By
Bob Phibbs
Updated October 22, 2024
Retail customer service training aims to create an exceptional customer experience.
So, what goals do you focus on when you teach your employees how to give customers exceptional experiences?
Sometimes, good customer service means something quick, cheap, and easy. Think picking up a quart of milk at a convenience store on the way home or using the Starbucks app to get your drink without waiting.
However, quick and easy is not the way to profitability for most stores looking to increase retail sales.
It gets even worse if you add in cheap when discussing best practices for retail customer service.
What is exceptional customer service?
Exceptional customer service makes the shopper feel like the most important person in the world. Even if it’s only for a few seconds, retail associates can create this feeling by going out of their way to make customers feel appreciated and happy to spend money in your store.
To consistently achieve this level of customer service, it has to be an established core value. Just like any organization, you have to know what your store stands for and what it doesn’t.
But you can’t just post a mission statement on your website or put up compelling signage and call it a day.
A brick-and-mortar retailer looking to create exceptional shopping experiences and lasting customer relationships has to live out that message on the sales floor.
"You have to believe, show, and deliver it."
That’s why your retail customer service training has to include more than product knowledge and learning the point of sale system.
Your retail employees need to know how to create a customer’s happiness, which is the most important thing in the world for those few minutes they are in your store.
It’s time to empower your staff to build -- and consistently practice -- these essential customer service skills.
Retail customer service skills and best practices
Let's begin by discussing the skills your retail customer service training needs to cover. These areas to build up in your team will impact your store’s profitability the most.
These skills will become second nature on the sales floor when learned and practiced. Developing them into your store’s best practices will increase retail sales on a first visit and build customer loyalty and profitability far into the future.
1. Greeting customers
Does your training program cover how to greet customers in a retail store? If not, you miss out on sales before shoppers even look at anything on your shelves.
It’s not unusual to walk into a retail store and see employees chatting in a group, on their phones, or too busy with merchandise to look up and say hello. It happens daily in all retail, from luxury boutiques to drug stores.
This behavior makes customers more likely to leave than seek out a salesperson, interrupt them, and ask for help.
Conversely, we’ve all experienced that fake smile and “let me know if you need help” before seeing the salesperson talking to you. This approach is lacking in both timing and sincerity.
Many people find approaching strangers intimidating, but some concrete practices make it less daunting. With training and practice, it starts to feel natural.
2. Listening and empathizing
Selling relies heavily on communication skills, which are sadly lacking in many retail stores.
It’s one thing to rattle off current discounts and suggest some popular items for a shopper. It’s entirely different from having a conversation, listening to customers enough to learn key information to help you personalize the interaction and close the sale.
Along with listening, your retail staff needs to understand what it means to empathize with customers. While engaging with a customer, they need to practice truly putting themselves in that customer’s shoes to understand their priorities, concerns, and desires.
While empathy is an innate trait, we can enhance and practice the skill of noticing what customers are thinking and feeling.
This skill becomes crucial because many retail employees are much younger than the customer base they serve.
While a 20-something customer service rep might assume price is the most important factor in a purchase, their boomer customer might be more concerned about craftsmanship, longevity, or even status.
You can only know by listening.
3. Engaging with customers
Retail customer service people are very familiar with the phrase: “No thanks, I’m just looking.” That happens because the associate wasn’t trained to avoid that answer to a question in the first place.
Do not let rejection be an excuse to stop trying to help customers!
Instead, train your staff to put the shopper at ease in the store without being invasive or obnoxious. Your training program needs to cover how to engage with customers who are just looking, turning them into customers who are receptive, engaged, and likely to make a purchase.
Skills like timing, using merchandise as a prop, and perfecting your body language can be learned and practiced to achieve great results.
4. Handling complaints
Does your training cover resolving customer complaints, beyond just calling the manager?
Excellent customer service means the customer feels listened to, understood, and validated in their concerns.
Ensure your training includes a process for handling complaints that’s easy to follow and leaves customers satisfied—or you will pay the price in negative reviews and complaints on social media.
5. Understanding features vs. benefits
An often overlooked aspect of training is how to talk about products.
Of course, staff should learn key features of your products, like materials, sizing, functionality, or anything customers need to know. But training people to be product encyclopedias will not help your sales.
An employee will never know as much as the customer who started their search online for a single product.
Customers would have purchased it online if all they needed was information. But they go to a store because they buy based on what a product will do for them—the benefits.
Your product's unique features can offer unique benefits, and it’s up to you to connect the two based on a conversation.
Teach your retail employees the language of features and benefits. Help them understand and practice the concept in any training program you implement.
6. Upselling and Add-ons
One of the most costly customer service mistakes I see in retail is only showing customers what they asked for. This is becoming increasingly common in the age of online shopping, where customers may already know a lot about your products and just come in to grab them in person.
When a customer walks in to make a specific purchase, a poorly trained employee either directs them to the product or tells them they don’t have it. This means the bare minimum sale, or no sale, will occur.
But what are some alternative examples of retail customer service?
An employee trained in exceptional customer service will help this shopper discover another relevant product, a premium model, or an additional item to complement their purchase.
