Halfords has 466 stores across the UK and Republic of Ireland, which makes it one of the largest non-food retailers in the UK. Its business is made up of three key product categories: car maintenance, car enhancement and leisure.
As you can imagine, understanding the ongoing needs of its customers and stakeholders is an important priority for the Halfords business.
That’s why, when Halfords decided to understand how well its Bikehut offering had been received among consumers, it chose to work with CRT.
The challenge
Although it is clearly the UK market leader, Halfords recognises the importance of continuously looking at new opportunities – and extending what it calls the ‘consumer franchise’.
Halfords has a number of Bikehut stores located throughout the country, which showcase the retailer’s premium cycling brand offer – and, as you’d expect, a key sales driver in all of these stores is a positive customer experience!
There was, therefore, an ongoing need for Halfords to quickly understand how well received the Bikehut stores had been among customers, particularly in terms of product range, pricing, customer service and store customer profile.
But the Halfords management team didn’t think traditional research methodologies would deliver the strategic information and data that was required. They needed to try an alternative solution – and that’s were CRT was able to assist.
The solution
Halfords approached CRT and said it wanted to engage with its customers by harnessing the power of our ViewPoint Touch Screen technology and our ViewPoint Research Control Suite.
Devices were deployed to stores and a variety of surveys were conducted with Bikehut customers.
The location of the ViewPoint Touch Screen was agreed between CRT and the local store staff with the aim of attracting passing traffic at key points within the store. Surveys are typically one month in duration with between 15 and 25 questions. The flexibility provided by the ViewPoint survey management module enables Halfords to rapidly change surveys in order to capture key data such as:
- Demographics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Products purchased/not purchased and ‘why?’
- Competitor information
- Local/regional variables
Data collected has helped Halfords to better understand its customers needs’ and to respond to the ‘customer’s voice’
Benefits
- Cost-effective local and regional quantitative statistics
- Local data enables store-level product alignment with demand
- Fast survey deployment and data capture provides near real-time customer knowledge
- Fully managed service ensures that no additional Halfords resource is required