I’m sure that many of you have been keeping up with the new Mary Portas series ‘Secret Shopper‘ on Channel 4, Wednesday’s at 9pm. In previous series Mary has helped small shops to achieve their goals, by sprucing them up and teaching the owners how to run a successful business. In this current series she’s looking at the customer service problems of larger retailers. Going undercover she’s revealing what us, everyday shoppers already know; That many big chains just aren’t up to scratch.

Having started her working life as a shop assistant at John Lewis Mary Portas discovered a talent for transforming big-name brands like Harvey Nichols. With true entrepreneurial spirit she later went on to write about retail therapy and in 2007 launched her TV career with the popular Mary Queen of Shops. You can find out more on her great website here.

In ‘Secret Shopper’ Portas starts by tackling fashion stores and company Pilot. The programmes contain a lot of nuggets of wisdom for wanna-be retailers or as Mary calls it ‘Fast Fashion’, I’ve listed some below:

Episode one: Fashion

• Keep your store tidy.
• When helping customers with enquiries, show people where products are, don’t just tell them.
• Train your sale staff properly to be polite and helpful. Make sure they know the status of stock.
• The culture of a business comes from the top.
• Put customers not profits first.
• Make sure the fitting room’s are staffed.
• Mary’s three golden rules of retails- A smile/A ‘hello’ and service.
• Keep fittings and fixtures clean and in good condition and build changing rooms big enough to dress in.
• Don’t let customers wait more than 3 minutes to pay, reduce queues.

Episode two: Sofa superstores

• Don’t use ‘hard-sell’ tactics, be senstive.
• Avoid misleading customers by lying about dates that sales end, and don’t make empty price promises.
• Sales people shouldn’t use a script, robots can’t sell and becomes problematic when they have to discuss something unusual.
• Don’t put sales on if they’re not genuine sales.
• Treat customers as individuals.
• Help customers find the best product for them don’t just push them into inappropriate buys to make sales.
• Ask the right questions to understand your customers lifestyles.
• Answer enquiries on the web.
• Invest money in customer service.

Episode three: Phone shops

• Don’t use confusing jargon.
• Listen don’t just tell people what they want to hear.
• Don’t baffle people with statistics.
• Show working examples of products.
• Consider new shop layouts to make people engage more with the product.
• Embrace change.

Episode four: Estate Agents

Wednesday February 9th, Channel 4, 9pm