In marketing, where I’ve spent my career, my mission is to nudge customers to buy. But sometimes marketers focus so much on the funnel that they forget about making a great experience. When retail customer experience (CX) is poor, customers may walk away.
But when you create a memorable experience, you’ll earn a brand advocate and repeat business. 81% of customers say a positive customer service experience increases the chance they’ll make another purchase, so CX impacts your bottom line.
I spoke with three CX leaders to find out what makes a great customer experience, how to take an omnichannel approach to bring technology and in-store spaces together, and retail CX examples to inspire you.
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What is retail customer experience?
Retail CX is how a customer perceives your brand, influenced by every customer interaction before, during, and after a purchase. Both digital, phone, and in-store experiences contribute to your CX. Retail CX can be positive or negative — a value-add or a detractor — so it’s important to get it right.
Why a Good Retail Customer Experience is Important
CX is about much more than giving customers the warm touchy-feelies. Here’s what CX can do for your retail business.
1. Differentiate your brand from customers.
Your customer can find the exact same product at many stores, so how do you differentiate yourself to gain their business? When I shop, I weigh price, convenience, and shipping options, but I also weigh customer experience. How easy will my shopping process be, and what kind of support will I have if there’s an issue?
2. Drive customer loyalty and repeat purchases.
When customers have a good experience, they’re more likely to return and buy again. Inversely, just one bad experience will prompt one in three customers to walk away from a brand they love.
“Ultimately, if you are not elevating your customer experience strategy to be the strategic part of your business, you won't have staying power. You will see a significantly large percentage of what I call lapsed customers— who buy from you one time, and then they never repeat the purchase,” says Zack Hamilton.
Hamilton is a senior vice president and head of growth strategy and enablement at parcelLab. Hamilton has advised companies from Apple to Dick’s Sporting Goods on retail CX.
Simply put, good experiences create customer loyalty, repeat purchases, and customer advocacy. It’s simple for retail customers to walk away, so bad experiences create customer churn.
3. Reduce customer acquisition costs.
Your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total cost of sales and marketing to gain a new customer. When your CX is poor, like a disorganized store or a bad online checkout experience, you’re less likely to convert them to make a purchase. That means you need to spend more money bringing more customers to your store or website before making a sale. Bringing back an existing customer costs much less than acquiring a new one, keeping your costs lower.
4. Grow revenue.
I don’t have to spell it out for you. Happy returning customers plus lower costs equal more revenue and lower costs. Good CX contributes to a healthy, growing business. Companies with poor CX will always struggle to thrive.
“If you don’t elevate your customer experience, you won’t have engaged customers that drive loyalty,” cautions Hamilton. “So your customer acquisition cost will always be very high, and you won’t be able to compete with your profitability margins. Ultimately, you will go out of business because you're not making the margins that you need to make.”
How to Improve Your Retail Customer Experience
The last decade has brought fundamental change to retail. Self-checkouts, mobile apps, membership programs, ecommerce, and curbside pickup have reinvented how people shop. But is all of it beneficial? Here’s how to improve your retail CX and create a stellar shopping experience.
In-Store Customer Experience
Four out of five purchases still take place in a store, so brick-and-mortar is still king. Here’s how to create a welcoming, efficient store experience that drives sales.
1. Design around what your customers want.
First, recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to retail experiences. When I walk into a small boutique, I’m looking for a different experience than I get at Target. I’m likely looking for specialist recommendations and advice, rather than shopping an entire aisle of choices and picking up some groceries with my makeup.
I have a mission, and your job is to design an experience that helps me accomplish it. Resist the impulse to be swayed by every new trend or imitate what big box stores are doing — it may not be what your customers want.
2. Empower your frontline staff.
Staff members are responsible for delivering your brand experience, and they can make or break it.
“My interaction with your employee is my brand experience. A great store experience has to be wrapped up in an incredible experience with the frontline team,” advises Hamilton. “If you‘re a luxury boutique like a Neiman Marcus, your goal is for a customer to feel bold and empowered coming out of the boutique. If your employees don’t feel bold and empowered, they can't help the customer feel bold and empowered.”
