Member Article

Stores need customers to act as brand ambassadors

Judith Ramshaw, centre manager at Royal Quays, looks at why store owners should work hard to ensure customers act as their brand ambassadors

As a retailer, wouldn’t it be great if your customers also became your brand ambassadors - promoting your business by word-of-mouth. What great free advertising that would be for, as they say, endorsement is the best form of promotion.

So, how could you make this happen?

While no business - large or small - can control where customers choose to shop, what they can most certainly do is influence the experience a customer faces when entering the store.

According to Peter Coffee, vice president at Salesforce.com ‘The typical customer tells an average of 16 other people about a poor service experience, but only tells nine about the good ones.’

People are quick to shout about bad news and if your reputation is harmed it can be hard to recover, so, it’s crucial that people entering your store are treated with the respect they deserve.

That’s why it’s so important that your frontline staff do your PR for you. With more people shopping for specific items, it’s important that both new and existing customers are treated to an outstanding customer experience.

In return, you get customer loyalty and people who are able to promote your products and service to a wider audience.

On a daily basis, we trust the recommendations of family, colleagues or friends so ensuring that your store is positively promoted is a must for any retailer.

Living in the digital age, brand ambassadors play a huge role on social media platforms. By ‘liking’ a page on Facebook or tweeting about an experience, all this interaction helps to boost and raise your profile and build on the relationship you have developed with your customers.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Royal Quays Outlet Centre .