※Translation in English of the column.

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Sales is the work to sell happiness ④

“Shopping is an entertainment”.

by BRUSH chairman Eiko Akiyama

In the previous chapter, I mentioned that the mission of salespeople is to raise the value of CX (customer experience). This point has been considered increasingly important after the Corona disaster. “Let’s boost CX!” is easy to say, but it’s not easy to put into practice.

In the retail category, there are a wide variety of things from daily necessities such as daily necessities and groceries to luxuries. Even if you don’t buy fashion items, interiors, art works, you will not have any problems with your life. Rather than necessity, customers are driven by an instinct to satisfy their desires of the moment. In other words, shopping is entertainment for customers. When we think of entertainment, we generally have an idea of show business such as theater, but shopping can be categorized to entertainment in the sense that “it entertains people.”

Customers feel uplifted through customer service, and it makes their life brilliant and rich…　Salespeople must be able to make customers’ dreams and aspirations come true. Instead of just casually selling things, salespeople support customers to imagine a scene of the life with items they bought, and to desire “I want to get it!” by enjoying such an imagination.
While talking about the appeal of brands and products, it is important to understand the tastes, lifestyles, values of customers and to propose the most suitable items. The question is how excited you could get your customers, in other words, whether you could move their feelings. It is customer service that touches the heartstrings of customers.
The most difficult is to identify the diverse values of customers. To do so, it is all about expanding knowledge and learning. Having a wide range of information about all the things in the life (travel, food, reading, art, and others) leads to lively conversations and gives the opportunity to discover the values of customers. In order to enhance entertainment and make customers truly enjoy shopping, it is important to cultivate yourself as well.

When customers have the experience of highly valuable services, they feel a sense of trust and become fans. If shopping is entertainment, the store is the stage, and the salesperson is the entertainer. As an entertainer, I want you to be someone who “moves the hearts of customers.”