Nowadays, customers are not only those who access a website or application and buy a product but also those who are part of companies that sell the final product at Retail. That is, factories, and distributors, among others. Therefore, companies engaged in this type of B2B (Business to Business) must improve their service through analysis and implementation of User Experience (UX).
Index of the blog:
First, we must know the meaning of a retail company or a company dedicated to Retail.
What is a retail company?
Throughout the world, there are millions of companies that sell products, software, and even sell their services, for those who sell products in Retail are called retail companies, which sell many products and have a stock with large quantities. The purpose of these companies is to acquire many customers who buy in small amounts either by physical means such as factories that do it primarily by visits to customers or vice versa and also companies that make sales by digital means such as Amazon.
User Experience is conceived as a purely digital tool but must also implement in Retail.
User Experience in Retail
Companies usually have a lot of purchases during Christmas, Mother's Day, and Black Friday, but for a company to survive, it must have constant sales, so what should the company do to make this happen? The answer is critical, analyze the user experience to generate strategies that lead to sales, that the customer acquires the product and is happy with it.
Can analyze the UX from two points of view, which has a digital medium such as an application or website for customers to make purchases and those who do not have a digital medium and the purchase is made by call or face-to-face. Therefore, let's establish how an analysis of two companies would work to provide the two examples. For this, we must consider the entire user experience from start to finish, their satisfaction with the service and product, the steps they had to take to make the purchase, and whether they found it easy or complicated.
The first example is a company that sells clothing, such as Ekono, and the second is in the food production industry as Sardimar. This food production company does not have a website to make sales, and the first has both means of purchase both physically and on the website.
If you want to know some tips for the Retail Industry, I advise you to read the following blog: 10 tips for an eCommerce in the retail industry.
Retail Company with website
For Ekono, we analyze the UX on the web platform and the customer's purchase process in the physical store.
In the physical store, the customer enters the store, sees the products with price tags, takes effect, can go to the dressing room, and measure the garment (usually there is a limit of 10 garments or even less). This decision-making stage for the person as they decide which pieces to purchase and which not to purchase. After this, the customer goes to the cashier to pay and leaves what they are not going to buy in the dressing room.
When the customer is at the cash register, the worker scans the garments' code and asks for the points card. The customer gives it to them if they have it, and if not, they proceed to pay. In this case, the system is very efficient. Sometimes some collaborators assist customers and sometimes not because there are not available. This can be a UX improvement since you can establish a means where customers choose if they want to be assisted or not. You can also instruct the collaborators to ask the customer what they need and how they want to be administered.
The difference in efficiency mentioned above is when a purchase is made online and is to be withdrawn to the store, but we will see that point later.
On the website, it is analyzed from the time the user types in the address, registers or logs in, and proceeds with the purchase. Selecting a product leads to another page where the product's qualities are described, the object's colors are also given, and the quantity purchased. Proceed to add to cart. Once the items are counted to the cart, they are bought, and the user decides where to pick them up or if it arrives at home at an additional cost.
Some of the difficulties as a user that we can find are little contrast with the font and background, thin font for the names of the items, no reviews or details of the products, and the description is vague, to mention some secondary characteristics. When picking up the product in the store, the user must go to the cash register, often wait in line, give his ID card and wait, which can take up to 30 minutes. Analyze the process of searching for a product in the system, and it must indicate the sector in which it is in the warehouse. What could be said that is failing is the warehouse arrangement where the packages of people who bought online are in broad strokes.
Retail Company without Website
In the case of Sardimar, it does not have a website for customers to make their purchases; it is a factory that distributes tuna to businesses such as supermarkets or grocery stores. The manufacturing process is best analyzed by people specialized in industrial production. But the purchasing process is as follows:
The UX can be analyzed, in this case, as all the steps that the buyer must do to have the product in its establishment, what can be made more agile, what can be improved, or if an action can be removed so that the customer obtains a high level of satisfaction? The company can also be seen as a customer since it uses software to manage the process of purchase orders, product dispatch, inventory, etc. Another company provides this action and should analyze the UX digitally.
The UX analysis process in a company is long, and it must be adapted to each type of business, thoroughly evaluated, tested, and changed until it is suitable to implement. These were examples seen superficially, but much more can be done so that a company can attract more customers, improve sales flow, and obtain higher profits.