Is increasing Membership your highest priority?

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regards

Michael - admin

A question for all candidates: Is your highest priority to increase membership? If so, do you think the best way is to make Coop charges for low usage (at least these, if not for all users) the lowest available? If not, how will you accomplish it? If you don't agree my priority what is your highest one?

Eric Stubbes

Firstly, I must apologise for the lengthy delay in replying to this question, which we all appear to have overlooked.

Increasing membership is clearly one of the boards main objectives, though I'm not sure I'd agree that it should be our top priority. We have been fairly successful in maintaining the proportion of customers who are members at roughly 35% - 40%. I'd like to see us increase this to at least 50% and I think this is a realistic objective in the long term.

Having said that, I think the best way to increase membership is to increase our total number of customers. As a reseller of services I believe this is vital if we are to improve services to members. I am therefore very much in agreement with our plans to increasing our sales and marketing resources. This will improve our sales performance with a significant increase in customer and member numbers. It should also help us to retain more existing customers and members.

Peter Turnbull

Peter Turnbull