What do you think? From emerging trends to the latest business principles, Furniture News is setting out to gauge the trade’s feelings on a variety of industry-specific topics. Today, we’re asking our panel: What aspect of your business do your customers most value?
Shane Harding, Highgrove Beds: It’s the mix of what Highgrove offers – great choice, great value and great support, including heavy in-store investment
John Northwood, sales agent: They could probably answer that best, but I believe it’s always being available and responding swiftly and efficiently to requests and enquiries
Martin Seeley, MattressNextDay: Free next-day delivery, most definitely – or, as we like to say, the Amazon Prime of the mattress industry
Deirdre Mc Gettrick, ufurnish.com: Giving choice whilst saving time and money. If I talk about our consumers, they enjoy the choice of finding and searching all the retailers (known and unknown), the speed at which they can search all the retailers and the comfort in knowing they have found the perfect item for their home at the best available price
Steve Reid, Simba Sleep: Quality, innovative product
George Sinclair, Nimbus Beds: The ‘design your own bed’ section. Customers can come in, and if they don’t like anything they see, they can design their own, free of charge. We then get it made in the factory and delivered to the customer. Every customer’s wants and needs are different, so to be able to design your own is amazing
Huw Williams, Toons Furnishers: Customers value our friendly, genuine service. Building good long-term relationships is essential for repeat business
Wendy Martin Green, Peter Green Furnishers: We are a family business, which brings a certain warmth to our relationships with our customers. I think that is rare these days
Jade Farthing, Haskins Furniture: The customer service we offer – each customer is a person and is treated with respect from the start of the sale to the delivery, and beyond
Keiran Hewkin, Swyft: Beautiful product
Neil Barker, Barkers Furniture: Honesty
Shaun Peel, MattressTek: The tailored approach and innovative thinking of our designers (and internally, the involvement of our in-house engineers in the installation, repair and servicing of our machines at their site). We are here to help them solve and prevent problems arising, and we seem to do it well
Tom Bayliss, Kettle Interiors: I don’t think there is simply one aspect, but more of a combined recipe that our customers enjoy. Broad choice of product, supportive content, and the added flexibility of how the customer can access it, is at the core of what we offer
David Kohn, The Multichannel Expert: Excellent product design and quality
Mark Gannon, Sofa Source: Our open and honest two-way communication
Mike Whitman, Iconography: The amount of time we can save them – IXO Commerce makes the day to day so much easier to administer
This article featured in the October 2022 edition of Furniture News magazine.