To empower your frontline staff, consider the employee experience as well as the customer experience. Keep appropriate staffing levels, train and treat your staff well, and empower them to make decisions that will turn a negative customer experience around.
3. Enhance your store layout and design.
Create an inviting atmosphere in your store with wide aisles, clear signage, and visual merchandising. You can use lighting, furniture, music, wall color, and even scents to create your ideal atmosphere. Strategic product placement encourages customers to explore the store more and find relevant products.
You can also consider immersive experiences like dining at Restoration Hardware’s showroom in a real-life historical estate.
4. Integrate technology.
Technology can play a huge role in improving a customer’s experience. For instance, it can help them navigate the store to find what they need faster.
The Home Depot pioneered an app feature to help customers locate an item by aisle and bin number. Now, Target and many others have adopted this feature. Digital signage, interactive displays, and price-check kiosks also help customers to find relevant products and check out faster.
Alex Campbell, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Vibes, believes that mobile technology can improve the customer experience and help customers achieve their mission. 75% of people say that text messages routinely drive them to purchase from brands, but these texts need to be on-brand, personalized, and useful.
For example, a shopper can add an offer to their phone’s mobile wallet at home. Then, when they walk in the store, geofencing reminds them with a prompt to use the coupon and save money.
“It‘s interesting to take a step back and look at what a customer’s mission is when they get to your store. How do we use mobile to make it easier?” says Campbell.
Online Customer Experience
With ecommerce, it’s harder to keep shoppers’ attention and easier for them to comparison shop. It would take you all afternoon to drive to five stores, but you can shop at five ecommerce sites in a tidy half hour.
Here’s how to catch and keep your customers’ attention online and create a great experience.
1. Nail your online store design, navigation, and checkout.
Three-quarters of ecommerce sites have mediocre to poor performance when it comes to homepage and category navigation, according to Baymard Institute. Simply put, customers can’t find what they need. The categories may be too confusing, or the filtering options don’t work well.
Checkout is another sticking point for customers, with a 70% cart abandonment rate in 2024. Customers give up when the checkout process is too long, the shipping and return policies aren’t clear upfront, or when unexpected fees show up during checkout.
Create a user-friendly website, offer a guest checkout option to let customers checkout without creating an account, and offer multiple payment options for a great customer experience.
2. Meet your customers where they are.
When customers have a product question or need support, they’ll reach for whichever communication channel is most familiar and convenient. In many cases, that’s text and social media.
While I managed social media for a consumer brand, I saw people reaching out on Facebook Messenger or X for just about anything, from product requests to complaints.
With social commerce, customers are completing their entire shopping experience through platforms like TikTok or Instagram — they may never come to your website. More and more, we as consumers want to reach brands on whichever channel is most convenient, whether that’s messaging or social media.
“People don’t want to make 1-800 calls anymore. We’re seeing the trend that calling is massively going down, and traffic on your websites and apps is massively up,” shares Gaurav Passi, founder and CEO at Zingly.ai. “It’s super critical for brands to engage where their customers are, and right now, that is websites, messaging, digital properties, texting, and WhatsApp.”
Most of the time, customers only engage with a brand when something is wrong, which means your interaction isn’t starting in a positive place. Find the balance of proactive communicating with customers without annoying them — and that’s where personalization comes in.
3. Personalize, personalize, personalize.
With millions of website pages and products at their fingertips, people need a way to cut through the clutter. HubSpot’s research shows that 78% of customers expect more personalized interactions than ever before.
“It is not about you. It's about the consumer who's coming in, what their likes are, where their dislikes are, and what they’ve bought with you in the past,” explains Passi. “Understanding your consumer in-depth and applying that knowledge in real time, I think, is the most important thing right now.”
With personalization, you can show customers more relevant products to buy. You can speed up customer service interactions by pulling up a customer’s conversation and purchase history in real-time and seamlessly switching between channels.
“I personally hate it when I get messages that aren‘t personalized to me, because I know you can do it, or you should be able to do it,” offers Campbell. “We do a customer concern survey every year where we ask people how many text messages are too many messages. Around a third of people say it doesn’t matter how many messages they get as long as they're personal,” he shares.
