My Guest Blogger – Annie Edwards & Fairtrade competition winner!
This article will take approximately 3 minutes to read
Published 10 Mar 2023 in Phil's blog
Hi everyone, I’m Annie Edwards, Insights Manager for the Society. With Phil away this week, I’m your guest blogger today.
A little about me…
I’ve worked for Midcounties for over 11 years (I know what you’re thinking, she doesn’t look old enough 😊) and I am a good example of how working for such a diverse organisation provides opportunities to develop your career.
I started off working for Co-op Energy as a customer service advisor before moving to Childcare, where I gained skills in reporting, tracking agency spends and compliance. When I was ready for my next step, I looked for opportunities that would enable me to use the skills I’d acquired – and moved into Insights for Food Retail. What excited me most about this was the opportunity for growth and development. Five years later, Insights sits as a central support function within Core Marketing, which means I can work with the whole Society.
Outside of work, I enjoy staying active as I’m not good at sitting still. I’ve recently started taking part in my local parkrun - a tough ask on a Saturday morning but very rewarding. It is also a great example of a free community event where everyone is welcome. I love animals and am particularly obsessed with dogs, so getting outside with nature is when I’m happiest.
A beautiful Alpaca and me!
Great for the community - my local Parkrun
What is Insights?
I often get confused faces when people ask what I do for work. Insights is basically interpreting data and trends to understand what consumers expect from the products they buy and the service they receive. It helps organisations to ensure the decisions they make are based on fact rather than what we think consumers want and need. My team helps the business do this in a variety of ways.
The first and probably most well-known is the customer satisfaction tracking programme we run for Food, Childcare and Travel, via the online ‘Talk to us…’ survey. This helps us to understand what our customers like and the areas for improvement. We share regular reports with our senior leaders to help inform areas for development and ensure the customer and members are always in the room.
To help supplement this, we also run ‘mystery shop’ programmes in all our Food stores to provide another layer of insight. As there is a real focus on driving membership, our mystery shop programme helps us understand if customers are being asked for their membership card and whether colleagues are confidently explaining the benefits of becoming a member.
Another area, we run is the colleague pulse survey. Our colleagues are our biggest asset as they deliver our customer experience. It’s important for us to understand their engagement as much as our customers. It runs every 4 weeks to ensure we are continuously listening, and I encourage all colleagues to have their say – it’s totally anonymous. Don’t forget to take a few minutes out of your day to complete the March colleague pulse survey which is now open here.
We also run bespoke research projects which help the Society to answer strategic questions which will inform future development. Whether we are defining what we stand for, making membership truly valuable or understanding what customers want from our trading businesses – insight is at the heart of our decisions.
The next twelve months – what’s next?
We are already off to a flying start this year with lots of exciting projects planned. The first quarter is all about optimising our customer satisfaction surveys so we are asking the right questions and giving managers the tools to understand their results quickly and take action. We will also complete our half-year consumer trends update in April, which looks at the external environment and market to help the Society understand what may be on the horizon to impact their strategic plans.
We are currently working with the broader Core Marketing team to put together a member offer strategy for the year ahead which will help us to deliver value to our members when it’s most needed.
There will be an opportunity in the coming weeks for a small group of colleagues to take part in a focus group. So, look out for further information on Colleagues Connect on how to express your interest and help the Society to bring our purpose to life and showcase our values.
I’m also looking forward to seeing my team develop further and continue to deliver fantastic insights; I simply couldn’t do it without them! With the peak of Covid behind us, we want to attend external events and conferences to look at how other organisations use insights to ensure we are bringing best practices back to the Society.
And finally, I was lucky enough this week to be invited, to attend the UK Customer Satisfaction Awards hosted by The Institute of Customer Service. It was great to see and hear how other organisations are using their Insights to drive strategy and improve their customer satisfaction. This has inspired me to enter an award submission for the 2024 awards and showcase how we are using Insights to shape and positively impact the experience for our customers and members. Watch this space…
Fellow team member, Imogen Head, Insights Analyst & myself at the UK Customer Satisfaction Awards
Fairtrade Colleague Competition winner!
With Fairtrade Fortnight ending this weekend, I have the prestigious job of announcing the winner of the recent Fairtrade colleague competition.
A big well done to Michael Davies from Stroud Slad Road Food store!
Michael, a Fairtrade hamper will be sent over in due course, enjoy. 😊
I hope you’ve enjoyed my blog this week and if you have any questions for me or the team, please feel free to reach out by commenting below.