Morrison’s new CEO David Potts is following the lead of Tesco boss Dave Lewis and sending head office staff to join their colleagues working on the shop floor.
Potts, who started at the company four days ago, has asked office employees to work on the front line of the UK grocer’s operations for one week a year, with an instruction to “listen hard” to customers and colleagues, Morrisons said in a statement. The CEO has himself pledged to work in a store during the Easter week next month.
The initiative is another example of how Britain’s largest supermarkets are sharpening their customer focus to halt a defection to discounters Aldi and Lidl.
Shortly after taking over as Tesco CEO in September, Lewis asked head office staff to spend one day every fortnight working in a store. Almost 6,400 employees and suppliers spent time serving customers between October and December, a Tesco spokeswoman said.
Earlier this week, Potts invited Morrison customers (see video below) to make suggestions on what the company is doing right and what it could improve on, in a video uploaded on Google Inc.’s YouTube.
“My goal in the early weeks is to listen as hard as I possibly can - to as many of our customers as I can, to as many of our staff as I can,” the former Tesco executive said.
Last week, Morrison reported its third consecutive year of negative like-for-like sales growth.
Meanwhile, the grocer has decided to part ways with television entertainers Ant and Dec for future advertising campaigns.
News by Bloomberg, edited by ESM
