Angela Marshall, Morrisons Carmondean: G33 store of the week

Your store scored well for customer service. How have you achieved this? I have only been in the store for 11 weeks so it is cracking to win this. I am over the moon. I have run a lot of listening groups where staff can tell us of any frustrations. We are then trying to make positive changes. If there is anything customers feed back to us we are trying to respond. I have also increased the number of store inspections and did a lot of coaching with the senior team around availability, hygiene, the way we walk the store and PoS. It’s just getting back to basics.

How are you tackling availability? We are a small store so don’t have availability champions. But senior management do daily walks around the store. We have also increased the number of gap scans we do with one in the morning and an afternoon one. This allows us to investigate any gaps twice a day. We are working to get the team on board with this and to focus on it as a priority. It is about trying to change the mindset.

What has new CEO David Potts done and is it working? There has definitely been a change. Some of the changes have been excellent. We are now doing some work on regional ranges. This gives us an avenue to request a regional product if we think we can sell it. Customers like local things and to see us support their local area. The store now has to clean and tidy the shop floor three times a day, which has worked. We did quite a lot of new recruitment with the increase in staffing Potts introduced. We have been able to bring more staff through and you can see that there are more people on the shop floor. This has helped the shop floor service levels as well.

What is selling well? The ‘Made from Morrisons’ promotion we are running is highlighting what is unique. We make our own burgers, quiches and doughnuts and then there are all the things we do on our Market Street. This has worked at driving sales and there has been a lot of marketing and PoS to support it. We have a lot of lunchtime and after-work trade as we are near the station so we are selling well on our ready-to-go ranges. Like-for-like sales are strong in all these areas.

How are you chasing sales? We pick the sales challenges and get the team involved. The team pick their own items to promote and we have a bit of healthy competition. If we make it fun for them they seem to get behind it. We have a sales challenge board and have all the sales figures put up on that.