Watch any team in the week before a grand final and notice what they don’t do. They don’t bring in a new game plan, they don’t rebuild anything, the big work was done in pre-season. Finals week is about the details, the ones that only matter once the pressure is on, and cost the most to get wrong when it is.
Retail is about to start its own finals series. Black Friday on 27 November, the run into Christmas, then Boxing Day and the January sales. For about ten weeks, more people will come across your store for the first time than at any other point in the year. Gift buyers. People with a voucher to spend. People who were sent by someone else. People with no loyalty to anyone yet.
Most of them will make up their mind about you before they reach the door.
The game starts before kick-off
A first-time customer has nothing to go on but what they can find. They search, they look at your photos, they skim your reviews, they check you are open, and they work out whether you are worth the trip. None of that happens in front of you. You only ever see the ones who made it.
The good news is that almost everything they look at is fixed once, at no cost, and then left alone. The bad news is that it only helps if it is fixed before they look.
Six things to fix before the rush
1. Your trading hours, everywhere: Google, your website, Facebook and the sign on the door, all saying the same thing, including extended trading, public holidays and any closures. The customer who arrives to a locked door on the Thursday night you said you would be open does not come back in January.
2. Your photos: Would a stranger recognise your store from your Google listing? If the shopfront has been repainted, the layout has changed, or the first photo is a window display from two Christmases ago, replace them. A phone on a quiet morning is enough.
3. Your last five reviews: Read them the way a new customer would, as a set, not one at a time. Reply to any that are still waiting, the good ones included. A reply tells the next reader someone is paying attention.
4. Your online stock and your deadlines: If your website says something is in stock, it needs to be on the shelf. Be open and honest about shipping time frames and publish your last order date for pre-Christmas delivery, before anyone has to ask.
5. Your entrance: Walk up to your store the way a first-timer would, from the car park or the far end of the arcade. Can you tell what you sell from ten metres away? Is it obvious the door is open? How easy is it for someone to find you?
6. Your team, casuals included, decide now what they can sort out without finding you: an exchange without a receipt, an item that is not on the shelf, a customer who wants it gift-wrapped when the wrap has run out. Decide it in October, not at 2pm on the Saturday before Christmas.
Why October, not November
Nobody fixes their structure in finals week, because there is no time to. By the end of November you will be too busy to notice any of this, let alone change it, and every week it sits there is a week of people who searched, did not like what they found, and never told you.
Fix it now and it works for you all the way through to the January sales, without you having to think about it again.
Want to see it done?
On Tuesday 6 October at 4pm AEDT (3pm Qld), Business Life Support is running Before They Walk In, a free 45-minute online masterclass for retail owners. Two real stores compared side by side, one doing it well and one with work to do, and a list of things you can fix yourself that week, most of them free. Register for the free masterclass.
For owners who want the whole framework, Customer Experience for Retail Owners runs live online on Monday 26 October and Monday 2 November, 4pm to 6:30pm, so you go into the busy season knowing where the gaps are. Check out the retail course.