You’ve got a shop to run, and you’ve got a shop floor to keep clean and tidy, and shelves to keep perfectly stocked and stacked. Once you’ve got all those tasks squared away, you can relax a bit, and get back to extraneous admin tasks back in the office or behind the counter.
But once your busiest business period hits, usually around lunchtime or the early afternoon, you pop your head out of the back room and see the shop is bustling, and there’s a very long queue forming. But you’ve only got one till working, and only a couple of other employees on shift today. What do you do? Well, let’s think about how you can speed your customer service up below.
Change Your Staff Schedule
Your staff are on a schedule for work, and you’re always going to need a schedule to make sure people are coming in to do a day’s tasks. But the floorplan you’ve got running at the moment might not be quite so effective if you’re seeing high traffic customer times day in and day out and not adjusting to them.
Get some staff to start later on in the day. You and another manager can come in in the morning, to make sure the business is all ready to go and any early customers are served, but by lunchtime, you should have two or three more people clocking in. This helps to cut down on the amount of boredom your staff might be feeling by the third or fourth hour of their empty shift, and it means there’s plenty of free time left in schedule for ideas and activities like staff training.
Go Portable with Your Checkout
Your checkout area is at the back of the shop, clearly signposted, with someone manning the tills at all times. And that’s worked for you so far; any and all customers come to the desk with their products or their complaints, and you can quickly and easily sort the person out and send them on their way. Everyone leaves with some kind of smile on their face.
Well, when you’ve got a queue building, the checkout desk won’t seem so effective anymore. The longer a person has to wait to be rung up, the worse of a mood they’re going to be in, and that can have some long term effects on the review they leave your store.
So to offset the damage a string of bored and impatient customers can do to your reputation, get yourself some terminals, so your staff can go down the queue with a portable card machine in hand. This will make sure everyone waiting around will be seen in very good time, and that one investment will work double time for you.
You’ve got a shop, and sometimes there’s going to be a queue. Make sure it’s always moving with some methods like these on hand. You never know when a customer will lose their limited patience with you.