Customer Experience Professionals CX

Do you really hear the Voice Of the Customer!

2016-02-09T11:24:00.000+00:00

Of late I hear more and more people talking about Voice of the Customer as a powerful tool to understand the customer. That, of course, must be true.

I am old enough to remember the well told the story of the corner shopkeeper who spent his time talking with and understanding his customers needs so well that he could predict and prepare for their every visit to his retail emporium.

I suspect the resurgence in this approach has a lot to do with the power of the interweb to fire off numerous 100-word surveys and, to engage in some level of dialogue on Social Media. However, surveys are not a conversation, and social media could provide an easily misinterpreted dialog.

Having worked in the John Lewis insight unit in the late 90's, I found out how difficult it is to ask the right questions in a survey.

Consider the following questions:

Would you like same day delivery at under £5.00?

The customer will nearly always say YES!

Perhaps the question would be better if we asked:

Would you like same day delivery OR the item in stock every time you visit the store?

Most customers would choose the latter.

These are very simple examples, but when I read surveys that are sent to me I see these fundamental errors more and more.

Recently a client asked me to review some analysis of survey and social media verbatim statements. The original study had indicated that customers were concerned that the service was too expensive.

Though a subsequent series of Voice Workshops and open discussion with the customer, we discovered that the problem was with the value not cost and that customers did not believe that they were receiving the service they were paying for. This simple misunderstanding of the information gathered could have had significant consequences.

In my opinion, the over-reliance on a survey or raw social media data is driven by an obsession to collect massive quantities of data to validate a sample.

I have always believed that in most customer situations, the customer needs are simple. Practically this means that you don't need to speak to many customers, perhaps as few as 100 to gain a real understanding of what they need and expect from your organisation.

This simple application of saturation theory, that is to say when you hear the same thing time and time again its true, and the real insight you gain through an interactive conversation is worth a million surveys.

I find myself wishing that more organisations would, at least, balance their extensive customer data collection activities with a good old high-quality customer conversation.

Next time, I'll talk about some simple rules you can use to determine exactly what adds value to the customer experience.

Customer Recovery or Delighter?

2016-02-01T13:48:00.004+00:00

As I mentioned in my last Post, I spent 14 years working for the John Lewis Partnership. For those who are not aware, John Lewis is a leading Department Store and Supermarket through it's Waitrose Food Shops. It has had an excellent reputation for customer experience for over 100 years and operates on an innovative employee ownership model.

When I joined the partnership as a Management Trainee, I rightly started on the shop floor as a sales assistant. As such, I went on many training courses to learn the way of the 'Partnership.'

As well as the well quoted 'under promise and over deliver' guidance, we new partners were taught; the other revelation was the goodwill account. It was explained to us budding Partners that sometimes circumstances meant that the Partnership had done nothing wrong, and neither had the customer, but there was a need to make the customer feel good about a complaint. This is where the Goodwill Account came into play. It was a way of refunding the cost of goods or providing a goodwill payment to a customer even when the Partnership was not in the wrong.

This simple financial mechanism ensured that the customer went away with a warm feeling, but also allowed Partners (staff) to do the right thing. By cleverly setting up as an internal account, it also meant that the amount spent could easily be monitored for both under or overuse in any department or store. The cost of Goodwill was seen very much as part of the 'marketing' of the Partnership and its focus on customers.

This approach genuinely created countless moments of delight for the Partnerships customers. It also goes to the heart of why the John Lewis is held in such high esteem by so many of its customers.

So when you are thinking about customer recovery it's not good enough just to recover the customer, it is an excellent opportunity to delight the customer and create long lasting relationship based on value.

Next time how you can get to the voice of the customer faster and more easily than you might think.

Who infulences the reviewers

2016-01-18T15:54:00.003+00:00

In 2013, a study of 10,000 people showed that 4 in 10 respondents (38 percent) say a single negative comment online can dissuade them from making a purchase. And that doesn't just cover Amazon or own brand sites: 51 percent of Prosumers (the smart, early adopters of the consumer world) say non-branded blogs or social media made them change their mind about a product or service they had intended to buy.

In 2016, it has become even more important that companies products and services get the best reviews as frequently as possible and when occasionally it not quite right, organisations move quickly and overdeliver to resolve the problem.

When I worked for John Lewis, we had a saying 'under promise and over deliver'. The simple phrase was taught to ever Partner when they joined. It was not about marketing; it was about the day to day operation of John Lewis shops, including Waitrose. Ensuring that we met the customers basic needs and when practical, delivering some innovation or nice to haves, like being able to collect your department store order from a Waitrose supermarket. And of course, when John Lewis do get it wrong they are renowned for overdelivering to put it right. In other words creating true delight by surprising the customer in going the extra mile.

So the question must be who in the organisation has the most opportunity to deliver the basics, provide some nice to haves and occasionally delight the customer.

While marketing is great at introducing the brand or new products to customers, it's those running the day to day operation of the business that can and must have the biggest impact on the customers and, therefore, their reviews.

