Christmas is the peak trading period for most retailers and a time of massive opportunity – one only needs to look around at excitable shoppers for confirmation.
But the question remains of how best to maximise this one chance to make a good year great, or rescue a flat set of figures.
The key is in customer service. Too often around Christmas this message gets lost, but it has to remain a cornerstone of retailers’ focus.
Customer service and expert knowledge is crucial for us in the electricals business, because it clearly differentiates us as a specialist retailer in a crowded market.
We bend over backwards to make Christmas easier for our customers, offering services such as Click and Collect and home deliveries before 10am seven days a week. But, of course, the real secret to customer service lies in making sure you have the right people and you train them properly.
Like so much about Christmas these days, hiring extra people for the festive season starts early, in September. The process is a search for people with talent and personality, who can talk to customers and excite them about our products.
It is always important to make peak colleagues feel they are a key part of the team. This is reflected at Comet by the proportion who stay with us in permanent positions, many going on to forge successful long-term careers with the company. Naturally, this also represents a huge opportunity for us – the chance to find and keep the best talent in the market every year.
It is imperative that you invest in your peak colleagues if you hold in high esteem – and want to protect – the standards of customer care that your brand has lovingly built.
After all, your peak recruits are your ambassadors just as much as your permanent workforce and must all be trained to attain a high standard of knowledge within a short time frame. Comet, for example, undertakes an intensive programme of e-learning and one-to-one coaching on the shopfloor every year.
With call centres equally under pressure over Christmas, our peak call centre recruits benefit from a month’s training before taking calls and are shadowed by expert sales managers in what we affectionately call our dolphin pool.
Finding and keeping the right people is not the only focus. You need to make sure that you have the right products in the right place at the right time, while also managing the impact on the environment.
In our eight-week peak period, the Comet fleet will travel 1 million miles, making nearly 8,000 deliveries to our 250 stores. After all, we need to make sure our peak workforce have a great Christmas too – with lots of great products to excite and enthuse our customers with.
Hugh Harvey, Managing director, Comet
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