Good customer experience can drive retail in India

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: neighborhood, which has ample parking space. Only a few retailers have copied convenience and supermarket formats from markets of the developed nations, but not all the elements. A large parking space for the customer is one of the key parameters while designing store environments in the west. As per industry standards, at least five parking slots for four-wheelers are reserved per 1,000 sq ft of a store. Convenience and supermarket stores with enough parking spaces during peak hours would definitely drive more customer traffic.

b) Quality staff for customer help

Few off-price and discount retailers put up a weekend sale to attract customers during weekends. Most price-sensitive Indian customers (in mass category) visit such stores to take the advantage of promotion schemes. They look for help even though prices are displayed and direction is provided to identify departments within the stores. In this light, shortage of quality staff in the stores for providing adequate help to customers would immediately lead to customer dissatisfaction. An increase in the number of quality staff would help to manage confused customers about promotions and where they would find specific items in the stores. The handling of customer complaints and returned items (due to manufacturing defects) need to improve a lot, to catch up with the standards in the west.

c) State-of-the-art systems at POS

Retailers typically look for low-technology investments to maximise the

Return On Investment (ROI), taking a short-term view. Most of them still use the old point of sale systems (software and hardware), which might not have been enabled to manage new services, sending real-time demand information to the head office etc. Providing additional services such as selling airline tickets etc, at POS is also catching up. It is not difficult to lose a customer to the next door unless retailers begin using state-of-the-art systems at POS in order to avoid queues and enhance customer experiences. They would need to look beyond traditional strategies and use self check- outs, shopping carts with scanners, mobile commerce, etc, for convenience in shopping.

Appropriate investment