Somerfield plc incorporates Somerfield and Kwik Save supermarkets which together operate over 1,300 stores in the UK.
The strategy for Somerfield plc is to be the leading small-format food retailer in the UK. Profit before tax has increased by 63% to £53.1m in ’05. “These are a good set of results that demonstrate the benefits of the continuation of our portfolio transformation strategy”.
Steve Back, Chief Executive
Customer satisfaction is a pivotal measure for any retail operation: customers’ in-store experiences not only drive their perceptions of the brand but dictate the frequency with which customers will use stores in the future.
The Global Insight division at Nunwood runs a quarterly customer satisfaction study for Somerfield: 50 customers are surveyed at each of the 600 stores four times per year. This provides satisfaction feedback on the key areas of quality, availability, staff and store environment. These results tailored to every store manager, regional, divisional and HQ director automatically through Nunwood’s online insight management system Fizz.
Somerfield required a way of using this quarterly satisfaction data to realistically (and fairly) target store managers and their teams. However, their portfolio of stores is considerably diverse in terms of size, location, car parking facilities and other factors beyond the store manager’s control, so comparing stores to each other, or indeed to the company average, was in some cases unfair.
The Market Analytics team at Nunwood developed a program of intelligent benchmarking to solve this problem. Regression analysis was used to determine what effect external factors beyond the store manager’s control (such as store size) have on customer satisfaction. Stores can then be handicapped or assisted appropriately.
As a result, each store within the Somerfield portfolio now has its own specific target benchmark scores, which we can state it is actually capable of reaching, and Somerfield can monitor which stores are performing on, over and below benchmark and reward store managers accordingly.
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