Tesco a leading food retailing company founded in 1924 by Sir Jack Cohen

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INTRODUCTION

This unit has been designed for me to produce a report:

Describing an organisation, its objectives and its commitment to customer services.

The different types of customers that the organisation has, they’re needs, with regards to customer service.

How the organisation meets the needs of the different customers at the same time as meeting its objectives.

How the organisation’s customer service policy makes sure that consumer protection laws are met.

Improvements to customer service in the organisation to better meet the needs of the customers and the requirement of consumer protection.

Describe the organisation, its objectives, and its commitment to customer service.

The organisation I will be investigating for this unit is Tesco. The company is part of a Tertiary sector, which provides services to the consumers.

Tesco.

Tesco a leading food retailing company founded in 1924 by Sir Jack Cohen who used gratuity from his Army service to start selling groceries in London’s East End markets. Since the first store opened in 1929 in Burnt Oak, Edgware, the company has grown and developed responding to new opportunities and pioneering many innovations.

Brief organisational history.

The organisation was set – up with the aim of providing goods and services to the public. Apart from Tesco opening new stores, in the early days, the company also dealt with laws on resale Price maintenance, which was introduced by trading stamps so as to reduce the prices to its customers. Customers collected stamps as they purchased their groceries and other items. When they collected enough to fill a book, they were able to exchange the book for cash or other gifts.

In 1995, Tesco broke new grounds in food retailing by introducing the first customer loyalty card, which offered benefits to regular shoppers whilst helping the company discover more about its customers’ needs.

By 1995, the company became the largest retailer in the UK and is now market leader with over a 16.5% market share. In 1996, Tesco launched customer assistants to make shopping easy for customers.

In 2001/2002, the company introduced customers’ champions in many stores, and implemented a new labour scheduler to further improve service for customers. The company expanded its retailing services by joining a venture, which was formed with the royal bank of Scotland to offer a broad range of financial services closely followed by the launch of Tesco visa cards, insurance and other financial services.

In only five years, Tesco Personal Finance (TPF) has achieved a profit of £96m. Over 1.4 million new accounts were opened to give us a total of 3.4million customers. The company has 15 products and services, from lending, savings and investment, to general insurance and is one of the UK’s top ten providers for credit cards and motor insurance.

The objectives of the company.

Tesco is the largest UK retailing store, with more than 400 stores through out England and Scotland and Wales. Tesco has certain objectives, which they use in order to serve the public.

Tesco had a strategy to deliver a great performance in the first half of the year. The strategy has contributed to the growth of the organisation making it a strong business in non- food and retailing services.  In the first half of they have

  • Delivered outstanding sales and profit growth in the UK
  • Developed capacity across non food gaining market share
  • Reached 4 million accounts in Tesco personal Finance
  • And have achieved strong sales, profit and returns growth in international business.

Some of the objectives of the company are as follows:

  • Make sales.

In order to achieve sales, the company started on – line shopping for customers that is Tesco.com. This is now the biggest e-grocer & most profitable e-retail business in the world. This year made a turnover of £447 million.

Over 110,000 goods are delivered each week, which makes the company have 65% share of the UK Internet grocery market.

The company also offered to meet the needs of their customers on their site (tesco.com). This year, they launched a new technology that allows shoppers to order their groceries on their handheld pocket computer wherever they were. The break through details was over 20,000 groceries loaded onto the computer allowing customers to compile their shopping list off- line.

The company sales have recently been increased by 26% compared to last year.

  • Training of Staff

To develop the talents of the people through training practices and also rewarding them fairly with equal opportunities.

By doing this, Tesco employs people from all works of life/ background, whether disabled or able training them in their different job specification, after a certain time if the work is being carried out very well the staff is being recognised that is, the staff could be promoted to be a supervisor. For instance, if checkout assistance is always prompt at work, does her work properly, respectful of all the laws of the company, the employee/staff can be promoted to be a supervisor.

  • Food Policies

By participating in the formation of national food industry policies on key issues such as health, nutrition, hygiene, safety and animal welfare.

Because Tesco is a food retailing company, they make sure that the food being sold on the shelves are healthy and not out dated. Tesco also provide a vast range of food ranging from Chinese to Thai to African to West Indies food. They also provide organic food for healthy eaters due to the ‘foot and mouth’ disease outbreak a couple of years back.

During the outbreak of this disease, Tesco was the first company to contribute to a fund supporting British farmers.

  • Customers advice and information

Another main objective of Tesco is to meet the needs of the customers by seeking and acting on their opinions regarding product quality, choice, store facilities and service.

Tesco meets its customer’s comments/ suggestion by providing a suggestion box in each store as well as a customer’s service desk. With this, customers can comment or complain on any thing they do not like being done in the store or suggest ideas in order to improve the store/company. For instance, a customer can complain on how the products on the shelves are not being arranged properly or how cashiers talk to each other whilst attending to customers. This could be done in writing and placed in the suggestion box or could be reported to the manager on duty. This improves the service of the company.

  • Computers for schools

Since the early 90’s, Tesco has given away over £77m of computer equipment throughout the computers for school scheme including 468,000 computers, software and printers. In 2002, over 273 vouchers were given to customers and more than 1,000 new schools registered with the scheme. Now, more than 23,000 schools across the UK benefit from the participation of the computer for school scheme.

 

Describe the different types of customers the organisation has and what their needs are, especially with regards to customer service.

There are different types of customers who shop in Tesco. Some of which are,

  • Disabled people
  • Families/ house wives
  • Business people
  • Old age pensioners
  • Students

Disabled People

This type of customers needs the co-operation/ attention from the staff. They want to be acknowledged everytime they go into the store, as they are not regular customers. They want the staff to be at their aid all the time, to give them help with packing their shopping. They want the company to create wider checkouts for them so their wheelchairs can move through every section. They also want the privilege of parking that is, car park space should be allocated for them. They also want shopping baskets that can be placed in their wheelchair.

Families/ house wives

They want availability of products and a lot of variety they can choose from. They want all goods to be properly labelled, stating the expiry date, contents and for the products to placed at the rightful position stating the price. This type of customers also wants value for money as well as promotion on products.

Business People

Because this type of customers mostly goes to the store when they are .on their lunch break, they want their kind of food readily available at all times.

When they go buy their lunch, they do not want to be in a queue because its lunch time and not a lot of people do their shopping then therefore, they want the staff to be on checkouts ready to serve them.

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Old Age Pensioners

They will need help with their shopping, as some of them may not be able to reach products on the top shelves.  They also want personal shoppers assisting them with their shopping. They also want bag packers to put all of their shopping into bags for them.

Students

This type of customers wants availability of products, promotions / special offers on the kind of product they buy and want to be treated equally and fairly like other customers.

There are different types of students who shop in Tesco some live independently while others live ...

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