The programme has assessed a very broad range of product and service categories, reflecting the breadth of the product offer now offered by Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons as they try to extend their reach and share of the total British spend.
GAPbuster, the world’s leading customer experience agency, has conducted this year long programme in association with the Checkout team and has measured each retailer’s performance in five specific categories to assess the professionalism and consistency of the experience.
How did we measure their performance?
Each month GAPbuster sent its experience evaluators into 10 outlets nationwide of each of these retailers to measure the typical customer experience.
Each evaluation covered fivespecific areas:
* Speed of Service
* Staff Friendliness
* Staff Interaction
* The Checkout Transaction
* Store and Staff Presentation
Over the last 12 months, we have measured their performance in fresh meat, fresh bread, tobacco, pharmacy, lottery, fresh produce, photo processing, café, newsagents, fresh fish, cheese and customer returns categories – a comprehensive survey designed to really test for the best.
So why is consistency of the customer experienceso important?
The impact on the customer from the in-store experience is what really counts…and leads to either an improvement in brand loyalty or a reduction in it.
This impact is fundamental to the performance of the retailer. In many cases the product range on offer does not differ significantly by retailer and customer service is a key differentiator which can significantly affect customer loyalty.
GAPbuster studies over the past five years have demonstrated improvement in customer experience can have a strong and direct correlation on sales performance. A 1% increase in customer experience can lead to a 0.5% increase in sales performance when delivered consistently across the organisation.
So, in a multi billion sector such as grocery, the stakes are very high…and not surprisingly, the results of this survey have also been very close.
Overall Performance – Congratulations to Morrisons
It really could not have been closer, with just 0.3% separating Morrisons from Sainsbury’s after 12 tough months of battle.
With an overall score of 81%, Morrisons is the 2005-06 GAPbuster Customer Experience Champion, pipping Sainsbury’s into second place, with Tesco and Asda locked in joint third place with scores of 79.3% each.
Morrisons secured first place with individual scores of 89% for staff friendliness and 92% for transaction efficiency and store/staff presentation, which gave it the edge over its rivals.
Of the five categories measured, Morrisons won two of them and managed a second place and two third places to demonstrate the most consistent performance and therefore edge out its competitors to take first place overall.
It also scored the highest individual score, with 88% for the delicatessen experience and finished the year very strongly with scores of 84%, 88% and 84% for the last three month period.
The greatest potential it has for improvement lies in speed of service and staff interaction with customers.
Both of these areas are major drivers of customer satisfaction and are identified later as opportunities not just for Morrisons but also Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda.
Performance by category
Variable 1: speed of Service
The lowest scoring category in the evaluation, with Tesco the category winner with a score of just under 52%.
GAPbuster evaluators measure queue waiting time and service time taken during service.
The targets are to be served within one minute of reaching the counter area to make a specific product enquiry and then to be also served within one minute upon reaching the checkout.
These were tough targets to reach but they reflect the increasing desire of consumers to receive fast, efficient service and are the standards by which best practice can be set.
As can be seen, all four retailers struggled to reach this target and there is considerable scope for improvement, with Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons failing to hit even 50% for this measure.
The issue remains to balance the cost of opening more checkouts versus the operating cost of such increased levels of service. What this survey illustrates is the potential danger in under delivery of service.
Variable 2: Staff Friendliness
GAPbuster analysis in many retail markets worldwide consistently identifies the importance of staff friendliness and interaction on their overall level of satisfaction.
Within the grocery environment, the two key areas where staff friendliness is most evident is when making a product enquiry and the checkout experience.
The GAPbuster evaluators measure each retailer on their ability to provide a sincere, friendly greeting and farewell and also on the friendliness of the service interaction throughout the purchase/enquiry.
The winner of this closely fought category was Sainsbury’s, which demonstrated a high level of consistency throughout the year, scoring below 80% on only two occasions and hitting the maximum 100% three times.
The overall high score for staff friendliness indicates that this has now become a basic factor for in-store performance and that to stand out and differentiate in the sector will require more than the basic greeting and farewell.
Variable 3: Staff Interaction
The winner of the staff interaction category was Tesco by over four points – a clear lead over all of its rivals.
