People ask, What is retail customer service? The answer is that retail customer service is those small interactions when an associate is waiting on a shopper that should make the shopper feel like they are the most important person in the store.

Many retailers use customer service and customer experience interchangeably, but they are not.

Customer service is one-on-one between a salesperson and a shopper. The customer experience is the customer’s entire event of shopping in a brick and mortar retail store, from the moment they arrive in the parking lot all the way to the time they are back in their car. Note that the customer experience does not have to include customer service.

With online retail growing every year, retailers with physical stores are discovering that they have let their customer service decline over the years and, as a result, the entire shopping experience for their customers has kept them from coming back.

The unique advantage brick and mortar retailers have is that they can control the entire customer experience within their four walls. But how do you do it? That’s the key.

While many retail organizations think that retail salespeople are the only ones who need to excel at retail customer service, anyone who answers the phone, who is at a buy-online-pickup-in-store desk, a warehouse worker or a driver—in short, anyone who serves a customer—needs to know not just a philosophy of others first, but the exact steps to deliver it again and again.

You can’t create an exceptional customer service experience unless everyone knows exactly what that looks like.