How to Improve Customer Experience in Retail Stores
Last updated: 14.09.2026
Learning how to improve customer experience in retail stores involves looking at each step of the shopper’s visit. In the UK, there’s a balance to be struck between being too involved and pushy, but not being negligent. But customer experience isn’t just your conversations with customers; it’s everything from how fast the checkout queue moves to stock availability.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What Is Customer Experience in Retail?
Retail customer experience is the accumulation of each and every interaction that a shopper has with the shop. It’s the moment they’re greeted when they walk in to the birthday email they receive. But it’s broader than customer service, it’s also:
- What the experience is like when browsing
- How long they have to wait to pay and payment options available
- Returning an item
- The layout of the shop and how easy it is to find things
- Whether they can check if their product is in stock before going
- Cleanliness of the shop floor and lighting
The customer journey moves through:
- Physical factors (layout, lighting, noise)
- Emotional factors (rushed, pushed, ignored)
- Practical factors (can they find items, check and pay easily?)
Small issues, like the card reader delays due to having no signal or unclear price tags, can prevent them from returning. In other cases, bad PR can spread.
Example from Reddit: Customers complaining about M&S mirrors, poor sizing, and changing room lighting that made customers lose confidence in themselves
Why Customer Experience Matters for Retail Stores
Good customer satisfaction is difficult to quantify (though not impossible) because it shows up in many different ways, from sales and retention to reviews and general brand perception.
Retail used to lead in the UK on customer satisfaction, but that all changed in July 2026 when the score hit 78.3 (out of 100) and banks overtook retail for the first time. However, John Lewis and M&S Food remain the gold standard, with high ratings, which has built up a national fondness for them. Customer expectations are high in those shops, which is married to brand respect. It matters because loyalty is high, and not just because of the loyalty card. This is something that can be done on a local scale.
14 Ways To Improve Customer Experience in Retail Stores
Understand the Customer Journey
Before making changes, you need to know the shopper touchpoints at each stage as it is. Map the frictions.
- Map the journey, stage by stage: discovery, arrival, asking, browsing, paying, returns, delivery.
- Ask staff what customers tend to ask. Feedback can be a measurable way to find pain points.
- Check popular times on your Google Business Profile for an estimate of when the store is likely busiest, and not just when you assume it is.
- Compare different experiences, like a parent with a pushchair, a wheelchair, and a delivery-day regular.
Assessing these customer touchpoints becomes the foundation of improving customer experience.
Improve Store Layout and Product Presentation
Your retail atmospherics (lighting, signage, spacing, noise, music) all set the tone. They have psychological implications, both conscious and subconscious, around how welcome, stressed, happy or overwhelmed they feel.
The layout should have a clear path and the flow should make intuitive sense.
- Best-sellers at eye level
- Niche items that people search for on the top shelf
- In-a-rush daily items at the front
- Checkouts clearly labelled near the front
The retail environment should make sense and feel familiar to help reduce cognitive friction (the amount of work we have to do to make decisions).
Train Staff To Deliver Better Service
Train your team to greet customers, know the product range (and where things are), and offer help that’s useful and off-script. Equally, if someone is just there to browse, knowing when to leave them alone is also important.
Ideally, staff will have authority on complaints and returns so that they don’t need to fetch the manager each time, which isn’t a good experience.
79% of retail CEOs think their organisation manages their labour shortages effectively, while only 55% of HR leaders agree
85% of deskless retail workers who had their training moved to solely online felt it hurt their performance. It’s a strong case that employee engagement and ongoing customer service training shouldn’t be a one-off, and particularly not just as an in-browser quiz.
Make Product Information Clear
Product information can create problems at the till, even for well-trained staff. Good inclusive retail design means letting customers retain agency by having clear information:
- Make prices, promotions, sizes and features clear to read at just a glance
- Keep shelf labels up to date and accurate
- Follow the CTSI’s guidance for traders on pricing practices so that discounts and reference prices aren’t misleading
- Provide detailed product information upon request
Get this right from the start and employees won’t be inundated with help requests.
Improve Product Availability
Give staff reliable stock information that is always up to date (real-time inventory) so that they can answer availability questions. A gap on the shelf is a lost sale.
Retail technology investments can help here, like accurate product data built on GS1 UK barcoding standards, stock alerts and even forecasting demand. Staff scheduling and workflow should be that popular stock is replenished first, before the shelves are empty, and offer alternatives when an item is not in stock.
Recurring stock gaps is one of the most fixable retail challenges when your sales data flags it early.
Reduce Queues and Simplify Checkout
Checkout is often a major bottleneck in a shop. A YouGov survey found that from 2,074 respondents, 29% said that queuing to pay had annoyed them in-store during the past year. Another 27% found self-checkouts to be bothersome.
