Carphone Warehouse 2016 Annual Report Download - page 18

Dixons Carphone plc Annual Report and Accounts 2015/16
Strategic Report
Strategy and business model
16
Business model
Our core retail business model, driven by customer insight,
comprises three pillars underpinned by a low-cost
operating model.
In order to ensure we understand what products and services
our customers want, how they use the products they buy from
us and what they think of the service they get from us, we use
extensive customer insights. This includes customer panels,
interviews, home visits and detailed surveys. We use this
information to build our ranges, improve our stores and
services and for other business decisions. This is supported
by mystery shoppers, exit surveys and customer feedback.
During the year our UK & Ireland and Nordics businesses
continued to improve customer satisfaction metrics and
reached record highs.
Taking each of the three pillars in turn, our model can be
described as follows:
Multi-channel
The shopping trip for customers is constantly evolving.
Our objective is to provide our customers with a seamless
and personalised experience where convenience, ease of
navigation and simplicity are key in attracting customers to
shop with us whether it is online, in-store or a combination
of both.
We constantly aim to develop and improve our customer
journey whether via our assisted sales tool Pin Point or by
improving stores, making them easier to shop in, with, for
example, improved navigation, better signage, and enabling
customers to interact with products before they buy. Within our
recently refitted stores, the TV and audio category is set up to
resemble a living room enabling customers to experience the
full sensation of a large wall-mounted 4K television with
surround speakers. These journeys are supported by product
specialists providing expert advice on the products’ features
and benefits.
Our websites are an integral part of the customer shopping
journey. In recognition of how customer trends are evolving we
have made it easier for our colleagues, in particular within our
CurrysPCWorld stores, to access products and extended
ranges in store.
Our training programmes, combined with our product learning
centres and customer journeys, provide our colleagues with
the right tools to understand customers’ needs and to provide
them with the complete solution to properly meet those needs.
We will continue to improve the training of our colleagues and
the ways in which we can make them experts in the products
we sell. For example they have recently undertaken a new
training programme focusing on selling multi-play.
Products
Combining our customer insight with our market-leading
presence we can make sure we have the right range of
products and services in our stores to suit customers’ needs.
Our scale and relationships with suppliers mean that we can
work with them to showcase the latest technology,
connectivity and products in our stores with areas dedicated
to key suppliers.
In consumer electronics, own-brand products enable us to
offer customers greater choice and access to a range of
products at competitive prices. We have defined a clear ‘good,
better, best’ brand range including: Currys and PC World
Essentials; Logik; iWantit; Advent; Goji; and Sandstrøm brands.
We see particular opportunities in the area of accessories and
essentials with, for example, our own range of Sandstrøm
cables. In addition, we continue to focus on the roll-out of our
kitchen furniture brand, Epoq, in the Nordics.
After-sales services and support
Our customers need help with their products, whether it be
delivery and installation, help keeping their products up and
running or repair should things go wrong. Our business in the
UK & Ireland sets the benchmark for our services infrastructure
under our Geek Squad and Knowhow brands, the latter of
which is also available across the Nordics.
We operate the largest network of two-man deliveries in the
UK with an average of 50,000 deliveries per week enabling us
to provide customers with the convenience of next-day
delivery in a four-hour time slot or the option of a free delivery
at a later date. We repair more than 1m handsets per year and
provide over 11m insurance or service agreements, carry out
approximately 500,000 computing set-ups per year and take
125,000 technical support calls each week.
Our Geek Squad and Knowhow teams in stores, in our call
centres as well as field technicians, can provide set-up and
upgrade services and online fix and backup services. Our
market-leading range of help and support services ensure a
customer has the backing of expertise and support that keeps
their technology up and running. Our state-of-the-art repair
facility in Newark is able to repair and return a laptop in seven
days. Our network of field technicians offer white goods
repair in a market we estimate to be worth around £700 million
a year.
Through ownership of the service infrastructure we can ensure
the quality of service delivered to customers. This, we believe,
provides us with a significant competitive advantage in
meeting the needs of our customers, as well as a revenue
stream not readily available to single channel online and mass
market competitors.
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