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NEWS
N Brown Group under spotlight
over interest rates A report in the Guardian which included commentary from the debt charity Stepchange highlighted that a third of the clients helped by the charity had run up an average of £2000 debt by shopping from websites including
very.co.uk and
simplybe.co.uk Customers were being charged 58.7
per cent APR by N. Brown Group brands, said the article, which also found that 1.9 million people used “catalogue credit” to pay for Christmas gifts in 2015 and that around 10 per cent of calls to National Debtline are about catalogue debt. A spokesperson for JD Williams, Ed Watson, commented in the article that the company was responsible and it provided an option for people who wouldn’t ordinarily receive credit and that its rates reflect the risk, but that a significant number of customers pay their accounts in full each month and do not therefore pay any interest.
Boden deploys 3D
body scanning Boden has conducted 3D body scans on 200 invited customers so as to better gauge average shape and sizes. It deployed a mobile white light scanner from Sizemic which collects 800,000 data points, taking 150 measurements a second.
The Hut Group acquires Grow
Gorgeous Te Hut Group has acquired the Grow Gorgeous haircare brand from Canadian business Deciem. Grow Gorgeous is understood to have sales of around £17m and, in the UK is sold in Boots and Selfridges stores.
Wesfarmers start as they mean to go on
New Homebase owner, Wesfarmers has wasted no time since completing its acquisition to make changes to the incumbent UK management team. With Peter Davis moving in from
Australia to take up the role of managing director, Echo Lu who had held the position has left the business along with finance director Don Davis who will be
replaced by Australian Rodney Boys after a handover period. It is also understood that Chris McDonough, Paul Emslie and Ewan McMahon who respectively served as marketing director, commercial director and retail operations director have lost their positions. It was further revealed that Wesfarmers will rebrand Homebase under its Bunnings trading style.
Morrisons secures Amazon partnership Te extended service is expected to
Amazon’s Pantry offering which launched in the UK in November to offer top branded ambient products will now be greatly expanded following a wholesale partnership agreed with Morrisons which will see the latter provide fresh produce, frozen foods, meat and fish for Amazon Pantry & Prime Now customers.
launch in the summer. In addition the supermarket is working to extend its arrangement with Ocado to enable it to expand its own online delivery service. It is also rumoured to be taking space in in Ocado’s new customer fulfilment operation in Erith from 2017 as well as adopting its Ocado Smart Platform.
Poor customer experience loses UK brands £234 billion a year
Poor customer experience is costing UK brands at least £234 billion a year, as customers abandon online purchases in frustration and take their business elsewhere, according to new research from cloud-based contact centre solution provider Magnetic North.
Te survey of 1,000 consumers
compared buying experiences across multiple market sectors, including utilities, phone, TV and broadband, clothing, travel, home improvement, entertainment and groceries. It found that 92 per cent of consumers have had a poor customer experience and one in three have acted on their frustration by abandoning a purchase because they couldn’t find the information they needed.
Te survey highlights a preference
for dealing with businesses via the web, with 62 per cent preferring to research online and 69 per cent preferring to make a purchase online. Te web is even the preferred channel for negative feedback, with 41 per cent of consumers preferring to make complaints online, compared to 24 per cent on the phone, showing that brands need to make the whole customer experience multichannel right through to the feedback process. Consumers are increasingly making purchases via their mobile, with one in five consumers preferring to research potential purchases or service providers on a mobile or tablet device, highlighting the importance of brands making the entire customer experience mobile friendly.
Direct Commerce |
www.directcommercemagazine.com Te UK’s consumers are not just
abandoning one-off purchases, they are also switching long-term allegiance as a result of poor customer service; almost half (46 per cent) of consumers have moved to a competitor because of poor customer service. Top reasons for switching to a competitor include difficulty finding out how to contact customer service (71 per cent), waiting in contact centre queues with no call back option (66 per cent) and dealing with a contact centre agent who has no knowledge of the customer’s previous interactions (66 per cent). Te report reveals that 71 per cent of
consumers would consider moving to a competitor if they had to repeat their query to multiple contact centre agents and 32 per cent would go to a different business straight away if the business did not meet their expectations for a response time to a query. Commenting on the research, David
Ford, Managing Director of Magnetic North, said: “Te customer experience landscape has changed, customers now hold the power and they won’t hesitate to take their business elsewhere if brands can’t meet their demands. Businesses will have to adapt to becoming more customer centric in order to stay competitive. “Negative experiences are resulting in customers abandoning purchases and this is costing UK brands billions each year and with our research revealing that 92 per cent of consumers have had a bad customer experience, no brands can afford to be complacent.”
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