5 Easy Ways to Stop Standards Slipping

Don’t point, sign
How long have you had your signs? Are they still as fresh and bright as when you introduced them? Do they entice and tease? Is the information as current and essential as it was then? Could you do with refreshing your signage anyway? Regular customers will no longer be reading old signs. Make your signs work for you: offer brief tasting and provenance notes, as well as serving and pairing suggestions.

Enhance the experience
Do you still make that special effort to greet every customer who comes through your door? Do you still offer attention without intrusion? Is your product knowledge as sharp as ever? Do you and your staff still add to your customers’ experience? If your staff are not engaging with customers as they once did, or are no longer offering a warm welcome and helpful suggestions, it’s time to act. Are uniforms still smart and hair kept neat? It all counts!

Take stock regularly
When you opened your shop, did you hunt high and low for superb local products? Did you pride yourself on discovering all sorts of stock that hadn’t been near a supermarket? Were you more attentive to customer demands? If the uniqueness or quality of your stock is falling off, so will your trade. Revisit your rivals, take note of their stock and resolve to do better. Experiment. Offer your customers something different on a regular basis: encourage them to pop in and see what’s new.

A matter of taste
Putting foods out on display adds a little theatre and encourages sales, not only of the featured item, but of its accompaniment too. Do you hold tastings as often as you once did, and are they quite as good? Are customers still tempted into your store by the alluring promise of tasty nibbles? And when customers do come in to taste, do you still engage with them and find out what they want from a shop like yours? Choose your nibbles to entice and surprise and they will get talked about.

Put on a show
Like tasters, great display, with good lighting, can offer drama. Does your display still change when it should, either with the seasons or in order to promote what needs selling? Do you check your sell-by dates and weed out items which aren’t moving as often as they once did? Do you use display to sell off unwanted goods before you have to write them off? Do you refresh your window display? Does it still attract custom? Are fixtures, fittings and back walls ready for a lick of paint?

Image courtesy of Lewis & Cooper