Greg attends Service Excellence

If we can, you can Challenge winner for the Evening Chronicle Greg Phillips has been busy embarking on his re-branding and re-fitting campaign for his new Nichols stores. He cited that the people working in the stores, and who have a one to one relationship with the customer, are delivering his business plan at the end of the day and Greg wanted to make sure that this side of the business was spot on.

So, as part of his prize, we here at If we can, you can headquarters thought Greg could really benefit from going to the Service Excellence conference, held at the Hilton Hotel in Newcastle Gateshead.

Greg said of the conference, “The day was really good. I learnt a lot from it and came away with lots of ideas and things that I can start doing here in my business. In particular I’ve learnt a lot about getting staff on board- it was something that really came across in terms of what we should expect of them, and about how we can be more explicit about the Nichols brand and how we want staff to represent us.

I learnt a lot about engaging and rewarding them, as well as encouraging and training them. We want our staff to take service seriously, as this is one of the most important elements in a retail business.”

When I spoke to Greg he had just opened his second store that day in Cramlington after completely re-inventing the old site, and he’d just received a text message saying how much they had taken. He said, “Even on the first day it’s flying so I’m absolutely over the moon about that. We’re hoping for the same result we had in Sunderland.

There’s always obstacles to overcome, such as landlords’ consent and planning applications. We’ve often thought of what we want a particular shop to look like but in practicality terms it sometimes doesn’t happen like that.

All the units have their own challenges, but once we get them open to the public I’m always so proud of what we’ve achieved. They look really fantastic and I’ve had text messages from people saying that the shops look great. It’s a real buzz at the moment and I’m really excited about getting to Nichols brand across the region.”