Traditional farm shop turns to technology to drive sales

An East Yorkshire farm shop and cafe business is embracing modern technology to drive sales and to keep customer service standards high.
William’s Farm Kitchen in Hornsea has invested significantly in a mobile website, an online shop and research tools over the last quarter.

William’s Farm Kitchen owner, Mark Farnsworth explained the rationale for the mobile website investment: “The rise of smart phones over the last few years has meant that people are now very comfortable using the internet and reading emails on their phone. We have developed a mobile version of our website so that customers can use our free wifi to download an immediate e mail voucher that saves them money in the farm shop.”
In addition, William’s Farm Kitchen has just launched an online customer service survey, www.wfkmobile.mobi/survey, to seek further feedback and to help to determine any additional staff training needs. Of the survey, Mark said: “We have excellent, well trained staff and it’s good for them to be motivated by the feedback. By making the survey quick and phone friendly and by incentivising a response with coffee and cake, we are confident that the response rate will be very good.

“Customer feedback is very important to us and helped us to shape our online offering as we learned that customers wanted the flexibility to put their own hampers and meat boxes together and we invested in the technology to make that possible.”

Mark concluded: “Sales in the new online shop also continue to thrive as lots of our customers visit us whilst on holiday and are now shopping with us on their return home. The investment in technology has been significant, but is already reaping rewards.”

William’s Farm Kitchen is an award-winning farm shop, butchery and cafĂ© based at Hornsea Freeport. It has established an excellent reputation for its great value local food and its food based events that include Meet the Producer Days and Steak Nights.