Customer Experience Excellence Report

It is raw economics that is shaping the consumer and retail experience. It is an industry grappling with a vicious cycle. The profitability of online is weak at best, so firms have attempted to shore up margins by introducing “costs of convenience”, bringing in charges for returns and delivery slots. Whilst this helps margin it is stifling growth which, in turn, is reducing the economies of scale of the online channel.

"Whilst demonstrating resilience in a difficult economic environment, shoppers are continuing to spend. They have, however, changed their purchasing habits, they are buying less or buying cheaper. They are buying “better value” (cheaper items) and buying more promotional items, shopping at lower-cost retailers or buying brands that cost less."

Duncan Knight, Partner, Customer & Operations Consulting – Consumer & Retail

Grocery retail companies in the UK top 100

Ocado
M&S Food
Waitrose & Partners
Aldi
Sainsbury’s
Farm Foods
Lidl
Tesco

Source: Based on the views of 13,143 consumers in the UK CEE 2023/24 research

Top 10 non-grocery retail companies in the UK top 100

Lush
John Lewis & Partners
Specsavers
Vision Express
Richer Sounds
Lakeland
Chanel
Waterstones
M&S
Apple Store

Source: Based on the views of 13,143 consumers in the UK CEE 2023/24 research

An interview with Steve Knights at Lakeland

Lakeland performs well in our customer experience index - what improvements have you put in place for customers over the past year?

We have focused on our position as a product specialist by investing further in our in-house product training programme. This has resulted in record customer feedback scores of 98% for Colleague Product Knowledge.

Lakeland performs above the non-grocery retail average for all Six Pillars, in particular for Time and Effort. Have there been any specific initiatives to make life easier for the customer?

With the ever evolving customer journey across multiple touchpoints and channels, Lakeland have invested heavily in a unified view of both our supply chain and the customer, enabled by our myLakeland membership scheme. This unified view allows colleagues to help and support our customers across all channels for example by ordering products not in store to be delivered free to a customer's home.

Customers are looking for a mix of technological convenience but with a human touch - how are you managing this?

At Lakeland technology is used to drive greater efficiency for simple transactional customer touch points e.g. automated tracking prompts for delivery progress. These efficiencies are enabling increased 'human investment' in the more complex and emotional customer touch points e.g. advising a customer which Lakeland heated airer is best for their needs.

Companies that make big advances technologically have had to harness data and often describe having to create a “data driven culture” - is this an area that you have focused on?

Like many retailers over the past few years, Lakeland has increased investment in our in house data and insight capability, but we prefer to see this capability as an enabler of a 'customer driven culture'. This is epitomised by the fact that all Lakeland colleagues, from IT and Data to Customer Services, have the same shared objective regarding 'customer happiness', which is reported on weekly across the business.