New Retail: Boutique salesforce

From sellers to Hospitality masters

Imagine entering a boutique with innovative digital tools and unique and entertaining experiences but poor service by the sales team. The overall shopping experience would be dissatisfying in the end, no matter the boutique environment. Sales service has always been key to offering a great customer experience. Even with the new and emerging trends discussed in the previous articles, how sales employees interact with the customer determines the overall satisfaction. With the shift in generational needs, the skills needed by the sales force have changed and increased in complexity.

With the emerging trends of retailtainment and phygital, the retail experience goes beyond just buying products. The same holds for the corporate point of view as retail goes beyond just selling products. Today’s sales force needs to cope with more complex customer journeys, more digital-savvy and highly knowledgeable customers, and higher service expectations.

Consequentially, the service provided in retail, especially luxury retail, equals more and more than that of a 5-star hotel. Luxury customers seek attention and excellence from the entrance to the exit of a boutique. For this, salespeople need emotional intelligence and profound brand knowledge to deal with sophisticated and knowledgeable customers, focus more on storytelling and sharing the brand values to create unique experiences and be digitally upskilled to use the highly connected store environment.

What are the most crucial skills for salespeople today?  

Sales employees should maintain outstanding service for all customer profiles regardless of the stage customers are at in the customer journey. ROPO (research online, purchase offline), BOPUS (buy online, pick up in-store), showrooming (research in-store, purchase online) – with the many hybrid purchasing behaviors, the sales team must be able to assess digital customer profiles to identify the different types of customers entering the boutique and adapt their speech accordingly.

Additional complexity arises as clients become experts of their preferred brands, which reshapes the sales team’s role. Whether loyal or not, customers have easy access to all types of information about the brand and its products. Today’s full transparency allows clients to be aware of every novelty or promotion. The sales employees should be well trained to answer all kinds of questions regarding the products, prices and the brand’s history to remain the expert in the exchange with the customer.

Likewise, the sales team needs to master the art of conversation. In addition to exchanging brand knowledge, luxury customers primarily want to talk about themselves. As a rule of thumb, a successful discussion is “80:20,” which means that 80% of the conversation should be built around the client, with only 20% about the brand’s history. The aim is to help the staff structure their talks for customer-centricity, making customers feel understood and valued instead of giving them the feeling of being talked into something. By wisely balancing the content of the conversation and leveraging the staff’s power of storytelling and empathy, a strong relationship can be built.

Ergo, the list of skills needed to address the growing customer expectations is long and creates a considerable gap towards the actual skill set of the sales force. Although many luxury retail brands already offer a seamless service, the need for service excellence and the focus on new trends demands an upskilling of the staff about soft skills (emotional intelligence, conversational structure) and hard skills (digital capacities, brand and product knowledge).
  

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As a result, the skillset of the salespeople needs to be fully reassessed. For new hires, luxury retailers should consider talents with hospitality backgrounds as they already bring a range of necessary skills to the table. For the existing sales team, retailers need to conduct a skills assessment to identify the gaps and upskill the team accordingly while making them feel part of the journey. Only a highly trained and happy sales team will believe in a brand’s culture. Galvanizing the employees around the business and nurturing their goodwill will majorly contribute to the brand.

Because in the end, customer experience merely mirrors the brand’s employee experience.