Just 35% of CRM leaders say their customer data is fully integrated with their service tools. “There’s been a huge push over the past five or ten years of collecting data. Now we’re at this point of figuring out how to use it,” Campbell says.
4. Bring in AI the smart way.
One way to leverage all of your customer data is to integrate AI into your customer interactions. The catch, though, is figuring out how AI can be additive instead of subtracting value. A bad AI interaction is still a bad experience. However, AI can bring scale customer service and recommendations to help customers day or night, on any channel.
“When brands have all their data together, we’re already starting to see how AI can sift through millions of pieces of data in real time and offer up those personalized recommendations online drive the personalization strategy,” says Hamilton.
“I think AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for customer experience, but it can’t fix a broken process. If you already have really bad processes in place, AI is only going to make those processes worse,” says Hamilton.
The key is to find when to make the switch from an AI interaction to a human one.
“We are automating 60 to 70% on the buying and services sides, but the other 30% of the time, automation isn’t always good,” shares Passi. “You might be over-automating; the customer is not happy, and their sentiment is off. We’ve been designing a technology which understands based on customers’ records, emotions, and real-time sentiment, when and how to bring a human in the loop.”
When you get it right, you can scale personalized recommendations and customer service for a stellar customer experience.
The Omnichannel Approach to Retail CX
Above all, I’ve learned that the brands who get CX right treat online and in-store CX as separate strategies. They design one cohesive experience because that’s how the customer perceives it — as a single experience from one brand. They expect the same voice, service, and excellence across all channels, whether in your store, on your website, or on mobile.
Use a CRM and an integrated messaging inbox to ensure consistency across all touchpoints for your customers. SMS and AI-powered interactions can be powerful tools, but they need to be personalized and consistent in your brand voice. 75% of people say that text messages routinely drive them to purchase from brands. Chipotle is a great example of sending personalized text campaigns in its distinct brand voice.
Apple is another brand that does an incredible job of creating an omnichannel retail experience, integrating digital and physical spaces. If you’ve visited an Apple store, you know that it’s easy to make an appointment in advance to avoid a wait. In the store, a team member comes to you while you test out their products and can complete your purchase from their iPad — no need to head to a checkout line. If there’s a problem later, you can get the support you need by chat or email.
Retail Customer Experience Examples
I’m always blown away by a good customer experience, like when an employee goes above and beyond or an app helps me find what I need or save money. Here are three brands getting it right — and what makes them stand out.
Walmart
Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Walmart is convenient. 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart, and you can find almost anything you need there. Over the past few years, they’ve transformed their CX with mobile technology and omnichannel experiences that integrate digital and physical spaces.
While all shoppers can take advantage of same-day curbside pickup, Walmart+ members have access to same-day grocery delivery and other perks. The brand redesigned hundreds of stores with a modern, more aesthetic look to encourage browsing and engaging with products.
They’ve also built their own proprietary large language model (LLM) called Wallaby, trained on decades of Walmart purchase data. This technology is enabling omnichannel customer experiences like text and voice shopping and allowing customers to get support like processing returns through messaging. By the end of 2025, they even expect to create personalized homepages for each shopper.
Dick’s Sporting Goods
If you walk into a Dick’s Sporting Goods, you might be surprised to find more than racks of products. Climbing walls, immersive virtual golfing centers, and multi-sport HitTrax cages in select stores are engaging customers in a new way and giving them a reason to stick around and shop.
That’s just one way Dick’s has revamped their CX. They’ve added free shipping for most items, one-hour in-store pickup, and a price match guarantee. More than six million people use their GameChanger app to manage team sports and stream games to friends and family.
The brand now uses targeted surveys to collect feedback and act on it in real-time. That’s led to significantly lower bounce and exit rates, and significantly higher conversion rates on in-cart exercise equipment.
Carvana
As someone who bought a car this year, I know how painful the car-buying experience can be. Time-consumer dealer visits and haggling over pricing isn’t very convenient or comfortable. Enter Carvana, a disruptor in the automotive space. Carvana’s main focus is a frictionless buying experience for customers.
