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It's important for employees to understand their role in customer retention. Your employees are sometimes the only contact your customer has with your business, so be sure that your employees have the same respect and treatment of your customers as you would yourself. Develop training manuals and methods that appeal to varied learning types of the employees, incorporating video, reading, and even customer service role-play into your training routine. Designate a more seasoned employee to mentor the new employees. Offer your employees incentives such as "employee of the month" or "customer favorite" to gain their interest in treating customers well. If your business is open Monday, Thursday, Saturday, and every other Tuesday from 1:45 to 3:00 and 9:00pm to midnight, you're going to struggle to retain customers. Don't make it impossible to remember when you're open. Adapt to your customers and be open when they require your services. Keep in mind the average working week. If you're only open from 10a-3pm, Monday through Friday, people who work a regular 9-5 job will never be able to shop at your place. Consider staying open later, or opening on the weekends. If you serve breakfast until 10:30 and a customer comes in at 11:00 wanting the pancakes, it can be a tricky situation. You don't want to back your kitchen up and compromise your service just as they're shifting over for the lunch rush, but you also want to keep your customer happy. What do you do? Be as flexible as possible, given the situation. Let your customer know that you're doing them a favor in as friendly and genuine a tone as possible. "We technically stop serving breakfast at 10:30, so it might take a bit longer, but we'll have that right up for you. Deal?" Customer issues do arise from time to time. How you handle this dispute will determine if you lose a customer or retain them. Listen to what your customer has to say about the issue at hand. Be sure to hear them out before making a conclusion. See if there is some way to appease your customer in order to have them happy to return to your business. Settle disputes amicably and with a positive attitude. Let the customer know you are more than happy to make them satisfied. The customer must not only trust the product, they must trust what you have to say about the product, how you present it to them. The customer is looking to you to produce for them real reasons why the product will fulfill a need. Coach your staff to seek more information from the customer about how the customer plans to, or wishes to, use the product in a sales environment. Use probing questions to put the spotlight on the customer, showing a personal interest in who they are and what they do. Up-selling can be an important part of any business environment, but only insofar as it doesn't become obvious to customers. Nobody wants to be badgered with prompts to buy extra things they clearly don't need. There's no right way to design and organize a store. What may make one customer feel at home may turn another off. But one thing that's consistent is that your store needs to be cleaned every day and organized in a professional and welcoming way. Whatever style you go with, modern, vintage, homey, or elegant, you need to keep it consistent and clean.
Train your employees to treat customers with respect. Set regular and accessible hours. Be flexible. Settle disputes in a timely manner. Learn to sell truthfully. Make your business clean and welcoming.