Top 5 Tips to Improve Your Dispensary Customer Experience

Providing a unique dispensary customer experience requires careful planning and a creative strategy to ensure your clientele leave satisfied. There are several ways you can curate what your patrons see, hear, and smell when they shop at your cannabis retailer and working with your staff to make it memorable.

In this article we’ll suggest a few ways you can customize your marijuana dispensary to make a lasting impression.

Define the Customer Experience

There are certain aspects of your cannabis business that really help define your dispensary customer experience. These key components are the basic principles of how consumers interact with your business from discovery to making purchases. Below is a brief list of bullet points outlining how your marijuana retailer can engage with potential patrons:

• Awareness: Making customers aware of your existence as a cannabis brand.

• Discovery: When customers discover the types of products and services you offer.

• Cultivation: When you begin building a relationship with potential customers in hopes to make a sale.

• Advocacy: Suggesting specific products for a consumer that will enhance their quality of life.

• Purchase/Service: Selling cannabis products to your clientele and providing excellent service to ensure their return.

Building Brand Awareness

In order for your cannabis business to grow, you must dedicate time and a budget to building your brand. Raising awareness of your marijuana dispensary can be accomplished using multiple means of marketing and online listings. Here are a few examples:

• Create engaging content for your social media accounts and website

• Attend public forums and events relating to the cannabis industry

• Register your brand with online listings and dispensary directories

• Make mutually beneficial promotional partnerships with popular cannabis manufacturers

• Use targeted marketing campaigns with your advanced dispensary point-of-sale software

Educating Clientele

Not every customer that enters your cannabis retailer will have previous experience with using marijuana and will be very curious about the various products. Training your budtenders to identify and educate first time users will be an essential part of creating a positive dispensary customer experience.

Taking the opportunity to inform new or potential patrons on the variety of products you carry using in-store materials, your website, or even social media will often convert curiosity into action. Knowledge is power and by educating your clientele about different strains, methods of consumption, and dosage they’ll be able to buy with confidence based on their preferences.

Exceptional Service

Once you have customers in-store the focus transitions to providing excellent service at the point-of-sale. This is the crucial time period where you want to leave a strong impression and show them how much you appreciate their patronage. The goal is to not only obtain the purchase value of the customer but the lifetime value of the customer. Ensuring first time customers come back time after time for the same level of service is paramount. Try these tips to improve your dispensary customer experience:

• Offer loyalty programs that reward shoppers that make large or frequent purchases.

• Give them ‘swag’ that promotes your cannabis brand as extras when preparing their exit packaging.

• Make it personal. Teach your sales associates to use the dispensary software so they can call the customers by name and see what products they’ve purchased on previous visits.

• Let it be known that questions are welcomed. If they need an explanation of a product or a tutorial on how it’s used, take the time to show them then and there.

Create a Customer Strategy

Developing a customer experience strategy is not a set it and forget it situation. Once you create your dispensary customer experience, find ways to improve upon it and take suggestions from your customers as well as you staff. The way in which you service your clientele should always be evolving and while the fundamental may remain the same, updating your policies, software, and marketing materials will be necessary. Your customer experience strategy should be end to end, from marketing to educating to selling.