SHOPPING CENTRE UPDATE
TRANSFORMATION LEADS TO SUCCESS
T
he world is about to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. However, with the potential of new waves to evolve, shopping malls, like many other businesses, faced an urgent need to transform to meet the challenges and adapt rapidly; forming the right and resilient strategy has become an essential element to any organizations as a crucial aspect to obtain a sustainable business and competitive advantage. Kinan’s portfolio consisting of ten malls, serving millions of customers in six key cities across Saudi Arabia, has launched the transformation strategy in early 2020 taking us into the future. Hence, this strategy has provided a strong foundation and a road map to quickly adopt precautionary and improvement measures to confront the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. We still believe more needs to be done while revisiting some of our core strategies: leading perfection, customer satisfaction, a safe environment, and the best shopping experience in Kinan malls.
Keep Malls Safe Throughout the Pandemic Assets and Systems Performance, Security and Safety Measures, Air and Water Quality were the core elements in our strategy to keep Kinan’s malls a safe destination to visitors. In that sense, we have utilized the available recourse and our partner’s technology and innovative solutions for remote monitoring services, including air, water quality and conditionbased maintenance, to control the building and ensure minimum energy consumption during the low or no occupancy.
I still remember the moment of giving malls work permits, going back to life and rolling out the red carpet to open gates to the crowd. It was a day of hard teamwork with no sleep hours in the operation and control room which I used to call “The Beehive”, evaluating ways, options and resources to create a more seamless journey and improve the customer experience minimize this impact by creating a joyful and positive atmosphere as you welcome customers back. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has managed the epidemic with the highest professionalism and control measures. Such a successful approach has been recognized as one of the most effective measures from precautionary, proactive measures and community awareness campaigns. Kinan Malls was one of the most trusted destinations for official TV Channels and social media platforms to communicate with the audience the success stories of cooperation between people, private and government sector institutions in the success of the Kingdoms strategic plans combating this pandemic.
Go Green and Sustainable is the Goal Over the years, there have been many changes in how facilities management is recognized within retail environments. A common feeling towards facilities management was that once it is brought to our attention, it signifies a problem: unclean areas, a leak in the ceiling, and faulty air conditioning. Being in Kinan as a mall operator leader, I recognized how important it is to be aligned with the Kingdom vision 2030. Thus, we start pursuing LEED and Green initiatives that can lead to environmentally eco-friendly lifestyles and taking ecologically responsible decisions, which can help to show the importance of natural resources within Kinan malls and by knowing that renovation has a direct impact on the perception of the mall atmosphere and an indirect one on customer satisfaction and spending we came over all difficulties, challenges, at the time where organizations, governments and individuals were navigating throughout all the challenges created by the
RETAIL PEOPLE . JUL - SEP 2021 .18
