Welcome to this year’s IRUK Top500 The Customer Performance Dimension Report, where we focus on how the UK’s leading retailers are serving the people who should be at the heart of any retail business – their customers.
Today’s customer is firmly in charge, setting out where, when and how they’d like to shop. Their expectations have been raised by leading retailers offering new levels of service in recent years. It therefore makes perfect sense that retailers who give them the experience they demand are more likely to prosper.
We assess how well ecommerce and multichannel businesses are serving their shoppers, looking at our research to understand how responsive and relevant the user experience that they offer is. At its core, selling now relies on giving shoppers the choice of how they want to buy.
Personalisation goes that step further to learn from the choices that shoppers have previously made in order to offer service in the future.
In this report, we’re sharing practical examples of how the most successful retailers approach the job of satisfying their customers, at a time when those customers have come to expect a seamless, joined-up experience that makes shopping something that’s easy to do. We’re also looking at how the Top500 as a group are working to serve shoppers, and how much that has changed since last year.
Our performance-based assessment of customer-focused strategies among Top500 retailers, seen through the prism of RetailX research, is designed as a tool that retailers of all sizes can use to assess their own performance, by benchmarking it against what the Top500 do to find areas where strategic improvement can put them ahead of the crowd.
We believe that our findings will be of interest to retailers of all sizes. We are sure that you will find this report useful and look forward to your feedback on new areas that we should consider in future iterations of this research.
