How to Drive a Consistent Holiday Experience Throughout your Stores

The holidays are here, and it’s time to strategize for the massive amount of customers about to enter your store. The National Retail Federation has the highest forecasted holiday spending with up to 960 billion dollars spent at retail this November and December. 

The holiday season is the prime time for retailers. Most retail businesses make close to 30% of the annual revenue during these few weeks, making it their top priority. Jump into the holiday months with a great strategy and a smile on your face. To make your retail engine fire all cylinders, we need to make sure your retail stores are working as a team.

We have identified three key areas for you to focus on to drive a consistent holiday experience throughout your stores.

Hire and Train Your Seasonal Staff 

Hiring Seasonal Staff is critical to meet the demand of your customers. The National Retail Federation states that retailers will look to hire between 450,000 and 600,000 new employees for the Holiday season alone. Providing enough valuable time with each customer not only increases the overall transaction value.

Once you have onboarded the new members of your team, it’s time to get them up to speed. Having a great and memorable customer experience in your store is essential, so your staff need to be well trained.

According to an Accenture Holiday Survey, 82 percent of consumers would shop with one retailer over another if the staff were more knowledgeable and provided help or advice. Get ahead by developing robust communication channels that provide your new staff with a forum to interact, ask questions, and share information.

This will allow you to notify your staff of new policies, procedures, and provide product knowledge Doing so creates contagious learning, and prepares your new associates as brand ambassadors.

Seamless Omnichannel Experience

Omnichannel is a key priority to maximize the revenue potential of your stores. Having a seamless omnichannel experience will ease the pressures on your workforce and help complete fulfillment orders. To do this, you must keep up with the demand and have a support system in place to deal with your social media engagements, online chats, and in-store purchases.  

Customers make online purchases every single day. Make sure your support systems are online and ready to go. Review your omnichannel customer base and your order fulfillment requirements. Doing this will allow you to estimate workload and gauge training requirements.

Your In-Store Experience

All your stores should be working as a unit. A consistent in-store experience for your customers allows clarity for your teams. For example, you have Holiday plans for all your stores, but some don’t seem to be meeting the necessary requirements… What do you do? 

To ensure that these stores are following the plan and direction, schedule a formal set of store visits to confirm that each store is compliant. The best way to mitigate the problems when implementing this plan is to have proper communication. It can save a lot of headaches! You must coordinate a means of clear communication across your districts so that your in-store experience is consistent. 

Dealing with the massive amount of traffic coming to your stores is stressful and exciting all at the same time. We want you to succeed this Holiday season by focusing on hiring more seasonal workers, training new and current staff, improving the

in-store experience consistency, and optimizing your omnichannel to achieve higher profitability.

If you want to dive deeper into how you can strategize Holiday Seasonal staffing, check out our most recent WhitePaper, 6 Steps to Successful Staffing for the Ultimate Peak of the Year – Holiday.