Discuss about the Retail Management for Values Customer Satisfaction.
Woolworths is the leading Australian retailer. The company provides all sorts of grocery items as part of its marketing mix (Andrew, 2011). Some of the grocery products comprise of fruits, vegetables, meat, packed products among others. The company has also started selling stationary items, DVDs, and magazines. In each category, Woolworth allows its customers to have large variety of choice relating to local produce, brand, and international cuisine. This means its management values customer satisfaction as one of the key factors of maintaining good performance of the business.
To ensure continuous customer loyalty and satisfaction, the management ensures its products are tested and approved by experts to maintain good quality. The company has diversified range of products ranging from furniture, bags, housewares, beddings to clothing and accessories (Stanton, 2012). The diversified range of products has assisted its management for to cater the all-around needs of the consumers because it enables them to have all they need under one roof.
Woolworth has been trying to maintain similar or slightly higher prices than its competitors. Having learnt that, it offers a wide variety of premium brands in food chain as one of the strategies to keep the prices competitive in the market. The company uses various pricing strategies to ensure it serves people of different levels of income (George, 2013). The company also uses other unique tactics to ensure its pricing strategy attracts as many customers as possible. For example, frequent club is a reward program which provides $20 vouchers for every 200 points gathered. The customers are also provided with Woolworths shopping cards which automatically track various aspects like purchases, meaning its customers do not need to retain paper receipts.
Recently, Woolworth has introduced a new pricing strategy known as round numbers. Although various people including retail experts have criticized this strategy, Woolworth believes it certainly makes it easier for its customers to identify prices, and also creates references prices (Louis, 2011). The strategy was aimed at moving more than 20,000 of its products to round dollars and no cents. The company believes this pricing strategy provides customers with simpler price points to assist them in adding the cost of weekly shopping and in managing weekly budgets easily.
Promotion is always of keen prominence for this company (Louis, 2011). Recently, its management has been using it to attain some of its business goals. The company offers different loyalty schemes which comprise of petrol pump discounts to its consumers as one way of keeping long term relationships with them. Woolworth uses various media including magazines, newsletters and social media for efficient promotion.
Woolworth gives extensive deals and offers including gift cards to its customers as one way of making its customers realize why they should be associated with the company. Having realised that most of its customers are in one or more social media platforms, the company carry extensive promotion through the online media (Dee, 2011). The strategies of promotion correspond to every mean which this company uses to communicate the values and benefits of its products.
Although this company has tried to incorporate promotion in its marketing mix, it is yet to use it effectively to assist it in maintaining as many customers as possible (Ene, 2014). The company should incorporate as many promotional tools as possible in order to attain its targets. Some of these tools should include advertising with several channels, sales promotions among others.
The company currently operates more than 1000 stores in Australia, with more than 950 being supermarkets. Some of the Woolworth’s stores operate as Safeway stores in Victoria Melbourne (Kaifi, 2012). The company has also realised that with the current technological advancements and the desire for every person to me digitized, its business can thrive online and therefore its management has considered operating through different online platform. Alongside operating on these platform, the company has recently development a mobile app for the purchases to continue making itself more available to its consumers.
To make itself more available to consumers in different locations, the company has come up with various private label brands, like the Woolworth Homebrand, Woolworth’s gold, Woolworth select, Woolworth’s fresh among others (Gummesson, 2012). There are also other retail chains using the name of this brand located in United Kingdom, Mexico, Germany, among other countries.
Just like other big firms, Woolworth has realized the importance of using social media platforms to stay relevant to the lives of its customers. To become widely known and available to most customers, the company has made itself available to different social media platforms. Like for example, it has a very popular Facebook page with more than 800000 followers (Gupta, 2011). The company is also available through various other platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, twitter, among others. The kind of feedback which its consumers provide through these social media platforms helps its management to determine the kind of experience with they have with its brands.
