Switch Your Shop Antenna On: What Are Your Customers Trying to Tell You?

Your customers are giving you clues about how to improve your shop every single day.

The question is... are you noticing them?

I've been talking recently about having your business antenna switched on. It's that habit of noticing things wherever you go – a great idea in another shop, something another business does brilliantly, or a product, display or piece of service that makes you think, “We could do something like that.”

But there's another place we need to have our antenna switched on.

Inside our own shops.

Because sometimes the best ideas for improving your business aren't somewhere else. They're standing right in front of you, in the way your customers behave when they're actually shopping with you.

Your customers are constantly giving you clues

Spend enough time in your own shop and familiarity kicks in. You know where everything is, you understand your displays, you know what the signs mean and you know exactly which products sit where.

Your customers don't.

And that's why watching what they actually do can be far more useful than assuming we know how they shop.

A customer hesitates in front of a display. Someone picks something up, looks at it and puts it back. Another customer walks straight past something you'd really like them to notice.

Then somebody asks where the chutney is.

Half an hour later, someone else asks exactly the same question.

Individually, none of these things feels particularly significant, and on a busy day they're incredibly easy to miss. But when you start noticing the same behaviours repeatedly, they're telling you something.

They're signals.

And if your antenna is switched on, they might be showing you exactly where your next improvement is hiding.

Try the one-hour antenna exercise

Here's something you can do with your team today.

For just one hour, ask everyone to pay particular attention to how customers are behaving in the shop. You're not asking them to stop serving or stand around studying people – just to be a little more switched on than usual.

Give them one question:

“What are our customers showing us that we could make better?”

You're not conducting a customer survey.

You're asking your team to notice.

Where do customers hesitate? What do they struggle to find? What do they pick up and put back? Which displays do they walk straight past?

What questions keep getting asked?

Where do people naturally stop, and where do they appear confused?

Give every member of the team a Post-it or small piece of paper and ask them to capture one thing they notice during that hour.

That's all.

Then compare notes

At the end of the hour, get everyone together for five minutes and compare what they've seen. This is where it could get interesting, because the person working behind your till may notice something completely different from the person serving on your counter.

Someone might have spotted a customer struggling to read a ticket. Someone else might have noticed that customers keep asking where a particular product is.

Or perhaps three members of the team have noticed exactly the same thing.

Now you've got a signal worth paying attention to.

Don't create another enormous list

This is the important bit.

Don't finish the exercise with twelve Post-its stuck to the office wall and another enormous list of things you'll eventually get around to.

You've probably already got enough of those.

Pick one.

One signal. One improvement. And do something about it today.

If customers can't find something, move it or improve the signage. If they're walking past a display, change it. If the same question keeps being asked, work out how you could answer it before the customer needs to ask.

And if they're picking something up and repeatedly putting it back, get curious about why. Is the price clear? Do they understand the product? Would a serving suggestion, a sample or a little more information give them the confidence to buy it?

The important thing is that you do something with what you've learned.

Because noticing the opportunity isn't the improvement.

Acting on it is.

Keep your antenna switched on

You don't need to run the exercise every day. The bigger opportunity is getting yourself and your team into the habit of noticing what's happening around you rather than simply looking at it.

Because once you start doing that, you'll begin seeing little signals everywhere.

And some of the best improvements you make to your shop might not come from a consultant, a conference, social media or another retailer. They might come from watching what happens in your own business on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

From the customer who can't find something.

The customer who hesitates.

The product that keeps getting picked up and put back.

Your customers are showing you how to improve your shop every single day.

Make sure your antenna is switched on.