Found:

I just found this old picture I took of a letter from a customer myself and another girl served when I used to work in MANGO. These kind of comments were received regularly by my boss regarding her staff. Makes me proud to have been part of that team.

Liberty of London

Somehow, despite many London visits, I had never actually visited the Liberty store. 

"Since 1875, Liberty has been synonymous with luxury and great design. Arthur Liberty's intuitive vision and pioneering spirit led him to travel the world looking for individual pieces to inspire and excite his discerning clientele. Liberty's vision... continues today within the iconic Tudor building." 

The distinct difference between Liberty and London's other luxury department stores, Harrod's, Selfridges, Harvey Nichols is the atmosphere of the 5 floor store. First of all, the staff are ready to help with any quiry. But most importantly, walking around from room to room, I kept wondering what treats would be just around the corner. Despite losing my bearings quite a lot, I was very much willing to overlook this confusion for the wonderful displays of antique furnishings, mannequin styling and fabulous merchandising of gorgeous product.

Strengthening your team.

2 different speakers with similar success strategies were Robert Willett - Chief Executive of Best Buy International and Ian Cheshire - CEO of Kingfisher (parent company to B&Q).

Both discussed the importance of the employees and customers being "partners" or "part of the team". 

Training staff on the importance of Customer Service skills is a vital ingredient to success in both cases. Setting goals and having the right people goes a long way in staff motivation, company efficiency and making sure the customer is central to the brand's intentions over e.g. growth. 

Customer Insight

Being an ambassador of Customer Service and keeping the customer at the forefront of retail and design, I was extremely excited to hear a panel discussion on the matter. 

(The discussion featured Alex Gourley - CE of Health & Beauty at Boots; Doug Hargrove - Chief Marketing Officer at Torex and Gerry Johnson - Managing Director at Waterstone's).

To me the most interesting point raised was on how to enhance the customer's experience through loyalty benefits such as the Waterstones' card and Boots Advantage card. It was stressed that it is vital that you have all other aspects of a customer's experience in your store covered and that loyalty cards should not look to replace or make up for lack of service elsewhere.

Further to this, cards give vital information to the likes of Waterstones as to how the individual shops; their preferences and buying patterns. Waterstones give recommendations (Amazon stylee) based on this knowledge. N.B. I found it surprising that Boots doesn't use data from the cards in this manner since the Boots Advantage card is so popular. Perhaps this is where they can learn from Waterstones' experience...??