House of Fraser’s chief customer office has heralded its restructure to a more customer-centric approach, but admitted there is work to do.
The department store group unveiled an overhaul in July, which involves basing strategy on detailed customer insights from an internal team to “future-proof” the business in the face of fast-changing customer habits.
Talking about the changes – known at the retailer as Project Gold – at Retail Week’s Tech & Ecomm conference today, Andy Harding said 15 new roles were created and around 30 to 40 roles “fundamentally changed” in the “biggest ever reorganisation of the business”. It is recognition of the changing way customers are shopping across multichannel.
The group now has a unified customer insight team bringing together for the first time House of Fraser’s brand, CRM, product and multichannel functions.
Harding said: “There’s been a difference in the way people think. We expected that to take a while, but it has happened in weeks.”
But he added: “This is not job done, the idea of changing the business, it doesn’t end now. We will see the process happen over the next 12, 24 and 36 months.”
However, despite the focus on analysing customer data to inform decisions, Harding said there is still space for making decisions on instinct because House of Fraser has to remain agile to compete with its bigger rivals.
“We can’t have layers of decision making, you sometimes have to do things with a gut feel,” said Harding.
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