Retail: What Your Customers Want

Figures from the company’s Convenience Tracking Program (CTP), which canvasses the opinions of more than 30,000 shoppers across the UK, showed consumers now value availability ahead of other factors such as customer service and convenience, a dramatic shift as one year ago, availability was ranked as only the fifth most important priority for shoppers.

Him! director, Peter Segal, attributed the rise in importance of availability to the strong increase in general standards of convenience retailing by the multiples.

“People are increasingly time poor and that is affecting these numbers, but their expectations are also getting higher,” he said.

The CTP data showed that - as in last year’s survey - the main reason for shoppers failing to purchase items was because they were out of stock. But there had been a seven percent improvement on 2006.

The number of people who failed to buy products because they were unable to find them doubled, while four times as many consumers cited incorrect pack sizes as the reason they did not purchase a product.

Mr Segal said, “Our figures show just how complex consumers are becoming and that they want more from their convenience stores. Retailers need to think a lot harder then about their offering and ask themselves if they are keeping up to speed with customer needs.”

Customer service was ranked second by the survey and Mr Segal said this remained an area where independents could set themselves apart from multiples by moving their relationship with customers from the simply functional to the emotional. “Nothing will have a greater impact on business and the major multiples will never be that involved or interested in community-level marketing,” he said.