An Investigation and a Report into the Customer Services at Sainsburys :: Business and Management Studies: Case Studies

An Investigation and a Report into the Customer Services at Sainsburys Introduction For my business report on customer service I have chosen to investigate Sainsburys. Sainsburys is a leading UK and US food retailer; although Sainsbury's main business activity consists of food sales they also have interests in financial and property markets. The Sainsbury's group consists of Sainsburys supermarkets and bank in the UK and Shaws supermarkets in the US and employ a total of 172,900 people throughout their company. What is Customer service? Customer service is very important to every company and keeping customers satisfied can lead to a big increase in profit. A survey carried out by NOP showed that reducing customer defections can raise profits by 25-85% and in 73% of cases the organisation in question made no attempt to persuade dissatisfied customers to stay with their company, despite 35% of them saying a simple apology would prevent them from moving to their competitors. Another survey carried out by HENL showed that a 1% cut in customer service problems could generate a 16 million pound profit for a medium sized business over 5 years. This shows that customer satisfaction can actually generate money. Another example of the benefits of keeping current customers satisfied are the surveys produced by TARP and PriceWaterhouseCooper. This TARP survey showed that 68% of customer defection takes place because the customer feels that they have been poorly treated and that it can cost up to five times more to buy new customers than to retain existing ones. Customer satisfaction not only benefits sales of goods and services but can also lead to bills being paid earlier by the customer. PriceWaterhouseCooper and the university of Bradfordsurveyed 3000 businessmen and the results show that if there was high customer satisfaction then bills were paid up to 14 days earlier than where there was poor customer satisfaction. All of this evidence shows that customer service is an integral part of a successful company. The importance of customer service to Sainsburys is reflected in their mission statement: 'Our mission is to be the customers first choice for food, delivering products of outstanding quality and great service at a competitive cost through working faster, simpler and together'. Types of customers There are many different types of customer and they fall mainly into two categories; external and internal. Â · External customers These are people who visit the store to buy their products or services and they all have different needs to be catered for. They are people such as the. Children (families)- Their need is equipment to be designed with their children's safety in mind. There will be a lot of families visiting Sainsburys to purchase