Speaking at the Retail Week Conference today, Halfords CEO David Wild told delegates, that retailers must innovate and differentiate to survive. He said that in an era of heavy discounting and web enabled price transparency, competing on price alone wasn’t a sustainable strategy for most retailers.

As car and travel products have become more complex, Halfords has moved to fulfil customer demand for more expert advice and product demonstration. This led to the launch of its Wefit services where store staff also fit products like bulbs, wiper blades and Sat Navs – so that customers leave the store with the product installed and working. Halfords also offers free Bike Build and a free 6-week check on all bike purchases.

“Growth in demand for Wefit has been tremendous,” said David Wild, “in our last full quarter levels of fitting were up 60% year-on-year. It shows how many customers want advice and help across our range of products.  Service is now a key element of our product mix and we are gearing up our training programmes so that we have even more expert store staff available to serve customers.”

Halfords entry into the £9 billion car servicing market, through their recent acquisition of Nationwide Autocentres has opened another avenue of growth through service. Research shows that trust and good service are key in influencing a motorists choice of garage. 

Nationwide have built their growth strategy around the provision of best-in-class service. Autocentre managers are trained to deliver exemplary customer service and each centre is audited quarterly using the Net Promoter Survey to check customer feedback and their propensity to recommend Nationwide to a friend. Any centres achieving less than a 76% recommendation rate are immediately placed on a management plan to raise service levels.

“We have moved from a period where service was a value add to a point where it is an integral part of the overall product,” said Mr Wild. “It is now a key point of differentiation between retailers.”