Increased Competition and the drive towards Increased Customer Satisfaction

In recent years the independent store has faced massively increased pressure from all angles. This has led to the formation and rise of the buying group and franchise small store business.

Increasingly as larger retailers continue to grow, even these smaller franchises and buying groups have found it difficult to compete. Lack of clear brand identity and consistency across the store estate has led to stagnation and loss of market share. Customer retention and satisfaction levels have declined and the overall shopping experience has been affected. Often these formats have great ideas and strategy but struggle with a lack of resource to drive the strategy down to individual stores. For example due to a lack of specialist resources such as: merchandisers, space planners or assortment specialists. All too often this means that stores lack a consistent look, feel and assortment which leaves the customer confused.

For franchise stores, co-operatives and buying groups the core aims are typically:

• Build a consistent and recognisable brand that delivers quality products and service in every store
• Increase their buying power to help keep prices competitive
• Meet niche consumer needs and increase customer loyalty and satisfaction levels
• Implement a comprehensive strategy that will deliver growth in sales and profits
• Develop and control the supply chain

How can Galleria help?

Galleria’s solutions are specifically designed and built to meet the specialist needs of franchise stores, co-operatives and buying groups and provide a number of key benefits.

Solutions such as Behavioural Cluster Planning can help these specialist retailers better understand the needs of their customers by analysing all of the stores and then segmenting them and clustering them based on actual consumer demand at a category level. This valuable insight can then help the group to develop an appropriate offer and value proposition e.g. build credible assortments for stores that reflect consumer needs and wants. By developing a better quality assortment buying power can be increased helping to lower prices, increase profits or balance of the two.Delivering more of what customers actually want and improving the quality or both assortment and merchandising decisions will massively improve the customer experience. Customer loyalty will be enhanced and brand value strengthened by the consistent message across the store estate.

Galleria solutions will then execute that strategy by delivering assortment, promotion and space recommendations to the individually owned stores who will then implement the relevant strategy in their store and feeding back through the solution to report this as done. Business owners will be empowered by this innovative approach and will quickly reap the rewards with increased sales, reduced wastage and increased customer satisfaction.

This sounds complicated?

We recognise that often these types of store and head office lack the necessary resources to carry out this sort work on a large scale. To produce individual store plans and recommendations by hand would take an army of people weeks to complete.

Our solutions have been designed to take advantage of your greatest assets, store owners. No one knows their store better than them so what better team of people to have on your side to help meet your business objectives and implement your wider business strategy. The solutions are easy to use and can be accessed via a web page for individual stores to use. This approach means that you can add significant value to your individual store owners who want all the benefits of running a small store but with all the benefits of being part of a larger organisation.