Serving our customers

Customer Satisfaction

Customers’ satisfaction – both the product and shopping experience - is one of the strongest drivers of our performance, and we have processes dedicated to understanding and responding to our customers’ views. We have developed a range of policies and standards in response to customer issues and we offer a 30 day product returns policy, to ensure our customers are completely satisfied.

General complaints – including those relating to product safety and quality – are tracked centrally allowing the team to identify possible problems with particular manufacturers or product ranges. The lessons learned are then fed into product development and improvement for future years.

To track our performance we use a number of different indicators, which are commercially sensitive to our business and not for public disclosure. These indicators include:

• Exit and till prompt surveys: asking departing customers for their views.
• Customer listening groups: convening groups of customers to gain more in-depth information.
• Independent customer research: market research to measure public and customer perception of our businesses, now including social and environmental issues.
• Monitoring complaints: tracking and recording the number and nature of calls to customer help lines to give an indication of our service standards.
• Levels of product returns: (where measured) allowing us to identify poorly performing ranges or suppliers.
• In-store waiting times: carefully monitored in all Argos stores.
• Mystery shopping surveys: using secret market researchers to test out the quality of service and the environment in a particular store.

As an indicator of how well we are doing, over the last year we only had one complaint within our Argos stores for every 22,000 orders placed. Within Homebase, the corresponding figure was one complaint for every 8,000 orders placed. Additionally, a survey undertaken by Verdict Research, an independent and well respected market research organisation, ranked Argos second in their survey in customer satisfaction.

Responsible marketing

We work hard to ensure that the way we market our products through in-store point of sale material and our advertising, via the Internet, press and TV campaigns, is fair and representative. Strict guidelines are placed upon us by the Advertising Standards Authority and Trading Standards, against which we have detailed sign-off procedures to ensure they are met.

Our customer communication is usually value-led and takes the form of product features and promotional pricing. For all retailers there is a balance to be struck between product advertising and stock management. In some cases where a promotion has proven to be hugely successful we can run out of stock before the end of a promotion and due to the nature of the advertising lead times, this can sometimes mean that customers become disappointed that a product offer is no longer available. We monitor this situation carefully and minimise occurrences through using carefully constructed sales forecasts based on past performance, as a basis for stock orders.

Responsible financial services

Our financial services business provides store cards to our customers, together with a range of other lending and insurance services. These services are by their nature subject to intense regulation which we are committed to complying with through a framework of robust controls. In addition, we have adopted a number of practices which take us beyond our regulatory obligations to ensure that we treat our customers fairly.

We are committed to acting as a responsible lender and through our store cards we provide access to affordable and transparent credit that enables our customers to budget effectively. If customers’ circumstances change (e.g. through unemployment or hospitalisation) our collections team aims to work with customers to agree affordable payment plans. We employ credit assessment and fraud prevention techniques aimed at protecting customers from taking on commitments they are unable to keep and to provide protection against fraud such as identity theft. We provide and use data shared through the Experian credit reference agency and with the Credit and Insurance Fraud Avoidance Scheme (CIFAS). Use of this data is an essential element of decisions affecting initial account openings, credit limit setting and our continued acceptance of orders.

We continue to develop our programme of training to ensure appropriate levels of competence for all colleagues involved in the provision of our financial services and embedded quality controls aim to ensure that we meet regulatory requirements, internal standards and customer expectations. Over the last twelve months we have made significant improvements to our complaints database to enable us to undertake detailed root cause analysis which is used to support ongoing product and customer service improvements.

Product selection and safety

Product quality and safety are assured in a number of ways. Suppliers must demonstrate compliance to all relevant standards before the product is accepted, and the business has a dedicated team of internal specialists to monitor product safety and quality, including commissioning our own tests if required. These initial checks are supplemented by our product safety hazard monitoring (‘Haznot’) system. In addition, we monitor customer feedback and returns data which alerts us to possible problems, enabling us to improve specifications or recall products if necessary.

During this year, we introduced eight new Intranet based training courses on consumer law for store managers and two general courses covering basic consumer law and age-restricted sales.

In addition, we have processes in place to guard against product selection which may cause offence to some of our customers. Home Retail Group’s product buyers are supplied with a set of guidelines to use when selecting new products. These were developed to help our buyers identify potentially sensitive issues, such as products that may cause ethnic/religious offence, ‘anti-social behaviour’ (e.g. sale of toy guns), the use of fur, materials sourced from the wild and inappropriate products for children.

Accessibility for all our customers

Home Retail Group is committed to making our stores and services accessible to everyone. Information on access facilities at all Argos and Homebase stores is available on www.directenquiries.com. ‘Minicom’ facilities are provided for customers with hearing impairments who wish to seek help from our customer service call centres. We continue to collaborate with the charity Talking Newspapers Ltd to develop an audio catalogue service and produce 6,000 copies for customers each year.

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