The supermarket trumping Coles and Woolworths
If you had to guess the top three supermarkets in the country, we’re betting you’d probably say Coles, Woolworths and Aldi. But when it comes to customer satisfaction, you’d be wrong – there’s a much smaller player making waves in Australia’s supermarket landscape.
Foodland, which is owned by Metcash and is based largely in South Australia, beat all the big chains to take out the highest level of customer satisfaction and loyalty, according to new research from Roy Morgan. Foodland earned a first-place score of 94.4 per cent satisfaction (also winning the highest customer retention rate at 71 per cent), followed by Aldi at 92.3 per cent, Woolies at 90 per cent, Coles at 88.4 per cent and IGA at 84.7 per cent.
“It’s interesting because Foodland is very small, much smaller than these other players,” Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine told The New Daily. “They seem to be having basically whatever their customers want.”
“We often find that smaller companies – people who have fewer customers to satisfy – will often manage to satisfy them better. People choose where they are going to shop, and the very fact that they’ve chosen a smaller player kind of says what they want.”
Levine says it’s partly because of Coles and Woolies’ popularity that their massive stores can’t compete with the customer service on offer from smaller grocers.
“They’ve just got so many customers, and what they’ve got to do is please almost everybody. The vast majority of people shop at either Coles or Woolworths or both. These supermarkets have to satisfy people across the board. At the end of the day it is really hard to satisfy everybody.”
Where do you do your weekly shop? Do you find you have to visit more than one supermarket chain to get what you need? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.