your customers feel welcome....
... and pretty!
Last week, we looked at how knowing your customers’ aspirations and how tapping into them will help you to attract customers.
Just as important as being the place where people want to be, however, is being the place where they want to stay – that is to say a place where they feel comfortable. The trick is to make your customers feel that by walking through the door of your business, they themselves have become the sort of person who feels at home in that environment.
We are all familiar with the chic boutique that looks like the sort of place where customers not dressed adequately might be turned away. This might be part of a business strategy – smart restaurants may operate a dress code for the benefit of other diners – but if this is simply an unintended by-product of design decisions you are taking, then you need to ask yourself whether you are scaring off the very customers you are trying to attract.
Here are some key design aspects you might want to consider:
Make sure your customers feel welcome:
How is the threshold to your shop or restaurant designed? Do customers have to struggle with unwieldy doors to even come in? This might be a particular issue for people with reduced mobility, but applies equally to customers pushing prams or carrying heavy shopping bags. If access is an issue, it may soon impact on your staffing, as you might need to make sure that a member of staff is on hand to help people gain access. This leads on to questions around your internal layout – is there a reception desk or till near the door that people can turn to if they feel lost? Or are you enticing your customers deeper into your shop with product displays?
Make your customers feel pretty:
The most obvious example of this is, of course the changing room mirror. A casual internet search on this topic reveals not only countless blogs and message boards discussing how awful some changing rooms make you look – there is even a postgraduate thesis on the subject of the effect of lighting in changing rooms on the purchasing behaviour of customers. Predictably, looking good in the mirror while trying on a piece of clothing may sway customers to buy. What is more surprising is how many shops get this fundamental bit of design wrong! Of course this does not stop at the lighting or the choice of mirrors. It also means changing room doors that close properly, so that you can relax in the knowledge that a casual passer-by is not going to catch a limps of you struggling into a dress. It means providing enough hooks and hanger so you don’t have to leave your bag and your coat on a dirty floor while you are getting changed. It means a stool to sit on while you are taking off your shoes – and ideally another one for your toddler to sit on while they are waiting. All of these will help make your customers feel at ease and attractive and will help them be in the right frame of mind to make a purchase. A customer who has made the decision to trying on a garment is half way to buying it – but in the wrong surroundings, they will just walk away.
Restaurants and cafes are no different – if your lighting makes customers look washed out and tired, they are unlikely to linger or choose you as a venue for a date or meeting.
Make your customers feel comfortable:
The same goes of course for more basic creature comforts. If your customers are too cold or too warm, they will subconsciously decide to move on instead of ordering another cup of coffee or dessert. Incidentally, they are also much less likely to want to get undressed in your changing rooms – and this goes both for temperatures that are too high and too low.
All of these things are very much common sense – with careful planning, they are easy to get right in the design stages of a project. But if you get them wrong, no amount of nice fittings and fancy wallpaper will make people spend enough time with you for you to convince them that they want what you are hoping to sell. The most important lesson to learn is to put yourself in the situation of someone visiting your business. Spend more time looking at your shop from the entrance door than from behind your till. And make sure that the chairs in your café are comfortable to sit in, even if you are so rushed of your feet you only ever perch on them for five minutes.