Name: Tom Davies
Job title: Head of e-commerce trading at Waitrose
What is your focus for Waitrose online? We pride ourselves on knowing who our customers are, what they like and how they cook, and focus our website design around this. We also train our pickers to select items with the longest shelf life and best possible date for shoppers.
How are you attracting new customers to Waitrose online? Now more than ever, customers want great value alongside great principles. We’ve responded to this by launching our biggest-ever investment in price. Elsewhere we remain focused on driving loyalty through our MyWaitrose scheme, and have already built this with over £100m in personalised rewards for over eight million members.
What changes have you noticed in customer behaviour recently? We’ve seen demand for our own-brand Essential Waitrose range grow significantly. It’s shopped by nearly seven in 10 customers.
How are you planning to deal with deliveries during the hot weather? During hot or extreme weather our partners do everything they can to keep our shops and e-commerce deliveries operating as normal. In terms of our delivery fleet, our vehicle chassis are designed to operate in a wide range of climatic conditions. Unlike some other retailers, all our vans also have air conditioning to help our partners stay cool in the heat.
How have the recent supply issues affected the online business? Our team worked quickly to fix the cause and arrange extra deliveries to our branches, with our shops and online business now back to normal.
Our shopper noted there were two substitutions. Why was this? In March, we came out on top of the Which supermarket substitution survey in terms of providing the least substitutions and we always do our best to deliver everything, however if we’re unable to do so, we’ll find them the best alternative. When we do offer an alternative, our policies always benefit the customer – they always pay the lower price for a substitution, and never miss out on multibuy offers.
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