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March 25th, 2010 @ The Royal Garden Hotel, London
The third annual PCR Awards is set to be the social event of the year for anyone involved in the PC retail sector, and a well deserved celebration for the nominees.
Competitive Package
UK - London
Collins says retailer must move towards specialist sector to survive supermarket onslaught
DSGi's chairman Sir John Collins has announced that the retailer will be rolling out its Tech Guys service across Europe.
Speaking at the Retail Week Conference yesterday, Collins said: "Tech Guys is an important part of our business. We still need to do some polishing of the offer here, but are about to start rolling it out in Europe."
He also said that the company must move towards becoming a specialist, rather than sitting in what he described as "no-man's land."
"Business as usual won't wash anymore – you are either specialist or generalist. In these tough times, there is no future in no-man's land," he said addressing listeners.
"I have the greatest respect for the hypermarkets. They can create efficiencies very quickly. They will continue to have a place for selling electronics competitively, but they cannot reach the service levels of the specialists.
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"We will be well and truly tested by Tesco, but if we can commit to our template, we will be fine."
Citing the example of Best Buy and Walmart, Collins said the specialist had managed to hold off the world's largest supermarket by focusing on its service. "Specialists need to keep the barriers to entry high by shoring up their offerings."
Addressing criticism of his staff, Collins said his company recognised that his company had made mistakes in the past and developed a reputation of poorly motivated and unknowledgeable staff, but that the firm had restructured its training department to improve the ability of its staff to understand its products and communicate clearly with customers.
Referring to the future of the company, he said that he wants the group to become the "master of multichannel," adding: "I disagree that e-tail is calling the death knells of the High Street."
Online currently accounts for around 10 to 12 per cent of the retailer's sales; however, Collins said he expects that to increase to 30 per cent over the next ten to 15 years.
I actually work for DSGi within a TechGuys environment.
Until recently there were 8 stand-alone TechGuys stores buy DSGi decided to close them all and move us ~TechGuys into PCWorld repair centres.
These centres can no longer provide a high level of service due to the 'supermarket-like environment', unlike the stand-alone stores.
Hopefully DSGi will work on this issue from their head office, there is no evidence of many changes here within PCWorld.
Big mistake to close the stand-alone stores, as they had a good reputation and quite frequently customers would arrive at our stand-alone store and say things like ''I'm glad I don't have to go down to PCWorld...they don't know what they're talking about''.
I too work for PC World and find that the company seems to be getting rid of any staff that have the good product knowledge, only to replaced by new staff that have very little knowledge, but these staff can be pushed into selling anything to a customer, the management say give the customer experience but actually mean take as much money off customers then make a fast exit. I would like some of the high management such as ‘Mr Collins’ to turn up in a store and actually speak to the staff (without the store management present) because he would find that the moral of the staff he is looking at saving the company is very low and most want to leave (even the new people) due to poor working conditions and poor pay, a good example of this is that most of us have not had a basic pay rise for many years even though the cost of living goes up every day.
As for his comment “Addressing criticism of his staff, Collins said his company recognised that his company had made mistakes in the past and developed a reputation of poorly motivated and unknowledgeable staff, but that the firm had restructured its training department to improve the ability of its staff to understand its products and communicate clearly with customers.” He seems to have his head in the sand because if he was seeking serious advise then he should speak/listen to the staff from all the stores and not stores that have been selected for him to visit, I very much doubt this would ever happens I would challenge him to respond to this personally to prove his worth, as for training just ask the staff what training they have been aloud in the last few years and you will hear the truth that the only training that gets pushed is the stuff that come with the standard you must do policy from head office i.e. mobile connectivity training (just ask an advisor why this is pushed to get the true answer).
I would leave my details but if I was ever discovered I would be sacked within a very short period of time, hence no name except MR PC World will have to do.
