21st Sep 2006 - Over the past 12 months, the UK’s top four grocery multiples – Morrisons, Sainsbury, Tesco and Asda have battled against each other in 12 diverse categories to determine the grocery store that offers the best and most consistent in-store experience to their customers.

The survey was published by Checkout Magazine UK in collaboration with GAPbuster WorldWide, the world’s leading customer experience agency that specialises in Mystery Shopping services.

GAPbuster utilised information gathered from mystery shop visits. Each month, GAPbuster sent its mystery shoppers to evaluate experiences from a typical customer’s point of view in 10 outlets of each retailer nationwide.

Not surprisingly, the results of this survey were very close.

After 12 tough months of battle, Morrisons emerged the winner with an overall score of 81%, placing Sainsbury’s into second place, with Tesco and Asda joint in third place with scores of 79.3% each.

Morrisons secured first place for consistent customer experience with individual scores of 89% for staff friendliness and 92% for transaction efficiency and store/staff presentation, giving it the edge over its rivals.

Why is consistency of the customer experience so important? In many cases the product range on offer did not differ significantly by retailer but it was customer service that significantly affected customer loyalty.

GAPbuster studies over the past five years have demonstrated improvement in customer experience can have a strong and direct correlation on sales performance. A 1% increase in customer experience can lead to a 0.5% increase in sales performance when delivered consistently across the organisation.

The impact on the customer from the in-store experience is what really counts and leads to either an improvement in brand loyalty or a reduction in it.

This impact is fundamental to the performance of the retailer.

GAPbuster and Checkout will be providing a new set of challenges to these retailers for a second year starting in November. In addition to measuring the experience, the program will also measure the impact of the experience on the mystery shoppers, and how this affects customer perceptions on a wide range of key customer service issues.