With so much time and focus spent on running your dispensary, have you considered what it’s like to be an actual consumer of your business, interacting with your front-line employees and your brand? If you haven’t, you might be shocked at what outside eyes have discovered. As the leading provider of mystery shopping and customer experience management solutions to the cannabis industry, we wanted to shed some light on a few of the things our independent evaluators have witnessed firsthand that can cost your dispensary money, and what you can do to keep it from happening to you:
Uncleanliness: Liquor bottles in parking lots. Trash. Piles of cigarette butts. Dust-encrusted furniture. Spider webs. Dead bugs. Half-dead house plants in the lobby, (seriously, if you can’t keep a houseplant alive, it doesn’t instill a ton of confidence in consumers that you can grow good cannabis). It might seem small, but details and cleanliness really do matter. The subconscious mind adds up all these details and creates an overall impression about your business and brand…don’t let a bad first impression taint the customer experience.
Poor/Misinformation: Even after the “Start Low, Go Slow” edibles campaign was launched, when purchasing a 70mg Cheeba Chew one of our evaluators told his budtender that he had never consumed edibles before and asked how he should take it. He was told, “Well, I would probably eat the whole thing, but you might want just to bite it in half.” Misinformation like this can cause a ripple effect that affects companies beyond the dispensary itself. Proper information and patient/customer education is critical. Creating education opportunities and actively training budtenders to tailor their suggestions to the customer needs is the key to providing your audience with winning information.
You Never Asked Me to Come Back: If I come into your store and tell you that “I’m new to all this,” you can retain my business and loyalty on SO many levels. So why do most budtenders fail to mention membership or loyalty programs, much fewer invite customers to return? Even a simple “Hey, I’d love for you to come back and tell me how that worked for you, and we can make any adjustments that might be needed” is a simple, yet open invitation for a return visit. You’ve worked hard to get where you are today. You deserve to understand how customers view your brand and, in turn, give them a better experience.
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