Marks and Spencer 2007 Annual Report Download - page 23

Our customers expect consistently great service, no matter
when or where they visit us. We were clear when we
developed our plan to return M&S to growth that improving
service should be one of our three top priorities, alongside
improving products and modernising stores. While there’s
more we need to do here, I believe we have made progress.
This has been driven in large part by our service training
programme, which involved over 60,000 store staff and was
completed in June 2006. This ‘Our Service Style’ training is
now incorporated into all store induction programmes with our
8,000 specially trained coaches taking on the responsibility for
continuous service training.
Mystery shopping
We wanted to make sure this training was translating into
improvements in-store. In May, we introduced a mystery shopping
programme to measure the quality of our customer service.
Stores are visited by mystery shoppers once a month, with our
biggest stores checked twice a month, in total around 6,500
visits a year. Each is scored on a range of measures chosen by
customers, from product knowledge to tidiness and respect.
Our overall scores showed steady improvement during the
year, rising from 70% in May 2006 to a progressive average
of 79% for 2006/07. This is a good result not least because
we recruited 19,000 extra staff at Christmas and faced a big
challenge in bringing them up to speed at a very busy time.
However, some stores are still not performing as they should
and we have work to do to make sure improvements continue.
In addition, the senior management team, myself included, visit
stores frequently. We spend a lot of time talking directly to our
customers and employees. Our customer services team talks to
12,000 customers a week. This feedback is invaluable. We also
conduct regular customer focus groups, which you can read
about on the page opposite.
We know we are not perfect and need to make further
improvements. In order to help facilitate this in 2007/08 we will
link the bonus payments of our store teams to their mystery
shop scores. We’ve set our sights high where service is
concerned. We are looking for excellence – getting by won’t do.
Productivity
As more and more people come into our stores, it is more
important than ever that our customer service is effectively
managed. Getting the right number of people with the right
skills on the sales floor at the right time is the key. It sounds
simple, but in the past we have found it difficult with staff often
distracted by store processes and bureaucracy.
So, on top of continued service training we have worked hard
to improve efficiency and to ensure that we maximise the
number of customer-facing staff. We have also worked to
define and clarify store standards.
Following this action, we saw productivity, the number of
individual items sold per full-time member of staff in clothing
and home, increase by 12.2% during the year.
www.marksandspencer.com/annualreport2007 MARKS AND SPENCER GROUP PLC 21
2004/05 2005/06 2006/07
UK Stores 61,132 62,288 69,309
Head office 3,505 3,057 3,246
Other 2,110 2,959 3,316
Total 66,747 68,304 75,871
May June July Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar
Mystery shopping
70% 73%73%
78% 79% 81% 82% 84% 82% 82% 83%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
50,000
60,000
70,000
A
verage number of employees
66,747 68,304
75,871
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