Mary Portas: Secret Shopper

 

What’s more important-customer service or commission? To furniture salesmen it’s the latter, claimed retail expert Mary Portas on the second of her Secret Shopper programmes last night.

How to solve this? Send tough taking Ms Portas to Northern furniture chain CSL to teach staff how to be customer friendly and make an example of them. But not before going undercover in some of the UK’s largest furniture retailers-SCS and Harvey’s, where salesmen pushed on her a white sofa for her ‘teenage son’s Uni pad’, and a leather sofa for her home that she shares with her cats. ‘Cats avoid leather’, said the sales guy? To add to their misdemeanours she was advised to commit insurance fraud at many of the stores.

However CSL owner, Jason, 37, told Mary his business was different as the customer always comes first? Something Ms Portas proved otherwise, of course, at the chain’s Rotherham store.

Spending a day as a member of the furniture sales team, all men, she was paired up with the store’s top seller, who despite being on minimum wage,  earned £57,000 last year all down to commission. Nice work if you can get it?!

After observation of the salesmen she set them an exercise to find a specially selected group of customers a sofa each that they would A- be happy with and B- would fit in their home, very important. The salesmen failed miserably, surprise, surprise, has no-one ever watched Mary Queen of Shops?
Welcome Mary’s ideas to turn the store into a customer friendly one at a cost of half a million pounds for all branches.

Ideas  included:- Creating an inspiration station, where customers can create a room plan using I-Pads provided.

-Mood boards, rooms created within the store.

-A list of truths written by the owner to dispel confusion of varying ‘false’ discounts and eradicate the so called money back guarantee.

-Make amends with the angry customers who created a complaints website.

And like all good stories, after implementing Mary’s changes the store was 30 per cent up on their busiest day. A coincidence or Ms Portas’ magic touch?

Next week Mary cracks down on the phone shops (Wed 9pm CH4)