IGA Liquor has come out on top for customer satisfaction in new research from Roy Morgan.
It’s a huge improvement for the retailer, which was lagging at No.9 in the previous year’s results.
In the year to August 2017 IGA Liquor’s customer satisfaction rating was 93.4%, which now places it ahead of its major competitors.
Dan Murphy’s (92.4%) was in the No.2 spot, followed by Aldi Liquor (91%) and First Choice Liquor (90.1%).
The findings come from Roy Morgan’s Single Source Survey (Australia) of more than 50,000 consumers, which includes interviews with more than 8000 customers of liquor stores and retailers.
Over the last 12 months, IGA Liquor improved its customer satisfaction rating by 17.3% points, well ahead of the improvement seen from its major competitors, with BWS the nearest (up 3.6% points), followed by Woolworths/Safeway (up 3% points) and Thirsty Camel (up 2.1% points).
Only two of the top 10 stores showed declines in satisfaction over the last year: Cellarbrations (down 10.2% points) and First Choice Liquor (down 3.4% points).
‘Big Discretionary Spenders’ provide potential for increased liquor sales
The liquor stores and retailers with the highest proportion of these ‘Big Discretionary Spenders’ in their customer base were First Choice Liquor (44.1% of usual customers are ‘Big Discretionary Spenders’), Dan Murphy’s (43.1%), IGA Liquor (41.8%) and Liquorland (40.6%). This group has the greatest potential to increase sales from their existing customer base.
Norman Morris, Industry Communications Director, Roy Morgan Research said: “Liquor stores and retailers are facing tough competition, not only from their direct competitors but other retailers who are all competing with them for the discretionary dollar. It is important in this highly competitive market for liquor retailers to understand how they are performing in terms of customer satisfaction relative to their competitors and where are the best opportunities for increasing sales.
“Improving customer loyalty is an issue for most liquor retailers as it would provide a major opportunity for increasing sales. This is evident by the fact that generally, on at least a third of purchasing occasions over a four week period, customers purchase from a store that is not the one that they usually buy alcohol from. This indicates a considerable degree of shopping around with insufficient incentive to consolidate liquor purchases with any one store.”
