An employee of the Indian subsidiary of Marks & Spencer (M&S), Velu Mwinning has bagged the gold award for Customer Service Excellence at the 5th Annual Trrain Retail Awards.

“The Awards aim to recognise and reward exemplary performers in retail and create benchmarks for customer service excellence in retail in India,” a M&S India release said.

“Velu’s story of excellence stood out as one of the 15 selected among the 800 entries coming from over 75 retailers from more than 100 cities and town across India,” the release said.

Velu, 46, has worked with M&S for the last seven years, starting out as a security guard and has steadily climbed the career ladder to become a customer service associate.

“Velu travels 150 kilometres every single day to work at the M&S store in Chennai, but a recent special customer request brought him national recognition from the Trrain Retail Awards jury,” the UK based retailer stated.

According to M&S, Velu attended a customer, who requested one garment to be altered and delivered on the same day for an important occasion.

As the store’s in-house tailor was unfortunately unavailable on the day, Velu promised the customer that he would have it done for him and delivered the garment to him the same evening in Vellore.

“This meant Velu travelling another hour and a half, despite which Velu delivered the garment on time and honoured his promise to the customer,” M&S noted.

“Velu touched his customer’s heart and truly exemplified M&S’s core values of inspiration, innovation, integrity and in touch,” the company informed.