In today's day and age competitors are plenty, and the service that retailers provide can either make you stand out above the rest or cause your business to get a bad reputation. It is known that bad customer service news reaches twice as many ears as praise for good service. So where does the service you provide begin and end?

There is a common misconception among retailers that your customer service starts when clients enter your store for the first time. On the contrary, your service actually starts from the moment a client gets in their car to drive to your store.

If your consumers have to drive too far to do business with you, you are already not providing a good service. The same goes for being located in a bad part of town where your customers feel unsafe to park on the street, get harassed by security guards and or feel at risk of being robbed.

Stores based in Shopping Malls are no exception. If the parking rates are too high, the mall is run down and neglected or the layout is inconvenient, unfortunately your store is part of the mall and therefore associated with the mall’s shortcomings.

Upon entering the store, there are many more aspects where bad service can come into play. If signage or store layout is not logically planned, it leaves the consumer frustrated because everything takes longer to find. The easier it is to navigate in your store, the better the shopping experience will be to a consumer. Making matters worse, is when the customer is trying to find help within the store and there is no staff to available to help because there are too few of them for the amount of people visiting your store.

Friendliness, or should I rather say unfriendliness, is the number one cause of unhappiness in customers. Imagine shopping in a self-service store where you would have no staff to deal with and everything is automated. How nice? Now imagine if you did not have to even drive to this store. Even better! The point I am making is that retailers are competing with online and automated stores that are more convenient, so this makes it even harder for them to provide good service and even more important to focus on the things they can change.

Another crucial part of good or bad service is the level of knowledge and expertise staff can provide on floor level. When going to specialty stores like gadget, hardware, electronic or jeweler sores, consumers usually needs the expertise they can provide as it's not common knowledge. Often you find that staff on the floor cannot offer customers their expertise or something as basic as product knowledge.

Not having enough stock or not having enough options on the floor is also among the most common areas of bad service. Especially, and this is a true story that happened to me personally, if you go to a chicken take out and they have run out of chicken.

Coming to the end of the shopping trip, often clients are inconvenienced at the checkout by security needing to go through bags or checking slips. Then upon getting out of the mall or leaving the store’s parking, customers further get bombarded by security guards wanting tips, this all leaves a lasting impression of the bad shopping experience you had.

Your service actually ends with your customer driving home, and not when leaving your store as many retailers think. So for retailers the focus should expand to create a holistically good customer service experience from beginning to end.  Remember that it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience, and that could be costly for your business.

Lorraine Coetzee is a Digital Media Project Manager for Sound Idea Digital | Lorraine@soundidea.co.za | @lorraine101 | Sound Idea Digital | www.soundidea.co.za