MERCHANT FOCUS: GRAHAM THE PLUMBERS’ MERCHANT
THE TIMES R
eaching Graham’s 85th birthday is a great achievement and illustrates that the trade sees us as a trusted brand that they can rely on. The key to Graham’s success is without a doubt the people. One of our customer promises is: ‘You talk to people in the know’ and that really is the case. Currently, we have a collective customer service experience of 9,000 years across our in-branch staff – and that’s a lot of knowledge, expertise and experience.
Of course, employee experience and satisfaction is crucial to staff retention and, in turn, great customer service. Many of our Graham staff have been with us for most of their careers, and truly live and breathe what we do. In a recent internal survey, 89% of employees said they felt proud to tell others they work for Graham. That’s wonderful and feedback we’re incredibly proud of. We have recently introduced a new long service award badge system. It’s a simple but effective way to both acknowledge our staff and allow them to highlight to their own customers their length of service. Complementing this is a new employee recognition awards scheme, enabling positive feedback from fellow employees and also customers to be recognised and rewarded. So far we have had a really positive response from staff in terms of both the badges and the awards scheme and we hope that these will continue to help promote a productive and happy workforce, which in turn will impact on the customer experience.
Tell Graham has been an active part of the Graham processes for many years now. While
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GRAHAM GROWS WITH
85 years old this year and recently under new ownership, Graham Plumbers’ Merchant has taken a modern approach to customer service and experience, as marketing director, Ian Kenny tells BMJ.
first and foremost a rating mechanism, it is also crucially a listening tool. We have and always will act on the feedback and comments received to help improve service. One of the key insights it gives us is changes in local stock demand. It means we can be agile – acting on and amending stock intake depending on the local customers’ needs and preferences. ‘You always get the products you’re after’ being another of our customer promises that we strive to achieve.
This year we also introduced a new trading
system. For a business with a long service history, it is important to stay relevant to the changing circumstances that we face. While an element of that relates to enforced issues such as COVID-19, it also applies in areas such as digitalisation, which is why we introduced the new trading system. The integrated system provides a telephone service, customer specific pop-up, automated customer messaging, user integrated CRM Data as well as automated purchasing routines – to name just a few of the features. These are services that will benefit all customers and colleagues, and not just those younger customers more adept with technology.
Training for the new trading system took place between September 2020 and January 2021 via coronavirus safe methods such online training, video calls and some face to face sessions where restrictions allowed. It was crucial that the training was flexible based on the varying restrictions local to our branches. We did not lose a single day of trading before, during or after the launch, which is a fantastic achievement and we are grateful to our staff
for their time and patience with the roll out. COVID-19 of course, affected Graham’s processes and customer service on a wider scale. The safety of our colleagues, customers
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net August 2021
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