April 26 2018

How retailers can keep the Mother’s Day magic alive

Continual improvement based on customer responses has helped us deliver an unbeatable Mother’s Day experience.

Mums are amazing, so it’s great that we’ve got a dedicated day to celebrate the wonderful women in our lives.

Unfortunately, Mother’s Day doesn’t always go as smoothly as we’d hope and there are certain things that can really put a damper on the day.

As part of our commitment to creating a brilliant experience for Mother’s Day, in 2016 we carried out a survey with thousands of people who had ordered flowers to be delivered to their mums.  The insights we gathered from our survey were really useful and helped us to identify what matters most to people ordering a special treat for their mums.

One area that really resonated with our survey group was a significant drop in satisfaction when flowers were delivered after 2pm on Mother’s Day.

It’s turns out you can wait too long for a good thing and according to our survey, getting their Mother’s Day flowers later in the day really spoilt the experience for customers.

We’ve seen similar feedback around the importance of getting flowers delivered early on Valentine’s Day – getting in early is really important to people who want to tell someone they care.

We used this insight to shape our flowers proposition, and in 2017 aimed to deliver all Mother’s Day flowers before 2pm.  We increased the proportion of flowers delivered before 2pm from 78 per cent to 94 per cent - boosting customer satisfaction by 8 per cent.

Continually improving our service and listening to customer feedback is at the heart of what we do, and this year, we worked even harder to ensure we were delivering an unbeatable Mother’s Day experience.

We kept our target to deliver all flowers before 2pm, but we decided to build on this.  Survey feedback showed us customers really appreciated it when our delivery teams made an extra effort to ensure their flowers were left somewhere safe if there was no one home to receive them.

In order to give customers the very best Mother’s Day experience, our teams underwent extensive refresher training.  Each service centre manager was given top-up training on the correct leave safe process and provided with a driver briefing pack, which included the leave safe guidelines.

As a result, customer satisfaction for flowers left safe on Mother’s Day 2018 increased 10 per cent on the previous year.

Making our mums realise how special they are is important and customers have clear feedback on what would improve the experience for them. By listening and responding to customers, we’re making sure we’re doing our little bit to make their Mother’s Day perfect.

A commitment to continual improvement is right at the core of our business and it’s driving real results in the strength and quality of our business relationships. Most importantly, we’re pleased and proud to see that the work we do is helping our customers to build their businesses.

We would like to thank everyone who’s taken the time to participate in our surveys and share their experiences with us.