Shop Direct: customer satisfaction is as important as the bottom line

“Customer satisfaction is part of our reward structure,” said Dan Rubel at the British Retail Consortium’s (BRC) Retail Symposium. “Just hitting sales and profits isn’t enough. We want to see key customer metrics improving, because that is how you become a success long-term, which we will be.”

Rubel explained that, for Shop Direct, personalisation and relevance were key in ensuring customer satisfaction.

“Our to-do list on personalisation is much bigger than our ‘have done’ list,” he said. “It’s our biggest challenge because customers are so demanding in terms of relevance.

“We have so much [product] and we don’t want to present something irrelevant to our customer – she will switch off.”

He added that that Shop Direct’s customer profiling was targeted at 25- to 45-year-old working mothers, whom he termed “strivers and aspirers”.

“You need a demographic sizeable enough to represent a business win, but not so big that it becomes unmanageable,” he said. “If it is not well defined, then you will fall into the trap of creating a vanilla proposition that appeals to no one, and you will not know where to focus innovation and effort.”