Ikea Case Study

The expansion of Ikea in the U.S. market had been moving at a very slow pace. Referring to the case study given, Ikea had only managed to open up three stores in U.S during the year 2009 to 2012 and the company has no plans to open up anymore new stores due to the slow expansion. The two main issues that Ikea are facing in the U.S. market is that the consumers in U.S do not appreciate the values that had been given by Ikea which are low cost and self-assemble approach as they perceive it as low quality products. However, the results from Ikea in the U.S. appeared to be favourable in 2013 due to the strong sales in the U.S. market and the store sales had grew by 6.7% (Ikea, 2014). According to Ikea (2015), the expansion of Ikea in the U.S had
According to Ikea (2014), the E- commerce had a growth of 65 percent in 2013 and that had led to firm and stable sales in the year itself. Ikea kept investing for improvements on their online shopping services in order to give a whole new web shopping experiences to their customers and had thus increased their products to be online from 30 percent in year 2007 to 70 percent of 9500 products in year 2014 (Daily News, 2014). The product that Ikea had expanded in its online shopping services includes home furnishing accessories (Ikea, 2014). Many customers in the U.S. find the latest online shopping services offered by Ikea is very helpful in the sense that many products had been offered online and it saved their time and hassle to travel to Ikea as some of them do not have cars, they would prefer to sit at home and wait for the products to be delivered to their doorstep (Apartment Therapy, 2015). However, Ikea can consider providing free delivery for total products below $30 where products are ordered through online. This can create an added value to Ikea’s online shopping and are able to attract more customers in U.S. to use the online shopping services of Ikea in order to boost the
According to Customer Service Score Board (2015), the customer service of Ikea was ranked at 499 out of the total 795 companies with score rates showing how terrible the customer services are. The major problems of Ikea’s customer services in U.S are bad delivery services with no specific delivery time given, some items are always missing when products are being delivered to the doorstep, customer services line always get disconnected, customers are being on hold for very long period over the phone, employees are lacking in product knowledge causing confusions to the customers and so on (Yelp, 2015). The customer’s services of Ikea are not helpful to most of the Ikea’s consumers. In order to tackle this problem, Ikea should start from the root of all problems which is their employees. Employees are very crucial assets of every company, employees that have rich product knowledge, able to handle critical situations and assist customers can generate customer’s satisfactions towards the company. Ikea should provide training to their employees in order to enhance their product knowledge, assist employees in role play practices in order to prepare them for critical situations that might happened when they are assisting customers in the