“Ordering a car from Carvana was the easiest thing ever,” shared customer Rebecca Garner. “The online experience was so easy we barely had to think about it. We got access to the warranty information, car registration, and anything else we could need in the app. Any information we weren’t able to find ourselves, we could find through the chat. They delivered the car right to our door in the city, and our interactions with the person that delivered it were fantastic.”
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How to Measure the Success of Your Retail CX
Because it deals with human emotion, CX can be tricky to measure. Here are a few of the top metrics to gauge how good of an experience you’re creating.
Engagement Rate
One way to measure CX is to look at how much customers engage with you and in what way. How often are they reading your emails, for instance? Are they reacting to your social posts or SMS messages? Are they clicking through to your website or unsubscribing?
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT is a metric that describes the percentage of customers who are satisfied with their purchase. This helps you track CX performance over time and segment your audience to send personalized messaging to satisfied or less-than-satisfied customers.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is a popular measure of customer sentiment and advocacy. The measurement simply asks customers on a one of 10 how likely they are to recommend the brand to a family or friend. It’s more of a result of good CX than anything else — a high NPS usually reflects a positive customer experience.
Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
CRR measures what percentage of customers you retain over a set period. The opposite of this is customer churn, which is how many customers you lose over a set period.
One caution I heard from the CX leaders I interviewed is to avoid the fallacy of vanity metrics. Rather than boasting about a CSAT score of 80, dig into the remaining 20% to understand why they weren’t satisfied — and take action.
How to Create a Customer-Focused Company
So, how do you create a CX focus at your company? One half is technology, which I’ve already covered. Your tech stack and how you implement it every day can make or break your CX. The other half comes down to people and culture. How do you design a customer-centric culture and embrace change to meet customer priorities?
1. Create an org structure and culture for success.
One problem working against CX is internal siloes. Marketing, sales, and customer services are all working separately instead of as one team. I’ve seen teams set up competing for resources, so they aren’t incentivized to work together toward a common goal.
One way to solve this is through establishing a CX leader who can advocate for the customer and bring all these siloes together.
“The best CX leaders are influencers, right? They don't own the entire customer journey. They have to influence the cross-functional stakeholders to do that. I look at them as problem solvers. They should have a bias for action and report directly to the CEO,” recommends Hamilton.
Beyond your org chart, it’s also a question of culture. Can you create a culture of customer focus that permeates from your frontline staff to website designers to executive leadership?
“The customer experience should be owned by everybody at that company. It’s everyone’s problem, everyone’s responsibility,” says Campbell. “That’s the whole reason why you’re there, making sure that your customers have an experience with your brand that matches what you stand for.”
2. Incorporate customer feedback and embrace disruption.
One big mistake companies make in CX is listening and collecting customer feedback — then never acting on it.
“There’s a difference between listening to your customers and doing customer experience,” shares Hamilton. “CX leaders are not connecting the dots between what our customers are telling us, the impact on the business, and why we should do something about it.”
Look at your metrics and change your communication tactics if your opt-out rates are too high. Listen to customers and prioritize redesigning your processes and technology according to your voice of customer research.
That may mean reinvention — radically changing your tech or diverging from others in your industry. But often, that disruption can mean survival in this noisy world competing for attention.
Earn Customer Love with Personalized, Frictionless Experiences
One of the common threads I gleaned from speaking to top CX thought leaders is that while retail CX is complex, your focus should be simple. Design experiences that make your customers feel valued and known.
Align your data to create personalized, omnichannel experiences that make it easy to buy and get support if needed.
“We need to focus on using our data to the customer's benefit. When you think about the customer, it should be so simple. How can you use data to make the experience better and easier right now?” asks Campbell.
Above all, retail CX impacts the bottom line. As you build a program, don’t forget to measure your success and consider the whole picture of how CX impacts your business.
“I think one of the reasons why customer experience has experienced budget cuts the last few years is the lack of connecting the dots between customer experience and business impact,” explains Hamilton. “If you think about CX of the future, it‘s less about your MPs and your vanity metrics, and it’s more about driving profit and loss. That’s the CX practitioner of the future, those who understand that and can connect the dots.”
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- Buyer's Journey Template
- Future State Template
- Day-in-the-Life Template
- And more!
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