Morrisons Livingston: Grocer 33 store of the week

What has been your career trajectory at Morrisons? I’ve been the store manager in Livingston for about a year. Previously I’ve run superstores for Morrisons in inner city London, in Yorkshire and other parts of Scotland.

Could you tell me a bit about your store? We’re a large Morrisons store with a great customer and colleague base. For a big store, it’s got a great community feel. We’ve got some excellent colleagues who provide fantastic service and we’ve got some really loyal customers in what’s quite a competitive retail market here in Livingston. We’ve got a lot of people who are loyal to the brand and come back week after week, and a customer café that people really love as well. People know they can get their shop here and then go and have a fantastic meal with the really competitive pricing we have in our café. We feel like we can offer the full package in this store. I would say we definitely are a destination shop because of the size and scale of the store and all those additional elements: the bakery, the deli and the cake shop, where we make all our fresh cream cakes in store.

What are your customers like? They’re probably in that medium to affluent bracket. Our customers are looking for great quality, fresh products, and we have some fantastic meat and fish counters. We have an in-store bakery, and we also have our own floristry section as well. We try to provide great quality, but we’re also trying to really push home that price message, so people feel like they’re getting a great value proposition alongside that really high quality.

How has the year been for you so far? It’s been a really successful start to the year. We’re expanding the team, which is fantastic, and we’ve integrated the new colleagues into the team. We’ve also got a large home delivery operation here. There are many different elements of service that we’re able to offer to our customers. We’ve got new ranges –we now have a large Easter offering, gearing up for the Easter weekend. We just had Mother’s Day and within our floristry section we were able to offer loads of new bouquets and options for people to have bespoke, hand-tied flowers in store while you wait. This has been really popular and successful. And we also work with local suppliers in this part of Scotland, which is fantastic.

You had a perfect score on service this week. How do you ensure your store offers excellent service? Myself and my management team try to lead by example. We’re really fortunate we’ve got a great team here. We encourage people to be themselves and to go that extra mile. And because we have a lot of people coming back week after week, we really feel like we know a lot of our customers pretty well. We spend a lot of time with customers, whether that’s through assisted shops or through just speaking to them and building those relationships. People feel like they’re getting an additional level of service that they might not get elsewhere. Our colleagues thrive off that and the great feedback they get because of it. Key to good service is being friendly, and a smile goes a long way. Always being approachable and personable, and looking to help wherever possible – it starts straight from when somebody walks in.