39% of all UK payments were contactless, while 64% more broadly were card payments
- Match the checkout capacity to your peak shopping periods
- Accept many payment methods, such as cash, card, contactless, and mobile payments to streamline checkout process steps.
- Make refunds and exchanges fast and easy to process. Use the myPOS email receipt feature to ensure customers have a digital copy
These are some of the more direct ways to enhance customer experience in retail.
Personalise the Shopping Experience
As we have seen with the ubiquitous (and, essentially, forced) use of discount cards in supermarkets, it’s become clear that the purchase history of customers is useful for various reasons. One of which is to provide a personalized shopping experience, where marketing material and discounts are relevant to their tastes.
The customer experience management approach should, however, take customer data and UK GDPR seriously, laid out by the Information Commissioner’s Office.
A more rudimentary approach is just through customer service. Ask customers if they’re looking for anything in particular, and then personalisation becomes about making recommendations, offering alternatives, talking them through product details.
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- 2-in-1 card reader with a charging and printing dock
- Extend usage time by combining 2 batteries
- Use in-store or on the go
Connect In-Store and Online Shopping
Over a quarter of retail sales in the UK are now online. Given the culture of shopping on mobile, it’s increasingly common to compare prices, check stock availability, and head over to the shop to pick it up. Whether or not you actually offer delivery, an omnichannel experience where customers feel like they can at least browse, and see real-time availability of your shop, is powerful.
Prices, loyalty benefits and promotions should be across both channels, with digital receipts offered with both. The retail customer journey may begin online and transition to in-store, and it should feel cohesive.
Create a Simple Returns and Exchange Process
Return conditions should be easy to find and understand at the point of purchase. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 means that each shopper has 30 days from taking ownership of a faulty item to return it for a full refund. After day 30, but before month 6, is a period where you get one chance to repair or replace it, with the burden falling on the retailer to prove the fault wasn’t there upon delivery.
Staff must be able to handle returns themselves, else the queue will be held up by calling over the manager each time. With digital receipts, there is more chance the customer has proof of purchase. A calm return is one of the best sources of positive customer interactions that can lead to positive reviews.
All returns should be properly recorded, not just for accounting purposes but to flag issues with stock quality and raise problems with suppliers.
Build Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty is now ubiquitous, with over 80% of Brits using one or more loyalty programmes. The question becomes about what reason the customer has to bother.
- Discounts for members
- Purchases accumulate points, leading to milestone rewards or discounts
- Redemption of reward points with third-parties
- Loyalty data driving stock decisions, personalisation, and promotions
Loyalty programs can support consumer retention, helping nudge members return to your shop over choosing one nearby that they’re not a loyalty member of.
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Collect and Act on Customer Feedback
Customer feedback gathered through reviews, surveys, conversations and complaint records should be assessed and quantified. Staff should have a dedicated place to anonymously record feedback, even if it’s just in a passing conversation.
Once it’s collated, AI tools like Claude Code can perform sentiment analysis and find recurring patterns. Certain staff member names may keep appearing, or products, or shop design choices like a lack of mirrors. Customer experience insights cannot be replicated with a manager walk-through of the shop. And, these can even be engineered with mystery shoppers.
Reply to your Google reviews in a personable way, especially ones flagging issues as it shows you’re listening. If you can, tell customers that their feedback led to real changes.
Use Retail Data To Improve the Experience
POS and store data can answer a surprising amount of customer experience questions you have. After all, behaviour and experiences have consequences. The table below is a starting point for any CX strategies:
| Metric | What it shows | Why it matters |
| Conversion rate | Share of visitors who buy | Flags friction in browsing or checkout |
| Average transaction value | Typical spend per visit | Shows whether upselling and layout are working |
| Checkout/queue time | Time from joining a queue to paying | Directly tied to shopper frustration and abandonment |
| Repeat visit rate | How often customers return | A practical proxy for loyalty and satisfaction |
| Customer satisfaction score | Direct feedback on the visit | Catches problems metrics alone can miss |
While you can see some industry performance metrics, the focus should be on tracking customer metrics over time to improve them. Ensure time-frames, assumptions and calculations remain consistent so comparisons are standardised.
Design a Proactive Service-Recovery System
Any store has its failures, even well run ones. Orders get delayed, card payments fail, and prices scan wrong at the till. Sometimes, it’s not even within your control. But, what is in your control is to plan for them.
Retail strategies should be able to build contingencies so that awkward moments are a chance to rebuild trust rather than lead to a complaint. Working hard to find a fast solution while remaining attentive, for example, can lead to positive reviews, even if your system originally failed.
