Supporting shop assistants is key to strengthening the position of a shopping centre

73% of consumers’ purchasing decisions are made when they are inside a store – this places a huge responsibility on shop assistants whose work and good rapport with customers have never been as important as today. Regardless of maximizing marketing impact, at the end of the day it is the in-store employee who is responsible for encouraging the customer to buy. We deliver retail asset services for shopping centres in various cities and are well aware of what works best in practice and of how important it is to invest in supporting and educating customer service staff. In tight market conditions, with high inflation eroding consumer purchasing power, we have developed a package of measures to help tenants increase in-store conversion and achieve higher turnover,

says Paulina Bauer, Head of Retail Asset Services, Cushman & Wakefield.

The quality of infrastructure, technical services, security and administration processes are key drivers of satisfaction of tenants with their presence in the shopping centres under our management. In today’s market conditions, retail landlords largely build their competitive advantage by taking care of the soft needs of their clients, for example by investing in the quality of the working environment for shop assistants, training courses to improve their selling and customer service skills, loyalty and incentive programmes,

explains Sylwia Wiszowata-Łazarz, Head of Marketing, Asset Services, Cushman & Wakefield.

Working with shopping centre landlords, we demonstrate that today it is worth investing in tenants’ shop assistants. Such measures will benefit stores and ultimately also investors. As part of our Retail Tenants Care, we offer advertising support, incentive schemes for tenants and in-store staff and competitions for sales teams,

adds Sylwia Wiszowata-Łazarz.

Our programmes to support shop assistants and our actions to transform shopping centres are likely to both improve store turnover and assist shopping centre landlords and tenants in pursuing pro-social goals. We are seeing a growing interest in our Retail Tenants Care, which we continue to develop to proactively address the needs of the retail market,

concludes Paulina Bauer.