Woolworth serves more than 18 million customers every week (Louis, 2011). Its Customers are one of the most important assets because they play a significant role in the performance and existence of the company. Its customers comprises of people of different age groups, gender, and social class. To ensure its customers maintain loyalty with the company, Woolworth ensures its products are of good quality and customer satisfaction is valued in everything the company does.
The company has various strategic objectives aimed at improving customer experience. For example, it aims at being a customer centric business. With this objective, it has been trying to define who its future customers are and what can be done to ensure their needs are addressed (Louis, 2011). The company has defined business-wide view of the Woolworth’s customer, which is based on customer’s mind-set, and their wants and needs as informed by lifestyle segments.
The company also has various strategies to build and maintain strong customer relations. For example, it uses its WRewards programme to ensure its customers have the best experience than the one they can have from its competitors (Gupta, 2011). This programme has remained Woolworth’s key strategy to increase the lifetime value for its consumers. The program enables the company to reward loyal customers and gather information to further understand the needs of its clients and align them with its total customer proposition.
In Woolworth, offering real value goes beyond offering its consumers with quality at a reasonable price. Woolworth always puts the customer first because it believes they are the reason the company is in business (Dee, 2011). Its management values customer feedback regarding their experience and views regarding what the company does best, and what should be changed to improve their satisfaction. Although this company tries to maintain its relationship with customers, competition makes it to experience challenges in maintaining its market share.
One of the recent aims of Woolworth is to ensure its stores meets the needs of its consumers. The company has been trying to consider various aspects in its stores like space, location, lighting and ventilation, to ensure they are fit for its target customers (Kaifi, 2012). To keep good and cost effective business, the management also considers a number of ‘green’ design elements like natural light and a system that automatically adjusts depending on the daylight conditions. The stores also recaptures waste heat from refrigeration to heat its stores.
For better customer experience, the company has considered placing enough spaces between the shelves to ensure the customers can spot their desired products from a distance. The spaces also allows free movement of people and trolleys (Gummesson, 2012). The stores are also deigned with considering security features like several emergency exit doors and CCTV cameras to monitors all activities around the premises.
Woolworth places various commodities in its stores to allow the customers have a wide range of selection and its aim of making all products under one roof to become a reality. The company places its products in a manner that can aid in making the consumers to have the best experience (Arun, 2015). The products are organized according to their category to assist the consumers to access them without difficulties. The use of tags placed at strategic points where customers can see them has also assisted its clients to have easy access products around the stores.
Placing a wide range of commodities allows the company to realize high customer turnout because consumers like obtaining products from places where they can get all what they need without wasting time (Ene, 2014). The manner in which the company presents its products in its stores has also promoted its sales because it brings some sense of attraction to the consumers.
References
Andrew, H. F. (2011). The Definitive Handbook of Business Continuity Management. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Arun, H. (2015). Case Study: Consumer’s Perception towards Private Label Brands in Retail Stores. Advances in Management, 8(1), 56-96.
Dee, M. (2011). National Competition Policy and the Retail Sector. Journal of Australian Political Economy, 67.
Ene, S. B. (2014). A Study on Corporate Image, Customer Satisfaction and Brand Loyalty in the Context of Retail Stores. Asian Social Science, 10(14), 89-105.
George, T. K. (2013). The AMA Dictionary of Business and Management. New York: AMACOM.
Gummesson, E. (2012). Total Relationship Marketing. London: Routledge.
Gupta, M. S. (2011). Consideration of Sources of Information as Selection Criteria in Mutual Fund Purchase: A Comparative Study of Retail and Non-Retail Investors. IUP Journal of Applied Finance, 17(1), 589-612.
Kaifi, B. S. (2012). Strategic Leadership Applied to Retail Management: Joe Contrucci Discusses the 21st Century Dynamic Organization. 17(4), 85-102.
Louis, D. C. (2011). Image and Personality: Two Complementary Tools to Position and Differentiate Retailers. International Management Review, 7(1), 12-65.
Stanton, T. (2012). Why Some Firms Thrive While Others Fail: Governance and Management Lessons from the Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press.
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