More convenience

What have you done to improve convenience for customers?

We opened another six new stores during the year and refurbished a further ten and it was our biggest year ever for multi channel. We had a significant push on a number of multi-channel initiatives, helping customers to research their potential purchases online, seek advice from product reviews and check in-store availability before making a journey.

Not only did we achieve our stretching target of more than 30,000 lines available to browse online, with more than 10,000 being transactional, but we rolled out both our ‘Stock Check’ and our ‘Reserve & Collect’ services during the year. These developments and our improvements in web content have resulted in significant increases in traffic to the website and a vast improvement in website customer satisfaction ratings.

Increasing numbers of consumers now research on line, seek advice from product reviews and check in-store availability before making a journey to buy, so we’re responding to the changing way our customers are shopping, with a significant push on many multi-channel initiatives over the last year:

• We’ve rolled out our new online Reserve & Collect service to all stores
• We’ve launched a new ‘Get into Gardening’ community website
• Our email database of more than seven million customers is improving our promotional reach
• We’ve achieved our target of more than 30,000 lines on www.homebase.co.uk, of which more than 10,000 are transactional, double the level of the previous year.