What Gives The Carphone Warehouse a Competitive Advantage?.
The Carphone warehouse was set up in 1989 by Dunstone and Ross with just £6,000, they believed that mobile phones were the future but nobody knew how to sell them. They decided to focus on what was best for the customer offering impartial advice on the vast number of phones and networks available.
Since then the Carphone warehouse has grown to be the largest independent distributor of mobile phones in Europe. At the beginning of November 2000 it had 1.009 stores in 14 different countries giving it a leading position in eight markets and a turnover of £698 million. By 31 March 2001 the turnover had increased by 59% to over £1.1 billion and there were 1,059 operating under the Carphone Warehouse' name.
Carphone Warehouse is a well-established chain with a large market share in the mobile phone market. This has allowed them to develop strong relationships with the mobile phone manufacturers and service providers thus keeping the costs low and allowing them to undercut the competition while maintaining profit margins.
The Carphone Warehouse aims to attract loyal, regular spenders, rather than pay-as-you-go customers, as a customer on contract delivers two or three times more revenue than a pay-as-you-go user. This policy has allowed the Carphone Warehouse to stay ahead of the market despite a recent drop in the number of sales of contract phones.
Carphone Warehouse are committed to an excellent after sales service, an example of this is if they have repaired your phone three times within the warranty period and a warranty fault occurs again, they will replace it with a new one free of charge.
The Carphone Warehouse invests a lot of time and money in its staff. Each member of staff undertakes a three-day course to learn the essentials of being a phone salesperson. After this course they are set a test and if they get more than one question wrong they are refused a job.