Sunday 17 January 2016

Gloves Off......Where Is That Trader?

Customer convenience is the new buzzword in retailing and yet finding your way around QVM can be an incredibly inconvenient task. We have over 600 businesses in a sprawling 7 hectare site and many of those traders move from day to day. It is time we made it easier for customers to find specific traders and products, and removed the frustration inherent in our moving feast of trader locations.

A colleague recently noticed a new footwear trader in the market and liked the look of their range. A couple of days later he decided to follow up with a purchase but couldn't find the trader. At the initial contact he hadn't been offered a business card and he couldn't remember any identifying signage which made his search just that much harder. Office staff were very helpful but couldn't track down the trader from our colleague's description. 

In the end it was direct discussion with one of the duty Market Officers on the day that found
the trader. The whole process of locating this stall was hard enough for an experienced market colleague. Imagine how difficult it would be for a general customer?

There are many parts to this stall location dilemma. Creating like product precincts would be one way of making it easier to find products. There are things that individual traders can do to boost their profile like signage and business cards. A verbal description of what our colleague was looking for didn't find the trader but a graphical catalogue may have. Perhaps a customer visiting the office or F Shed Information Centre could be shown photos of trader’s products on a large screen.  

There are many wonderful aspects to QVM's old world charm. But frustration helps no one, and it is time we made it easier for customers to find what they are looking for at QVM. 

Have Your Say - click here. 

Gloves Off is a new series of articles about things that should have been fixed but haven’t been fixed around our market - things that most people think are good ideas but for various reasons they haven’t been activated – or things that are just plain wrong but we haven’t got around to fixing them. So it is time to take off the protective gloves and take a bare-fisted approach to the problem.