Customer Support
“Adding KingsleySurveys has focused our efforts with the added value of independent, polished benchmarking. It ensures consistent data across different functions, both within the portfolio and globally.”
Martin Leatherdale
Centre Manager
Overview
Lion Walk Shopping Centre is a premier city-centre retail destination in Colchester, Essex,. Spanning approximately 280,000 SF, it features 60 retail units alongside office spaces, residential areas, a Grade I listed hotel, a church, a library, and various public amenities. As the primary shopping hub for a catchment area of 400,000 people, Lion Walk attracts around 9 million visitors annually. The centre is anchored by major brands such as Primark, JD Sports, and Boots, reinforcing its status as a vibrant retail and community hub at the heart of Colchester.
Since opening in 1976, Lion Walk has evolved into a dynamic mixed-use space that balances historic significance with modern retail experiences. In collaboration with Lambert Smith Hampton (LSH), a property consultancy firm, Martin Leatherdale helps lead the centre's business strategy while overseeing facility maintenance operations, ensuring client service delivery, and driving onsite profitability and profit and loss (P&L) performance.
Martin’s primary aim is to provide exceptional customer and tenant experiences while maximizing Lion Walk’s performance in standards and profitability. He has found success by aligning the business with stakeholders’ objectives, and implementing Grace Hill’s KingsleySurveys tenant survey solution has been integral to that success.
Company Profile
Industry: Mixed-Use Retail
Unit Count: 60
Headquarters: Colchester, Essex — United Kingdom
Years in Business: 49+
Challenge
As leaders in the property management aspect of ground operations, LSH has traditional internal processes for gathering tenant feedback and KPI performance. These processes include mystery shopper reports, tenant meetings, monthly store visits, data harvesting, and qualitative and quantitative surveys.
However, the customer experience journey for Lion Walk tenants is multifaceted. Given the much broader businesses that touch tenants in the operational process, Martin and the LSH team recognized a gap in bringing tenant feedback together.
Collectively, Property Ownership and LSH understand the importance of remaining dynamic and responsive to tenant needs, particularly in today’s rapidly changing retail landscape. In addition, retail property professionals like Martin recognize that the competition is no longer just the surrounding stores within a set geographic footprint. As Martin emphasizes, “[Now,] we need to compete with online and out-of-town retail offerings by creating immersive and experiential shopping experiences.”
To fully capture tenant sentiment, KingsleySurveys was seen as the solution. It provided a deeper dive into insights across all the critical and diverse business functions — such as agents, marketing departments, soft and hard facility maintenance contractors, and the increasingly important ESG — all of which combined play a fundamental role in shaping the overall experience for Lion Walk tenants.
Solution
By implementing the KingsleySurveys Tenant Survey Solution, Martin and the LSH team have effectively filled a gap in gauging the tenant experience and satisfaction at Lion Walk Shopping Centre. Martin notes that the implementation and training process was clear, straightforward, and well-supported at all levels.
Martin has now used KingsleySurveys at Lion Walk for two years, and it has become a critical part of his property management process to ensure tenant satisfaction. It provides a streamlined and productive approach to data analysis, and they rely on the insights for both quantitative and qualitative analysis, specifically:
- Analyzing quantitative KPIs and identifying priority areas to ensure business alignment.
- Gathering qualitative feedback provides actionable steps for improving tenant and customer satisfaction.
- Centralizing all data for standardization, benchmarking, and optimization purposes.
Martin adds, “The KingsleySurveys approach works better by integrating multiple perspectives to create a more comprehensive, data-driven benchmarking system. By bringing together insights from these various business functions, it enhances long-term trend analysis, performance comparisons, and strategic decision-making across locations. This ensures that key areas influencing the tenant experience are not only measured but also aligned and improved with organisational goal setting for continuous improvement.”
"The platform is invaluable for its balance of quantitative and qualitative data. It highlights areas for improvement and provides actionable insights that directly impact tenant and customer satisfaction.”
- Martin Leatherdale, Centre Manager
Results
Overall, the results speak for themselves. Property Ownership uses KingsleySurveys for all its shopping centres, which promotes healthy benchmarking and competition. For Lion Walk, the data insights from their tenant surveys have helped them achieve rewarding results.
Some key findings from Lion Walk’s KingsleySurveys include the need for events, activities, and an engaging community. Taking action, Lion Walk streamlined marketing efforts, increased collaboration with partners, and hosted more events, resulting in record-breaking footfall for a single event and 4.5% increased footfall year-over-year.
In addition, Lion Walk achieved exceptional scores in the tenant satisfaction and renewal intention categories in 2024, earning the centre a prestigious Kingsley Excellence Award. This award demonstrates their ability to outperform the Kingsley Index with a strong track record of meeting tenant needs and consumer expectations.
As a result, Lion Walk is committed to maintaining this high standard by enhancing efforts in key areas such as marketing, sustainability initiatives, event programming, maintenance, and community engagement. This dedication to improvement ensures Lion Walk remains a vibrant hub, fostering long-term satisfaction and success.
“Year-on-year survey results and participation rates have improved, as has tenant and customer satisfaction,” said Martin. “And tangible improvements have been made based on qualitative feedback, such as enhancing the shopping environment and maximising occupancy.”
Before using KingsleySurveys, Martin and his team tracked operational and customer-focused metrics, including footfall, sales density, occupancy, and geolocation data, which fed into the P&L and NOI balance sheet at the board level. However, with the KingsleysSurveys solution now in place, they can also measure marketing and commercial leasing performance, both of which are difficult to measure with other disparate solutions.
By delivering invaluable insights, KingsleySurveys has enabled Martin and his team at Lion Walk Shopping Centre to elevate the property’s success, resulting in:
- Reduced costs.
- Increased efficiency.
- Improved tenant and customer satisfaction.
KingsleySurveys has become a tool that allows Martin to evaluate customer and tenant needs with measurable KPIs that drive strategy and performance. It’s created a cohesive process for gathering qualitative feedback that simply didn’t exist prior to using the Grace Hill survey solution.
When asked whether the investment in time and resources was worth it, Martin responded with a resounding “Yes!”
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