Swot Analysis of Bizrate

Tutorial 1

To Serve or Not To Serve?

XYZ Co. is a high street retail company which is trying to differentiate itself via its service delivery. The company is a division of a large retail group. It has 2,000 employees and 200 shops. The company has been running two customer service programmes focused on front line staff over the past eighteen months.

The group measures customer service delivery in all divisional stores via a mystery shopping programme which is carried out every quarter. Currently XYZ Co. is bottom of the divisional league table and has been so for the past eighteen months. The operations director is particularly disappointed at this performance and is concerned that the customer service programmes have had little or no impact. As a result a team of consultants has been engaged to undertake a review of the company. You are that team.

The objectives of your review are to identify reasons why the organisation is performing badly in mystery shopper tests and the steps the organisation can take to make a quantum leap in its customer service. The operations director has given you access to the stores and their managers and staff.

You and your team have visited a cross-section of shops and interviewed members of managers and staff. You have also mystery shopped a selection of stores as a customer. The service you have received has been “indifferent” but certainly no better or worse than the majority of competing outlets on the high street. You have asked to interview members of the Head Office team but were told that “the customer service programme is focused on the shops not internal departments”, and permission was refused.

In your interviews with members of the management and staff, some consistent comments have been made about customer service and the organisational environment. A representative sample is given in the appendix.

Brief

Identify possible reasons why XYZ Co. does not appear to be customer focused. What hard and soft steps do...