As shopping centre managers you concern yourselves with your centre's visitor numbers which are the product of catchment penetration and visit frequency or, if you prefer, customer retention.

So, why do shoppers stop visiting a particular store? The biggest single impediment to repeat purchase in retail is lousy service.

If one of your retailers blunders this will impact on your centre's performance, so why don't more centres provide an intervention service for dissatisfied shoppers?

BAA makes an interesting example, if you're prepared to accept that they act for much of the time as shopping centre owners. One of their catering operations served my wife a seafood meal and shortly after eating it she experienced extreme symptoms of nausea. We wrote a letter of complaint and copied in BAA's head of catering operations. The response was a letter from their insurance company requesting evidence that we had visited our GP within 24 hours of the incident.

Now, several questions: Why didn't the restaurant contact their customer in the first instance? As this was an airside restaurant was there a possibility that the guest was leaving Britain - and her GP - behind? Finally, how many letters of complaint about product quality do they get to make them delegate to a third party?

Will we visit that restaurant again? No.

Shopping centres don't enjoy the same monopoly principles that BAA does so maybe it's not a bad idea to find out what your tenants' complaints policies are because their lost customers are yours, too.

Stephen Logue, chairman, Business Blueprints

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