Your customers’ expectations are based not just on your direct competitors but on their retail experience elsewhere in the real world – and online. [level-members]
It may not be fair, but your customers’ expectations aren’t based just on your competitors, but on their experiences everywhere in the retail world – bricks and mortar as well as digital.
This means you should strive to create a consistent brand across every touch-point you have with your customers. The tone of your communications, the attitude, and the personality should all be consistent.
In other words, a great online presence won’t work if it’s paired with a dumpy shop and surly customer service. Likewise, given how much consumer decision making goes on before a customer ever gets off his or her couch, a dumpy website isn’t going to get you very far beyond your shop’s front door.
Something else to think about when you’re comparing your online and offline experience is how much each is influenced by analytical thought rather than intuition. (Or worse, the “well that’s the way we’ve always done it” attitude.) It’s easy to think more analytically about your digital work – there are tools that make it very easy to compare one piece of content vs. another, or one email subject line vs. another.
That’s harder to do in the shop, but worth the effort. Try different displays, different events, even different timing for events. You may not find any real differences, but you’ll never know what’s working – or what might work better – unless you establish some kind of metrics to measure by.
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