With the announcement of the UK government's 'Comprehensive Spending Review', combined with the forthcoming Christmas shoppig period, retailers are feeling renewed pressure to build customer loyalty. With this in mind, Superdrug recently set about putting customer service at the heart of its strategy, being rewarded with a 12% increase in customer recommendations.
The health and beauty retailer teamed up with customer insight agency SMG to develop a programme of customer service improvements throughout all 900 stores in the UK and Ireland, resulting in the 'Easy to shop, easy to pay, hard to forget' campaign which not only improved customers' shopping experiences but also identified new opportunities for improvements and the growth of customer loyalty.
Superdrug had historically used a mystery shopper programme to collect customer feedback, but the limited visits per quarter that the programme provided were considered insufficient to collect a meaningful volume of reliable data.
According to Jeremy Michael, managing director for SMG, "We worked with Superdrug to develop recommendations to increase customer loyalty. Customers are now 10% more likely to return to Superdrug than they were before the start of the initiative."
Based on a continuous customer feedback programme, Superdrug developed new service standards in three key areas: staff training, staff shift times, and till interaction:
According to Alan Johnson, retail operations director for Superdrug, "SMG provided us with a tool that delivers instant feedback for all of our stores throughout the year, and gives us large volumes of feedback about what our service is really like."
SMG also works with other brands including Burger King, TK Maxx, and Pets at Home.
Categorised as: