Store of the week: Tesco Consett

Congratulations. How do you feel? We’re delighted. It’s great to have got this award for Consett and for Tesco. I think we’ve got a great team here.

One of the pieces of feedback from our mystery shopper was over the great customer service. How do you encourage that? We’ve done a lot of work on service both as a company in every store and as a brand new shop. We talk about service all the time and celebrate good service with staff. We have a spin-the-wheel concept we introduced about a month ago. If a member of staff gets nominated three times by customers for good service, they spin the wheel to win prizes, like a bottle of spirits.

How was the bank holiday weekend? Very busy despite the rain. It starts raining and people come shopping! We sold a lot of booze. The basic range does really well - especially items such as toasters and kettles. TVs have also been selling well. We have also been doing in-store sampling because it engages with the customers.

You have click & collect in store and also scan & go. How are customers taking to them? They are doing really well. We are trying to encourage customers in store [to try click & collect]. We go around the store and promote it. We also have POS on shelves highlighting click & collect. We’re a scan and go shop and we are really promoting that too. It has been really popular: we’ve got 1,400 customers a week using it but we want to push that up.

You have a Morrisons very close - just 0.1 miles away. How do you keep an eye on the competition and have you been impacted by Morrisons ‘I’m cheaper’ price campaign? Morrisons has suffered more than us. We’ve had a lot of customers saying they like to come to us as it’s a brand new store. We also visit our competitors to see what they do, what we can do better and then feed any good ideas back.