At WHSmith, ‘Customer Focus’ is central to our business. It is important to us that we understand our customers’ needs so that we can meet their expectations in our service, product offer and operations.
Customer service
Customer service standards remain a key focus of WHSmith. To ensure we continue to deliver high standards and meet our customers’ expectations, we carry out regular staff training on customer service standards. This year, 800 store managers took part in voice conferences led by Group Chief Executive, Kate Swann, and High Street Stores Director, Simon Marinker, which focused on the standards we expect all of our colleagues to deliver when serving customers.
We review our performance through an independently conducted Customer Satisfaction Monitor. This survey is conducted twice a year during our busiest periods. Each survey has a sample size of 500 and assesses performance in areas such as friendliness and helpfulness of staff, time spent queuing and store cleanliness and tidiness. During the year, our customer satisfaction score was 8.0, and our scores have remained consistently high over the last four years. Our overall score for satisfaction with the friendliness and helpfulness of staff ranks especially high at 8.7. We use the findings of these surveys to ensure that we continue to focus on the key elements of service that are most important to our customers.
We know that queuing time is an important consideration for our customers and we continue to look at ways to improve our performance in this area. During the year, following extensive trials, we began the phased roll-out of self service tills in some of our larger High Street stores and airport units. The feedback from customers to date has been extremely positive, with improved queuing times and no detrimental impact to overall customer service.
We continue to implement a programme of improvements to our stores. The focus is on improving the store environment through changes to lighting and flooring, as well as making the stores easier to navigate so that customers can find what they are looking for easily and quickly.
Product choice
We seek to ensure that our product range offers our customers choice. As part of a varied offer of products, we provide customers with the opportunity to purchase products with a reduced impact on the environment as well as those that support charitable causes. These products include stationery products made of recycled content, such as lever arch files, notebooks and A4 paper, or pencils made from FSC-certified material.
Our charity partnerships also provide opportunities for customers to support specific causes. This year we worked with charities such as the British Legion, Marie Curie Cancer Awareness and the Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign, through the sale of poppies, pin badges and pink filofaxes. We continued to offer our ‘Adopt an Animal’ range of charity Christmas products, and a wide range of charity Christmas cards. In terms of our books offer, we have a dedicated local books buyer to ensure that our stores have a range of books that are relevant to the area where they operate, for example publications on places of interest, local history, tourist guide books and work by local authors. We also promote books supporting charities, for example Comic Relief, and give high profile exposure to debut authors through the Richard and Judy Book Club launched in 2010 exclusively with WHSmith.
Improving access for customers
It is our aim to make our stores accessible to all customers. We pay particular attention to our disabled customers and are working to ensure that our stores can accommodate their needs. To meet this need, we continue to install customer service lifts, automatic doors and hearing loops. We are also updating many of our stores, and in doing so have widened aisles and created store environments that better accommodate customers who use mobility scooters or wheelchairs, as well as parents with push chairs. We offer information about the access features of all our stores on our website. These details include information on automatic doors and lifts in our stores. We also continue to provide diversity training and awareness using training guides designed and printed by the Employers’ Forum on Disability, specifically for WHSmith.
Responsible retailing
We take seriously our responsibility for the products we sell, and we are committed to listening to our customers’ feedback. Our Marketing Code of Practice sets out the standards we follow in our promotional activity, marketing and advertising. In practice this ensures we sell products that are safe, fit for purpose, meet legal standards and are never described in a misleading manner, particularly when marketing to children.