Want your customers to have a cheery shopping experience this holiday season? It will involve a lot more than stocking your stores with hordes of employees.

According to Linda Shea, global managing director of customer strategies at Opinion Research Corp, retailers need to look at their entire customer experience when figuring out the best way to provide proper customer service to their shoppers.

That could mean adding more signage in the stores to make them easier to navigate; making sure check-out lanes are running smoothly to get customers in and out quickly; adding a greeter at the door to immediately answer questions; or providing more self check-out aisles.

“Who is your target market?” is what companies need to be asking themselves when they are building a customer service strategy, she said in an interview.

For instance, a store that has a large number of senior citizen shoppers might not want to install a row of self-check out stations because chances are, they will not get used by that shopper, she said.

“It’s all a function of your demographic profile,” she said.

While companies may hesitate to invest in customer service and the overall customer experience because they cannot see an immediate financial benefit, she said they should realize that a customer who has had a bad experience can cost them money down the road — especially because there is a tendency among shoppers to broadcast a bad experience.

“You can be assured a lot of people are going to hear about it,” she said. “It’s long-term damage.”