I find it interesting then that a lot of organisations have chosen to make Marketing responsible for all things customer when customer reviews are such a factor in customers buying habits, are most influenced, by those responsible for the operation of a business.

In 2016, when customer reviews will continue to have a significant impact on why customers buy, reviewing who looks after the customer in the organisation must be at the top of the agenda for senior management.

Next time I will discuss how we best to resolve complaints while achieving the delighter status that is so important to a great customer experience brand.

The 4 Themes that Customers Really Care About

2016-01-12T17:38:00.005+00:00

As I said in my last post, it took 20 years, but one thing I have realised is that clarity about the simple things customer expect is paramount.

Last time I talked about Basics, Nice to Haves or Innovation and delighters. This time, I want to explain to you the next level of details that customers think are important.

I have run and observed hundreds of Customer Workshops across many different sectors from health through to retail. Of course, many of the customers in those different groups are the same people who go to hospital and shop in a supermarket. So the themes they create, and they are their themes, not mine that are common to almost every sector.

The workshops ask customers to write down a simple set of statements about what they need or want from an organisation. There is then a discussion about whether the statements they have written group into common themes. The approach is an adaptation of "Grounded Theory." It's amazing how almost everything they write falls into these four common themes.

The common themes that customers describe are:

So using this approach its possible to gain a very clear view of what is important to customers and how they group together, and how that can become actionable in the real world. It can and should become the basis of your action plan going forward.

Next time I'll post about why customer reviews will be the most important part of brand positioning and how clear CX operational activities can deliver great reviews.

Check Out my Podcast Series http://stephenhewett.podbean.com

2016-01-06T16:40:00.003+00:00

http://stephenhewett.podbean.com

Why Clarity is so important For CX Professionals

2016-01-04T11:23:00.000+00:00

I have been working in the CX industry for about 20 years. From running the customer database at John Lewis, through to my current role of founding partner at C3 Partners, where all we do is CX.

It took 20 years but one thing I have come to realise is that clarity about the simple things customer expect is the most important part of being a CX professional. Many organisations lack that clarity.

Most customers are not that demanding; they just want the product or service that they are paying for, If you can deliver some extra value along the way they will be jubilant.

So if it that simple why do we make such a song and dance about it as CX professionals? But of course, there are millions of customer and they are all unique you may say. Well, that's true but they may be more alike than you think.

Having spent many years talking to customers in Voice of the Customer workshops, I have come to realise that customer needs break down into a simple hierarchy:

So it's possible to understand our customers by applying this simple method of categorisation. Once you have done that you know the things you have to get right every time, the Basics. You know the things that can add value and your customers will appreciate and notice.

I want to make a point about delighters. Customers find it difficult to define a delighter If you ask them. When they do talk about delighters, they are typically describing 'nice to haves' or innovation. To be truly a delighter it has to be unexpected, hence the customers difficulty in defining it. When I hear an organisation state it's CX goals as delighting customer I wonder if they understand the subject.

In my next posting, I'll explain how you can understand the customer more clearly by breaking down the Basics hierarchy.

The great importance of making it easy for your customers to buy from you

2015-04-12T11:27:00.000+01:00

On the face of it, we might imagine that all organisations will strive to make it easy for their customers to buy from them, but in practice this isn’t necessarily the case.

You shouldn’t assume that just because your organisation has been selling to your customers in a particular way for a long time, this means that your customers will want to keep buying from you in that same way for ever.

In practice, the way you sell to your customers ought to be in a constant state of review. What you need to ask yourself is this: what can we do to make it easier for our customers to buy from us and to give them a better customer experience?

The secret of answering this question acutely and effectively is this: always strive to look at things through your customers’ point of view and through their eyes.

If you do this, you’ll quickly realise that what your customers really want is to be able to deal with your organisation as simply, clearly and easily as possible and to get from you the products and services they really want, with these products and services delivered with a maximum quality of customer service.
Organisations often make too much of multi-channel, as if it were some magical route, some Open Sesame, to the perfect customer relationship. The truth, though, is that what customers want isn’t actually multi-channel for its own sake, but instead the biggest choice of channels relevant to their own particular needs.

For some customers, this will mean just one channel. For example, they might want to visit a retail outlet and pay cash for something they want to buy. If you install an internet-driven automated sales machine in one of your retail outlets but they don’t want to use their debit card, you’re not, in fact, helping your customers.

Yes, I know that internet-driven automated sales machines are, clearly, important because they allow your customers to access your full range of products (or products and services) when you aren’t realistically able to keep everything you sell in stock. But in fact it’s irrelevant that debit cards make things easier for you: you’re in business to make things easier for, and more acceptable to, your customers!
Another example is how too many organisations set up key performance indicators (KPIs) which are focused around the needs of the organisation rather than its customers. The classic example of inappropriate, or even plain silly, KPIs, often arises in call centres. KPIs imposed in call centres on customer service staff often require these staff to limit an incoming phone call to a particular length, and if the issue around which the call is centred is not resolved during that time, the organisation will want the call ended.

