Retailers lag behind other sectors in offering enhancements and add-ons
Despite an increasingly competitive market, retailers are lagging far behind other sectors in offering enhancements or add-ons such as insurance or complimentary items.
According to research carried out by incremental revenue specialists Collinson Latitude, only 40 per cent of retailers offer customers add-ons to their core business – significantly less than any other sector. The study indicates that the retail industry is failing to recognise the potential for these products to increase their customer base and business revenues.
Of the other sectors surveyed, airlines were found to be the most likely to provide customers with complementary products or services (85.7 per cent), followed closely by travel (83.3 per cent) and financial services (69.2 per cent).
Janet Titterton, business development director at Collinson Latitude commented: “In what is an extremely competitive retail environment it is surprising that retail businesses appear to be relatively unconcerned with developing products that will add value to their customer proposition. Trusted retailers such as Tesco have proven the success that can be achieved by diversifying a brand’s core offering to include a range of products that are closely linked to many aspects of people’s lives.
“The fact that less than half of businesses in the sector offer currently do this demonstrates that there is a huge opportunity for retail businesses to develop unique incremental revenue programmes that will enable them to add value to the customer proposition in order to drive both loyalty and revenues.”