Manchester City Football Club becomes Manchester City Footfall Club with new technology
21 October 2009
UNITED KINGDOM — Manchester City Football Club has shown it means business not just on the pitch but in its retail space. MCFC has recently combined its ticketing operation, call centre, and store and retail service centre into one purpose-built facility at its City of Manchester Stadium and has begun to optimise this complex retail operation with discrete measurement systems. A key part of this initiative has been the installation of Shopper Count; a footfall system from Synovate Retail Performance, which counts the number of people entering the store. With this in place, MCFC will be in the premier spot to have the right people in the right place at the right time in order to manage fans' expectations and to deliver unrivalled shopper experience in the footballing world.
During normal non-match trading days it sees between 500 and 1000 customers in the store, but on match days those numbers swell to as many as 40,000. This brings unique challenges. The store has now installed equipment which lets it better understand and predict the behaviour of its customers and visitors.
MCFC's on-site retail operation is spread over two floors at its stadium. The ground floor is like any normal sportswear shop, except of course it exclusively sells MCFC branded items. Customers can buy their shirts, pay for them and then have numbers and names printed upstairs. Upstairs is the club's call centre, shirt printing, ticket collection and season ticket business, though there are also smaller items for sale there.
The club believes there is huge scope to break the traditional bounds in football retailing and customer service. For instance on a match day a customer may buy a shirt before the game but not have time to have it printed before the kick off, and of course they wouldn't want to miss that. However, if the store lays on extra staff after the game they may, for instance, secure more shirt printing business. But to do this cost effectively they must work out how their store is shopped by customers and measure traffic through the doors, and up and down between the two levels and compare this against transactional data from the tills and data on existing staff levels.
According to MCFC Head of Retail, Duncan Martin, "We looked at all the systems on the market before we chose the market leaders, Synovate Retail Performance. Its high level of accuracy, customised reports generation, proprietary equipment and ability to combine several research disciplines clinched it for us. In addition, we are also using Synovate's Mystery Shopper systems to help us improve one-on-one customer interactions. Our concept is genuinely unique and we are already learning things about our business which will help us both improve the customer experience and our profitability. In fact we are so impressed with Synovate already that we are exploring its Shopper Engage model which will track individual shopper behaviour to understand how people shop the store, how they queue, and how they respond to signage, fixtures and different areas; allowing us to further fine tune our offer and build the customer experience."
Synovate retail psychologist Dr Tim Denison commented, "Synovate Retail Performance is the customer counting system of choice, used in over 5,000 retail premises in the UK, but we believe this is the first time its been used in the pro-sports market here. The store has two distinct identities; it behaves like a normal retail outlet on non-match and weekdays, but becomes a totally different animal, very much a 'superstore' on match days.
"Synovate is producing reports to enable the retail teams to combine footfall patterns with existing data sets to produce accurate forecasts for staffing and service levels required for the two types of trading pattern. Manchester City Football Club has made it clear to us that it intends to be seen as a bona fide professional retail operation, not simply as an add-on to the football club as at most other clubs, and we are working together to deliver that goal and hit the back of the net."
Enquiries for interviews with Dr. Tim Denison should be directed to Theo Chalmers at Verve PR on 01908 275271 (weekdays) or 07932 004632.
Contact(s) for this press release
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Chris Scoot
Synovate Retail Performance |
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34 Walker Avenue |
Tel. +44 1908 682 700 |
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Theo Chalmers
Managing Director, Verve Public Relations |
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Park House, 8 Grove Ash |
Tel. +44 1908 275 271 |
Synovate Retail Performance provides footfall monitoring solutions, shopper tracking systems and in-store behavioural research to retailers worldwide. Its core products – Shopper Count, Shopper Interact and Shopper Engage – scientifically measure all aspects of a shopper experience from store entry to exit. Originally founded as Solution Products Systems Ltd (SPSL) in the UK in 1998, it was acquired by Synovate in December 2007 and now offers unrivalled global reach and scalability through Synovate's network of in-country teams and three specialist hubs based in Europe, North America and the Far East.
It supplies national and international retailers with essential business metrics to drive accountability and performance improvement. Synovate Retail Performance harnesses powerful retail and shopper intelligence and creates real deployable insight, to deliver its mantra of "Measure, Manage, Improve" to clients.
Synovate Retail Performance is home to the Retail Traffic Index series, which for over 10 years has been the industry's leading tracker of national, regional and sector retail footfall trends. It is also co-founder of the KPMG / Synovate Retail Think Tank, offering thought leadership on the state of retail health and the future of retailing. Synovate Retail Performance is part of Synovate Customer Experience, Synovate's global business practice specialising in the profitable management of the total sum of all customer interactions.
For more information on Synovate Retail Performance click here.
About Synovate
Synovate, the market research arm of Aegis Group plc, generates consumer insights that drive competitive marketing solutions. The network provides clients with cohesive global support and a comprehensive suite of research solutions. Synovate employs over 6,400 staff across 62 countries.
For more information on Synovate visit www.synovate.com.