“If you relax on customer satisfaction, things begin to slide”

“We had two good years when everyone was renovating during the pandemic. Sales continue to rise although our rate of growth has settled down,” says Managing Director Stine Solheim.

The retail chain is noticing the large price increases and that consumers have lost confidence in their own finances and are spending less. For example, more customers are buying cheaper flooring than they would have done last year, and we are noticing that high price increases affect the stores’ gross profits.

The fact that Fargerike scores highly on customer satisfaction helps to keep turnover up.

According to the Norwegian Customer Barometer, the chain boasts the industry’s most satisfied customers. This spring, Fargerike came top of the industry for the tenth year in a row and took 14th place among all the companies surveyed.

Fargerike signed up for the customer feedback solution Maze in May this year.

"We have started using the results from Maze and are looking at the ambassador rate and satisfaction in store. What we see is that stores with a good ambassador degree also deliver better results based on their KPIs. The higher the ambassador degree, the more profitable the stores," said Solheim, and continued:

“As a specialist retailer, we value expertise and service extremely highly. The fact that we receive feedback from customers on how well we are performing in customer-facing situations helps us to prepare and facilitate better training in-store. We work hard to ensure high customer satisfaction levels and to measure our performance every single day in our stores. Fast feedback means that we can make corrections and become better at managing the customer encounter in-store,” says Solheim.

She emphasises the importance of receiving fast feedback from the marketplace.

“In retail, changes happen quickly. Assessing changes at annual conferences or against long-term strategies is just not viable. We have to react faster than that and be able to take action within 3-6 months on marketing or store layout and tailor our training programme to the challenges we see in our stores,” she explains.

Maze enables Fargerike to receive constant feedback from their customers.

“Now we continuously see how we are doing as well as developments over time. In addition to our customer encounters, we receive feedback on parameters within our concept, such as marketing, product range strategy, campaign structure and store concept,” says the managing director of the chain.

Fargerike’s customers care about the chain and are happy to provide comments.

“We receive a lot of customer feedback. Response rates are high. Comments can be both positive and negative, but the vast majority are positive. From dissatisfied customers, we receive constructive feedback,” says the managing director of the chain.

Request from the stores

The initiative to start using Maze at Fargerike came from below.

“Several of our franchisee members wanted a tool to enable them to measure customer satisfaction. They wanted results for each store and more frequent feedback than just once a year. They wanted to address the challenges they faced and find out which customers were satisfied and which ones weren’t,” explains Solheim.

Fargerike started to use Maze when they had launched their full-fledged customer club. The managing director of the chain explains that the roll-out of Maze went quickly and seamlessly – and far more smoothly than they were used to when new IT solutions were being installed.

Best practice

The Fargerike stores that score the highest on customer satisfaction also deliver the best KPIs. Regional managers deal with the stores that are not doing well by sharing best practice across stores.

The chain compares KPIs such as shopping cart with the customer satisfaction level measured in each store.

The executive management of the chain, regional managers and store managers all track the feedback.

“We share the results in our monthly reports. We work to ensure that everyone follows our concept as closely as possible, and we’ve come far on that journey,” says Solheim.

Stores still post different results. The three regional managers work actively to ensure best practice across the stores. By getting everyone to apply the concept in a more consistent way, they expect to achieve a considerable improvement year on year.

Solheim says that things reach ‘boiling point’ in their stores in the May-August period.

“Because that’s when we sell a lot of exterior paint. That’s when we see ambassador levels fall a bit. That tells us that we may have too few employees working on the floor. And that means we need to plan our days better.

They want to expand the solution

Fargerike uses an operational model that Stine Solheim describes as ‘franchise light’ where franchisee members have an agreement in place on the use of the Fargerike concept. The franchisees own their site and their shop fittings themselves.

“As in any franchise chain, our franchisee members are all very different. Up to now, about 45% of our franchisee members have been using Maze, but more and more of them are starting to use the tool.

For the time being, Fargerike has not adopted measurement of customer satisfaction at employee level.

“Some stores only have 4-5 employees, and we have chosen initially to build up a sense of teamwork. Employees are encouraged to look at results as generated by the team. But the next phase will be to think about going a step further,” says Stine Solheim, and concludes:

“We have got more than 90 at ambassador level, but want to go further. This means that we have to be the best in terms of professional expertise. This is how we capture market share. If you relax on customer satisfaction, you’ll quickly see it reflected on the bottom line.”