So How Innovative is Touchwood Shopping Centre?

Touchwood was sixteen years old on Monday. This made us reflect a little on the previous five years and what we had achieved that wasn't just about financial returns, customer service and community engagement (we live those every day).

We thought about innovation and what we have delivered in the locality that may not have been expected of a centre that is not the biggest (we are ranked in size around number 40 in the UK), isn't part of the 'big three' (Intu, Westfield and Hammerson) and is very tied in to a town centre environment with limited innovation space.

We surprised ourselves a little bit...

If you were to walk in to the centre today you would see the UK's first ever robotic, fully automatic key cutting machine - still under beta testing but working excellently and installed as part of a collaboration with IconX as our personal relationships with the team there have given them the trust and speed across the ground they needed to get things working.

We were the first car park in the UK to have 'wave and pay' on our car park machines back in 2014, involving jumping through all sorts of hoops with the banks to ensure compliance - this has been massively popular with our customers. Our customers wanted it, we were stubborn and got there first.

We led on the emerging digital 'Big Data' initiative working very closely with Telefonica back in 2015 to develop their 'Smart Steps' platform to be fit for business use. This data tool allowed us to see on highly granular level how our customers visited, where they came from, where else they visited, how visitor patterns changed, how our footfall compared to our competitors and so much more.

We now recycle over 98% of our waste. That's fully recycled, not just diverted from landfill (burnt for energy) - we only do that with the last 2%. This is through working around obstacles, changing cultures, looking to innovative recycling solutions (I'd never heard of a dirty MERF at the start of this process) but we now have an environmental footprint we are proud of, especially when you consider we have cut our electricity consumption by 72% and our gas consumption by 75% since 2007.

Our advice - be curious, ask questions and be open to solutions and it is easy to innovate in whatever space you occupy.

And wait until you see our new App that's coming later this year, it takes rewarding loyalty to a whole new level with location-aware capabilities that we are just starting to explore the capabilities of, all because we were curious as to what we could achieve and lined that up with what we wanted our customers to experience...(and we might have been prepared to take a calculated risk and invest).