This potentially offers Tesco a key advantage with its customer experience, but only if it can raise its scores to at least an 80% level, where customers are achieving basic levels of satisfaction with the experience.
Staff interaction can make a huge difference to not only the overall customer experience but also to the amount that each consumer spends.
The ability of the store staff to identify and meet customers’ needs will very often make the difference between making that purchase and walking out of a store empty handed.
This is the prime opportunity in the overall in-store experience to create a strong affinity with the customer by offering excellent product advice and creating additional cross selling and up selling opportunities.
Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons need to close the gap on Tesco and rapidly move to the position where they are consistently scoring at the level of at least 80%.
This is a clear opportunity for improvement for all of our retailers.
The clear benefit from developing staff skills in such a way is three fold – staff feel more confident and motivated, customers feel valued and sales increase – a real win-win situation.
Variable 4: The Transaction
Congratulations to Morrisons for the best performance in transaction efficiency, with a score of over 91% and a highly consistent performance throughout the year.
Indeed on only two occasions did it slip below the 90% “customer advocacy” level and this consistency enabled it to outperform all of its rivals.
The GAPbuster evaluation measures queue waiting times, efficiency of the transaction and the interaction between the staff and the customer at the till.
All four retailers are delivering a highly efficient service and this has become a basic consumer expectation, not a point of difference.
Variable 5: presentation
Morrisons came out the winner with a score of over 91% again pushing it into the “GAPbuster advocacy” level threshold and establishing a clear superiority over its rivals.
Counter cleanliness and stock levels, store tidiness, wearing of staff uniform and name badges and appearance are all measured by the GAPbuster evaluators.
Morrisons’ consistency was the key to its success again, with its score dipping below 90% on only two occasions throughout the year.
On a general note, the wearing of name badges was a consistent failure point for all four retailers and an area with considerable scope for improvement.
In summary, congratulations to Morrisons and to all of its retail front line staff who have delivered the most consistent customer experience over the past 12 months of GAPbuster evaluations to become the 2005/06 Customer Experience Champion.
2006-07: The Challenge Ahead
This year’s competition proved to be very tough and very close, with all four retailers scoring around the 80% level and with fewer than three percentage points separating all four of them.
The overall closeness of the competition reflects the highly competitive grocery sector in the UK, but also indicates there is still significant potential for any of these four major players to raise their game over the next 12 months to pull away from their competitors
GAPbuster studies in many different retail sectors consistently show that a customer experience score of 80% will simply lead to basic levels of satisfaction, but this will not be sufficient to earn the loyalty of your customers.
True loyalty occurs with scores of 90% or above, when your customers actively recommend you and remember the experience as outstanding.
The question remains will our top retailers make the step change in the next year and push ahead in the customer experience battle?
Starting in November, GAPbuster and Checkout will be providing a second year of challenges and in addition to measuring the experience, will also be measuring the impact the experience has on the mystery customers, and how this affects customer perceptions on a wide range of key customer service issues.
GAPbuster Worldwide… Experiences are Everything
GAPbuster Worldwide is the world’s leading customer experience agency, operating in 37 countries worldwide for over 80 retail clients in a wide range of categories including grocery, fast food, fashion, petroleum and banking.
The unique GAPbuster system identifies the gaps between the brand promise (customer’s expectations) and the reality of their in-store experience, quantifying the issues that create the “gap”.
The GAPbuster system utilises information gathered from mystery shop visits, store audits and/or customer satisfaction surveys. No analysis is required at head office or store level, leaving store teams to focus on actions and creating fast track performance improvement based on best practice within their organisation.
Each store will receive an individual action plan within three days of the evaluation, highlighting the three key actions for the store to deliver a significantly improved experience for their customers.
The GAPbuster system automatically identifies the priority actions most closely linked to the retailer’s strategy via a score weighting system and generates a targeted action plan for each individual store to drive consistency of service. By doing this the retailer will truly create competitive advantage by delivering on the promise that “experiences are everything”. For further information on the GAPbuster performance improvement system, please contact Steve Raher on 01256 810988, by email at steve.raher@gapbuster.com, or go to www.gapbuster.com.
