BUSINESSES in Huddersfield have heard how the town needs to be rejuvenated.
Huddersfield born and bred entrepreneur Kate Hardcastle and her business partner Richard Gomersall delivered a presentation as part of their seminar Insight With Passion.
The team aimed to make retailers aware of how poor the customer service is in the town.
Kate said she had been mystery shopping for the past four weeks and was “appalled at the level of service”.
She said: “I grew up here, and it is really important for me that people have what I had – a fantastic town centre.
“We don’t celebrate the beautiful architecture and it feels like it is homogenized, vanilla, neutral here.
“Overall the customer experience has not been good. I even had one of my worst shopping experiences ever here, in this town centre.”
She told shop owners at The George Hotel, St George’s Square last night that one in seven retail outlets were not utilised and the town needed a facelift.
The Insight With Passion team also said that customers were less likely to spend money getting into town and therefore a unique shopping experience was needed to draw them in.
Kate said normal complaints from retailers in response to her lack of business includes “customers having to pay through the nose for parking.”
The team demonstrated how the town needed to pull together to create a unique and pleasant shopping experience.
Using images from successful global companies and smaller businesses in other towns, they detailed the road to retail success.
Rotherham is said to have one in five retail spaces unoccupied and Bradford one in six.
