Retailers, occupiers and shoppers
The relationship with our retailers and other occupiers is a prime focus of our business. We work at all levels to engage with them to ensure that we are providing the high quality service they need for the success of their business.
Our property and centre management teams have refined their structured communication programmes this year and the responses from the dialogues have made a valuable input to our business strategy and those of our occupiers.
The design and production of retailer handbooks has been completed with distribution of a hard copy to all retailers in our directly managed UK shopping centres commencing in January 2008. This exercise entailed a significant input from both the property management and operational centre management teams to produce documents that worked for all centres. A website has been created to hold the up to date version for each shopping centre handbook to provide retailers with instant access to the appropriate document.
Job creation
A centre’s sphere of influence results indirectly in many thousands of other jobs in businesses that support and provide services to it and its retailers. This ensures that the local economy grows in parallel with the success of the shopping centre. As entities that continually evolve to satisfy changing expectations of their customers, shopping centres are a catalyst for job creation.
Shoppers
We recognise the importance of providing first class facilities and customer service to our shoppers and our focus on attracting and retaining the loyalty of our customers has continued into 2007. Customer service desks are a focal point for communicating with our shoppers and customer forums continue to be held at the centres, harvesting customer opinion and suggestions for improvement. A standardised complaints procedure at all our shopping centres enables us to respond promptly and appropriately to all complaints and comments received from our customers. Investigation procedures are in place to prevent reoccurrences.
In 2007, four of our shopping centres have conducted detailed
mystery shopping programmes. These programmes focussed on
evaluating every retailer within each centre and, in some cases,
also the Centre’s Customer Service and Security teams. The key
objective for our mystery shopping programmes are to examine the
levels and quality of customer service that are offered to our
shopper across each centre.
Results and findings from these exercises are fed back to all
tenants by our Centre Management Teams to help improve standards
across the centres and also to commend those offering exceptionally
high standards to our shoppers. The research framework adopted for
the mystery shopping programme also enables the results to be
tracked and benchmarked each year to analyse ongoing performance in
customer service.
We maintained our investment in research and now possess powerful databases on customer demographics which allow marketing to be tailored to our visitors’ needs. After an unforeseen delay in 2007, our centres’ websites will now be re-launched in 2008, providing customers with the highest standards of information, competitions and special offers.