Converting store visitors into purchasing customers is the ultimate goal for every retailer. But as we’ve noticed over the years, reaching higher conversion rates means you need to increase the focus on the store staff’s behaviour. Especially their willingness to offer help.
The experiment
To test this hypothesis, we designed an experiment, with the goal of understanding the relationship between staff behaviour and conversion rates.
How we did it
We conducted a data-driven experiment across two stores over a one-week period. The data was collected via personal interviews with 870 visitors as they exited the store.
We segmented visitors into three distinct groups based on their purchase intentions:
- Those with an intention to buy a specific product.
- Those with an intention to buy but without a specific product in mind.
- Those without a purchase intention.
This segmentation allowed us to customise our analysis and get deeper insights related to conversion potential for different types of visitors.
Results
1. Offering help drives conversion rates
In the first part of our analysis, we looked at all respondents and learned several key insights:
- 41.1% of purchasing customers were offered help, compared to 24.4% of non-purchasing customers.
- Conversion rate for those offered help: 21.92%
- Conversion rate for those not offered help: 9.6%
- General average conversion rate: 12.06%.
- The initial share of visitors offered help: 20%.
After six months of focus on improving staff behavior, the share of visitors offered help increased to 40%, driving the average conversion rate up from 12.06% to 14.53%.
These insights clearly show that staff behaviour, specifically offering help in this case, plays a big part in converting visitors into paying customers.
2. Reasons why people don’t buy
In the second part of our analysis, we focused on visitors who arrived with a purchase intention. The goal was to get responses that could provide direct insights into how staff performance influenced their buying decisions.
In this group, we identified the following reasons for not making a purchase:
It was very interesting to see that 20.9% of customers who didn’t buy anything said that a lack of help was the biggest reason for leaving empty-handed. More evidence pointing to the importance of staff behaviour. Also, 5.2% stated that they received help, but the assistance was not satisfactory. This reinforces our belief in staff training.
Conclusion
The data we have from these experiments clearly demonstrates that the behaviours among your store teams are a significant driver of conversion rates. If you increase your focus on staff behaviour, offer daily training, and measure the improvements, you can directly impact the sales figures.
- Stores that prioritise staff training and encourage greater customer interactions see an improvement in conversion rates.
- By increasing the percentage of customers who received assistance from 20% to 40%, stores saw a significant boost in average conversion rates – from 12.06% to 14.53% – which means a 20% higher conversion rate.
- Reasons for visitors not buying could be influenced by store staff, especially the quality and frequency of help.
The next step for retailers
As you’ve now learned, the behaviours in your store teams are what leads to business success in the long run. And if you don’t collect customer feedback, provide daily training to your employees or don’t measure their improvement, you won’t impact the conversion rates in a meaningful way.
On March 27th, you can join our webinar where we’ll talk all about KBIs (Key Behaviour Indicators), which more and more retailers are starting to focus on. This is the process of letting stores have more control of their customer experiences by switching the focus to staff performance and connecting that to the sales figures.
You are free to join us!
Written by:
Tom Endresplass
Customer success director