- Identify common failures, like stock errors, delayed collections, wrong prices, and payment issues
- Give staff clear authority and pre-arranged options so that they can resolve the issue quickly and autonomously. For example, a back-up payment terminal, or a second way to find the price of a product
- Record service failures so operational issues are separate from one-off incidents
- Reporting tools or customer service software can help keep records consistent so that different shift managers have the same information
Being able to quantify and visualise the recurring problems can lead to a positive return on investment for new systems, particularly as many are simply cloud-based SaaS, or pay-as-you-go, like myPOS.
Reduce Customer Effort Across the Store
The common theme for customer experience comes down to effort and friction. The more customers face effort, the less enjoyable the experience and the less they will buy. Here are some common friction points:
| Friction point | Customer impact | Practical fix |
| Long checkout queues | Abandoned baskets, annoyance | Portable card machines and flexible staffing at peak times |
| Out-of-stock items | Wasted trip, lost sale | Real-time stock alerts and delivery or reservation options |
| Complicated returns process | Reluctance to buy in the first place | Clear, published return terms and trained staff |
| Untrained or unavailable staff | Unresolved questions, slower decisions | Ongoing coaching and clear escalation routes |
| Inconsistent online/in-store pricing | Loss of trust | Synchronised pricing and promotions across channels |
So, how can AI improve customer experience in retail? Or does it increase customer effort?
AI can help run operations more smoothly when used on the back-end, like predictive stock shortages or detecting upcoming busy days. But, forcing AI solutions onto customers, like with chatbots and customer service phone lines, can sometimes be counter-productive. Often, it depends on the customer segment, as older generations are more resistant.
Common Mistakes To Avoid
Even the most well-intentioned retail design strategies can have flaws. Below are some of the most common mistakes that, when caught early, are avoidable.
- Focusing too much on store appearance rather than functionality, flow, service and operational issues
- Onboarding staff but not training regularly - particularly dangerous when training is 100% online
- Making loyalty schemes or returns too complicated and unclear
- Allowing queues and payment delays to ruin an otherwise good visit
- Not recording verbal feedback
- Not using feedback to create actionable change
- Adding technology that outsources the work to customers
- Inconsistent experiences across different stores
Avoiding these can help enhance customer experience just by virtue of not introducing annoyances.
How myPOS Can Help Retailers Deliver a Better Customer Experience
While each customer has their own unique process to browsing, almost all customers who complete a purchase will go through the same experience: payment. It’s one improvement that touches all paying customers.
myPOS card machines accept contactless, Apple Pay, and Samsung Pay with any of the terminals. Of the retail POS solutions, the myPOS Ultra lasts for over 1,500 transactions in one charge, or if you want a printing dock and two batteries, the myPOS Go Combo ensures the customer walks away with a physical, not just digital, which the older generation and those who are cautious of privacy may sometimes resist.
Conclusion
Retail customer experience is a key driver to repeat visits and maintain strong sales. But, it rests on the unglamorous details, not just the obvious customer service: intuitive layout, accurate labels, short queues, easy returns, knowledgeable staff. The human touch in retail is one of the main assets it has in the otherwise-losing fight against online giants.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can visual merchandising impact customer engagement and sales?
Visual merchandising and window displays are an effective way to get customers through the door. It can put them in a positive frame of mind when entering, and the in-store signage guides them from there. Shopping is a very visual experience.
What payment options should I offer to meet diverse customer preferences?
Card payments are easily the most common payment method, with contactless (including mobile wallets) the most dominant way, followed by Chip & PIN. QR payments, payment links and online checkout pages can all be useful for click & collect. Some older customers may want a cash option, though cash is declining in relevance.
What financial tools can help me analyze customer spending patterns?
A good POS provider will produce a sales report and transaction dashboard, and this should be the most direct and accessible starting point. From here, integration with other systems, like Odoo, can help produce custom reports for busy periods, popular products, and so on. But, first, check the POS sales report.
What are best practices for handling customer complaints in retail?
Before you respond, listen carefully and acknowledge the problem. Some complaints are primarily about airing an issue and being heard rather than finding an immediate solution. Giving front-line staff the training and authority to handle things like returns can improve the customer experience.
What innovative approaches can I take to create a memorable in-store experience?
Given that it’s unlikely you have access to expensive, ground-breaking technology that other shops have invested in, your memorable experiences are likely going to come from a human touch. For example, product demonstrations with some humour and hosting skills, or a rapid Q&A from a knowledge specialist for a popular product, or perhaps an event in-store like book signing.
What budget considerations should I keep in mind for customer experience enhancements?
Diagnose the problems first, because if you know the lifetime value of a customer, and how many you’re losing, then you have a reference point for ROI forecasts when spending more on customer experience. Prioritise and pilot the ones with a measurable impact, like checkout speed, and continue gathering feedback to measure the impact of any changes.
