Improving Customer Experiences

Making your brand relevant and socially useful is a goal of almost every kitchen and bath showroom. How do you accomplish this? The first stop is your website. Are you providing information that customers want? Are you making it easy to find information? Pretend you are a customer looking to remodel your kitchen. If you went to your website, would it deliver the information you want and need? Would it encourage you to call, email or make a showroom appointment? Ask yourself what you can do to make your brand more relevant and useful? This is a great place to start because recent research found that consumers find nearly 50% of all brand experiences as boring.

Providing an easy button is another tool to enhance showroom customer experience. Americans are obsessed with simplification. You need to find ways to make the buying experience at your showroom easy. Don’t ask customers to fill out complicated forms. They won’t take the time. If you don’t make it easy to buy from you, customers will go places where they aren’t hassled. That’s a compelling reason why showrooms should offer a complete product package that includes plumbing, appliances, accessories, flooring, wallcoverings and lighting. When you tell customers to go elsewhere to obtain the products they need for their new kitchens and baths, you create extra steps, time and stress, not to mention that the elsewhere may also offer cabinets, countertops and tile.

Simplification also involves making it easy to communicate with a real live person. Phone numbers need to be prominent on your website. You also should seriously consider providing customers with a bot chat option to answer questions that are asked most frequently. Additionally, your website needs to be easily viewed on smart phones and tablets.

Zero Moments of Truth (ZMOTs) is a “decision-making moment that takes place hundreds of millions of times every day on mobile phones, laptops and connected devices of all kinds. It’s a moment where marketing happens, where information happens and where consumers make choices that affect the success or failure of nearly every brand in the world, claims Winning the Zero Moment of Truth author Jim Lecinski, who served as managing director of U.S. sales and service for Google. It’s a term used to describe how people purchase because almost no one buys anything without first going on the Internet.

ZMOTs recognize that consumers own every brand. They write about their experiences with brands for others to use in their decision-making process. This is why it is critical for showroom owners, manufacturers and reps to understand their brand experiences. Customers will rely more on a review on Yelp than they will on a review in Kitchen & Bath Design News. That’s why you have to constantly monitor what is said about your brand on the web and respond positively.