7. Closing a sale
Closing sales is an art and science, but with a quality training program, you can provide your retail staff with the tools to improve this essential skill drastically.
In retail, we are often tempted to focus on the volume, rather than quality, of sales. We must balance spending enough time with each customer and helping enough customers.
It’s why the best retailers stop thinking of customer interactions as transactions and instead focus on building relationships.
Train your staff with a step-by-step process to close retail sales quickly, but in a way that feels organic and unhurried to shoppers.
Customer service training ideas
Now that you know what it takes to provide memorable and profitable customer service, how do you train your retail employees to do it?
Standing out from the competition starts from the very core of your business.
When you invest the time, effort, and money in people who embody the high standards of customer service you want in your store, you’ll see increased sales and profits.
1. Model exceptional customer service
The best thing you can do as a retail store owner or manager is to lead by example. When a customer walks in, do you keep doing what you were doing, or do you greet them, engage them, and make them feel welcome?
You may be in the store for other reasons, preferring to sit back and let your staff care for customers. But all the training in the world will not sink in if you show employees that it’s OK NOT to practice exceptional customer service when you’re busy or only supervising.
By seeing you in action and modeling what you teach, your employees will learn faster and more effectively.
2. Coach your staff through the sales process
One of the skills every manager should have in their training arsenal is how to coach. Learning some coaching skills and incorporating coaching conversations into your training is necessary.
In retail training, this means spending a lot of time with your employees, observing what happens in your store, and talking through interactions after they occur. You could think of them as customer service exercises.
It is part of holding them accountable for using what you teach them. You can tell your child to clean their room, but unless you check up on them, they won’t do it and will learn it doesn’t matter to you.
The aim of coaching is not to critique employees, lecture them, or even tell them what to do -- it’s to help them practice and take ownership of improving their skills. Focus on asking questions to discover where your employees feel stuck and what they think would help them improve.
3. Invest in a retail customer service training program
Invest in a proven course if you want a structured training system that covers everything your retail employees need to make your store successful.
It is difficult enough to run a retail business and find the time to train your staff well. Formalizing and implementing your own training program requires hours of extra time you probably don’t have.
SalesRx teaches sales and customer service skills in bite-sized lessons your employees can watch each week and includes support for managers to implement the program and practice the skills on the floor daily.
4. Hire a trainer
Most retail owners don’t have enough time to spend with new employees, and on-the-job training isn’t enough to effectively teach and reinforce the skills your team needs.
Depending on the size of your operations, consider bringing in a trainer to work one-on-one with new hires and work with long-term employees to improve their sales techniques.
Of course, most operations are not at the level of needing a full-time trainer, and that is where a retail consultant can help. You might need help implementing a training program virtually or someone to train you how to lead and manage your team more effectively.
This is a higher-priced investment, but considering how important public-facing staff is to every sale in a brick-and-mortar business, you can’t afford to neglect training.
5. Roleplay customer interactions
Mock sessions are an excellent way to solidify the concepts and practice the skills your employees learn in their training. While it may feel silly or unnatural initially, getting the first attempts at a new skill out of the way in a practice setting is better than with customers.
The key is not just saying, "I'm the customer, and you're the salesperson. Go!" It has to be a short practice and only used to ensure that your associate can complete one aspect of about 35 steps.
Spend extra time with employees working on interactions like getting past objections, suggestive selling, and using the language of features and benefits when talking about products. You can also role-play handling customer complaints, greeting customers, and closing the sale.
Let's face it: Since the pandemic, you need to role-play how to diffuse customer blowups before they occur.
Acting out customer interactions can help you identify opportunities for improvement and uncover areas where your employees get stuck.
6. Build the right team
Training is costly -- when done incorrectly, it costs you time, effort, and financial investment.
One of store owners' biggest frustrations is investing weeks and months in training someone, only to have that person continue their bad habits, unwilling to try new techniques or work on self-improvement.
Don’t waste time training the untrainable.
If you want professional staff who will grow with your store, focus resources on good people who want to learn and train them well.
7. Encourage laughter and fun during training
Retail customer service training doesn’t have to be serious or boring, and it shouldn’t be.
If you want customers to enjoy being in your store, make it an enjoyable place to be. Foster an environment where your staff can be themselves and let their personalities shine.
While you want them to be professional and follow the processes you’re training them on, don’t train employees like robots reading a script at every step of an interaction. Enjoy getting to know them through the training process, joke around (appropriately), and have fun!
Laughter and fun create a relaxed environment, leading to improved job satisfaction and performance in your staff. This, in turn, creates a better customer atmosphere and more sales for your store.
Ready to level up your retail customer service training?
A lot of retailers give lip service to customer service.
- They might print cards with a mission statement about customers' importance and then demand their employees carry them.
- They might put a list of principles on their shopping bags.
- They might teach every employee to call shoppers guests.
But what do those actions accomplish?
"You can paint a house, but everything falls apart if the foundation crumbles."
To create an exceptional customer experience, retailers must substantively change how their retail stores operate, which starts with investing in exceptional customer service training.
The World Retail Forum recognized SalesRX for its innovative approach to helping thousands of retailers like you.
