When it comes to the customer experience, make sure you obsess about non-buyers also

When it comes to optimizing their store experiences, retailers obsess about how buyers feel and rightfully so. Keeping buyers happy enough that they return and make subsequent purchases is the only way to succeed in the retail environment, and any retailer that does not devote a substantial amount of resources to measuring, monitoring, and improving the purchasing experience risks putting its entire operation in jeopardy. But for every moment that retailers spend obsessing about the thoughts, perceptions, and future proclivities of actual purchasers, they should be spending another moment also obsessing about how to convert shoppers, browsers, or bargain hunters into buyers.

Buyers and non-buyers have vastly different cognitive orientations and pain points. While many retailers have embraced the notion of customer-centricity inasmuch as the buyer is concerned and, quite correctly, have implemented in-store customer feedback programs, relying on customer experience data from purchasers alone can paint a highly inaccurate picture of the overall shopper base. The fact that the buyer purchases an item means that whatever barriers to purchasing might have crept into his mind during the course of a store visit, these were somehow overcome over the duration of the shopping trip.

But in the case of non-buyers, purchasing barriers are real, insurmountable, and varied. They include:

> Product out of stock
> Trouble finding product
> Prices too high
> Trouble locating a sales rep
> Poor service from sales rep
> Long lines at checkout

Breaking down these barriers to purchasing — which is the first step towards boosting in-store revenue — means engaging with non-buyers, making sense of their feedback, and taking direct action to remedy whatever issues are causing them to walk out of the store empty-handed.

Ultimately, that means utilizing innovative techniques to gather feedback from shoppers who do not follow through with a purchase during their visits. To do so, feedback invitation paradigms need to be shifted and new, more innovative invitation methods need to be deployed. Ubiquitous feedback invitation methodologies — kiosks, digital signage, smartphone-readable quick response codes, or other advanced methods — must come to complement the existing, invitation-on-receipt methodology. Intelligent retailers, mindful of the differences between buyers and non-buyers, will want to gather data at as many persuasion points as possible, and not just at cash registers.

Retailers who take effective action to reduce the number of empty-handed shoppers who walk out their doors are putting themselves in a position to tap into the single biggest pool of potential revenue that exists today.