08.2019 Cover Story
Go to A-Mart Everyday, Get Satisfaction Everyday
A. Mart / Wang Jiahui
Emphasis on Customer Experience and Service
In recent years, consumers are paying more and more attention to food safety, and the trend of "self-cooking" is prevalent. Some consumers may quit because they are busy and not good at cooking food. A. Mart took the lead in Taoyuan Store and Taichung Fuxing Store to exclusively launch the "Valet cooking" service. Consumers can choose the designated meat, sea food at the fresh zones and hand them over to the chef for on-site cooking. The whole course is open and transparent, and 100% of the raw materials are cooked. Customers can enjoy their own delicacies at a charge of only 30 yuan.
In addition, it was observed that consumers over 60 accounted for about 10% of the total visitors. A. Mart has launched a number of services for the elder in recent years, including providing magnifiers, additional rest seats, vegetables and fruits to be shredded /sliced, friendly exits for checkouts... "Locomotive Delivery to Home" service is provided in the branches with a high proportion of the elder. Members over 70 years old who spend 300 yuan on a single purchase can enjoy the service with the goods being delivered to home within 10 minutes. At the same time, since July 1, all branches of Taiwan also provide free haircut service for customers over 68 years old. On weekdays, customers can go to the Fast-cut shop in the branches for haircut with invoices without the limit of the sum of consumption. The first trial operation lasts for three months, which is expected to drive the growth of regular visitors more than doubled.
Shops also hold regular "Customer Forum" every quarter to provide guides for new goods, special display and services, and provide trial meals to better understand consumer needs from intensive interaction.
Buy fresh food and eat at ease
Aiming at consumers' demand for high CP value products, A. Mart launched more than 360 "delicious, useful and super-valued" private brand products, including food, condiments, household cleaning products, bath products, light bulbs, etc. and the prices are 20-30 % lower than the similar commodities, so that consumers can enjoy better product quality at a more economical and affordable price. In 2018, the packaging was redesigned with A. Mart CI color recognition. The manufacturing process conformed to various national standards and passed SGS certification. In addition, it cooperated with 50 famous ISO certified manufacturers. Food factories also obtained HACCP labels and produced according to GHP standards. Good quality drives the performances of the private brands and achieved rapid growth of 50% in the past two years.
This year, A. Mart strengthened the promotion of 100 " strict selection of the fresh food", and proposed four commitments, including: cooperation with local farmers, cold chain distribution, fresh and direct supply; safety testing of commodities to ensure consumer food security; friendly farming/breeding, sustainable environment; cooperation with qualified manufacturers to select high-quality raw materials, for example, vegetables and fruits will be produced directly and contracts with small farmers as the main axis, introduction of organic and items with marketing resume will be strengthened, eggs will be from CAS large factories and farmers’ commodities with awards to promote humane raising of eggs; combination of own brand, strict selection of the fresh food and other special commodities has driven 100% growth of visitors in the past six months.
A. Mart has been in Friday, Yahoo Chimo Super Mall, Lotte Market and Shopee since 2013. There are more than 20,000 commodities on each platform. Combining with the shopping festivals such as Double 11 and Black Friday, Mart has brought out super discounts such as shopping money and platform point feedback, which has led to the best performance with a high growth rate of 300%, more than 800 million yuan has been created annually.
A. Mart Chief Operating Officer, Zhuang Jinlong, said, "Online shopping opportunities bring us 80% of new customers. At present, the performance of online shopping is equivalent to the turnover of a medium-sized entity store, and the customers are concentrated between 30 and 45 years old. In the future, A. Mart will devote more resources to customer in order to improve performance”. Since the fourth quarter of 2018, A. Mart has successfully attracted 30% of single and small family customers by introducing super-merchant pick-up service combined with platform resources, as well as the occasional "free shipping for purchase over 499 yuan " campaign, aiming to raise the minimum freight threshold for retailers.
Not only that, A. Mart will also plan to use "electronic tags" as shelf cards this year to reflect preferential prices in real time and to save time for manual replacement. Customer experience space will be designed at Shuihao store which is scheduled to operate in the fourth quarter to promote checkout efficiency and enhance customer experience by means of taste test of new products, games and thematic situational display, increase of interaction with customers, and the trend of smart technology stores, as well as the import "self-checkout machine"
In response to the mobile payment, A. Mart also plans to launch the official APP in the first quarter of 2020. It is expected to develop a multi-dimensional integrated parking payment model. Through APP, consumers can choose to pay parking fees by mobile payment or invoices. At the same time, they can also use APP to buy goods in advance and then pay for goods in stores to shorten the time of waiting for checkout. In the future, special prices, thematic activities, virtual points collection and other concessions will be provided, so that the consumer experience will continue to upgrade! __________
