Blacks Leisure picks Empathica to deliver customer insight

Published 10th December 2009

December 11, 2009, Birmingham – Blacks Leisure Group, the leading outdoor goods retailer, is embarking on a customer insight programme in 208 of its Blacks and Millets stores, with Empathica, a customer experience management expert, in an effort to gain valuable customer feedback that will enable it to improve its customer service offering.

Blacks and Millets customers will be invited, via a prompt printed on a receipt jacket, to give feedback on various aspects of their visit, including: the store environment, speed of service, and how friendly and helpful the staff are. Customers will also be asked whether they felt the retailer offered good value for money and whether they enjoyed their shopping experience. All customers will respond via an online survey.

Blacks Leisure Group is the latest retailer to tune into the views and opinions of real customers every day, in order to make rapid adjustments to its customers changing expectations at a local level.

Richard Hitt, Customer Insight Director, Blacks Leisure Group, said, “We’re keen to ensure that our customers are at the heart of everything we do. Empathica offers a simple and effective method of delivering regular and systematic customer feedback in what is an otherwise under-researched retail sector. We are delivering Empathica invitations to all customers in participating stores as we value feedback from all of our customers – the insight from which will help us deliver excellent customer service across all our stores nationwide.”

Gary Topiol, Managing Director, Empathica, said, “Retailers need to be able to react quickly to their customers’ changing demands and the only way to do so is to gain customer feedback and react to these expectations. We will provide Blacks Leisure with valuable customer data, as well as delivering marketing insight to support the outdoor goods retailer in its commitment to high levels of customer service across its business.”


More information:

TanyaPring Fieldworks Marketing
Tel: 01435 873080
tanya@fieldworksmarketing.co.uk

Gary Topiol
Empathica
gtopiol@empathica.com


About Blacks Leisure

The heritage of Blacks can be traced back to 1861 when Thomas Black founded his sail making company in Greenock, Scotland. The advent of the steamship required the transferring of their skills into another business of tent making.

In 1994 the renamed Blacks Outdoor concentrated its strength in a broader range of outdoor activities; from walking and mountaineering to skiing and snowboarding. Blacks stocks specialist brands such as North Face and Berghaus as well as developing our own specialist brands such as Technicals and ALS.

Blacks is one of the country’s leading outdoor retailers. The style and the design of the stores have been developed to meet the requirements of the modern marketplace.
www.blacksleisure.co.uk


About Empathica

Empathica provides retailers, foodservice brands, retail banking institutions and other multi-unit based organisations with comprehensive Customer Experience Management programs that help ensure outstanding customer experiences and engaging relationships across the entire brand.

Using a variety of surveying methods, Empathica captures ‘voice of the customer’ data and then performs rich analysis to derive key actionable insights that deliver operational excellence and deliver on the brand promise of our clients.

Empathica conducts more than 30 million customer surveys annually and delivers real-time, weekly, and monthly reports to more than 70,000 locations across close to 100 of the world’s leading brands.

Empathica is a privately held organisation headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with European operations managed out of its Birmingham, England office. Empathica also has affiliate offices in Australia, China, and Japan.

www.empathica.com