Instead, base your KPIs – and indeed all your metrics relating to aspects of your customer relationship process, on what you have ascertained your customers want, rather than on what you want!

Zen and the art of customer service

2015-04-06T11:25:00.000+01:00

I’ve been reading Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. First published in 1974, the book has never been out of print, has sold about four million copies to date, and still sells about 100,000 copies a year world-wide.

The book is essentially a gripping and entertaining account of a long motorcycle trip in the United States which the narrator, whom we can reasonably identify with Pirsig himself, makes with his son Chris (Chris rides pillion on Pirsig’s bike) and with a married couple who have their own bike. The account of the trip is interspersed with long, well-articulated and almost always very clearly written and highly accessible philosophical material. Pirsig uses the matter of making sure that his motorbike is well-tuned and well-serviced for the trip – which necessitates important adjustments being made to the bike during the trip – as a metaphor for the need to master technology and use it to one’s maximum benefit. Pirsig sees a sublimity in this mastery of technology. As he puts it:

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha – which is to demean oneself.

Another main theme of the philosophical content of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is Pirsig’s identification of a concept he calls ‘Quality’. He emphasises that this was not a concept he thought of himself but that it was suggested to him by a lady colleague, whose name was Sarah, at the a university college where he taught in the US.

Pirsig does not attempt to define ‘Quality’, and indeed he specifically suggests that it isn’t possible to define it. Pirsig says, in effect, that the precise meaning of quality is something that readers of the book, and people who hear about the philosophy of Quality and set out to make sense of it, need to work out for themselves. Pirsig suggests that Quality is the fundamental force in the universe, stimulating everything from atoms to animals to evolve and incorporate ever greater levels of Quality.
One of the endearing things about Pirsig as a philosopher is that while he can talk about things in a highly abstract way, he appears to be at his happiest as a philosopher when he is being down-to-earth. In particular, it’s clear that at its core, Pirsig sees Quality as anything that is really well done, well made, well delivered and well-conceived. As he said in an interview subsequent to the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and referring to the book:

I remember thinking to myself as I wrote it, ‘If this is going to be an essay about Quality you had better not fail to provide an example of it in the writing itself.’

Of course, the importance of quality in products and services was something that had been fully recognised long before Pirsig wrote his book. But what he said that had never been said before is not only that Quality, once attained, becomes a kind of Godhead, but also that it acquires a kind of life, and even life-energy, of its own.

The point, surely, is that this is true of anything that is well-made and well-delivered. The Quality at the heart of the making and the delivery will, indeed, acquire a life of its own that will fill and add sublimity to the lives of people touched by it and will create a kind of multiplier effect of Quality that keeps on resonating positively in the lives of millions and even for years to come. Look, for example, at how a really excellent consumer electronics product wins millions of customers and brings those customers, and people to whom they themselves recommend the products, enormous levels of satisfaction and, yes, sublimity.

Yet no product can ever be truly great without first-rate customer service being delivered with it, and indeed first-rate customer service seems to me beyond doubt to be as valid a manifestation of Quality in terms of Robert Pirsig’s take on the subject as anything else to which the term Quality might be attached.
The point is, when an organisation offers great customer service, it is bringing a sublimity, a very real manifestation of Quality into the world that will delight and enhance the lives not only of the customers who receive Quality in customer service but also the lives of the customer service agents who deliver it.
Let us all, therefore, in our work in customer service, strive for Quality at all times, not only because it makes an organisation more financially successful, but also because great customer service helps to bring sublimity, delight, enhancement – and perhaps even the Godhead – to our lives.

What C3 Partners’ core business philosophy – analysing Voice, Gap, Change – really means

2015-04-02T11:23:00.001+01:00

I and C3 Partners base our core business philosophy on the perception that helping client organisations maximise the extent to which they are customer-centric is all about the client organisation:

a) listening to its customer’s voice;

b) understanding the gap between that voice and the organisation’s view of the customer;

c) effecting the change which closes the gap.

Organisation’s customers have never had more power – and that power continues to grow. Yet in reality, the customer voice all too often receives too little attention from organisations. Instead, organisations pay too much attention to their own hypotheses and assumptions about customers.

It can be flattering for organisations to imagine that their own insights are more significant than what their customers say and think about them, but organisations are, in truth, better off not seeking to feel flattered, but rather trying to find out the reality about what their customers think of them and want from them.

C3 Partners has a customer-centred methodology that focuses directly on what the client organisation’s customers really think of it. This methodology fosters the creation of a structured and honest dialogue with customers that is intimate, honest and which builds a true picture of what customers really value about the organisation.

Next, C3 Partners applies powerful classifications, analysis and visualisation tools to building a clear picture of the gap that exists between what customers really want from the organisation and what the organisation is currently delivering to them.

These two closely related steps of understanding the customer’s voice and getting a clear picture of the gap go a long way towards revealing the real customer-centred state of the organisation, establishing the ‘Customer as a Compass’ to guide a truly customer-centred strategy.

C3 Partners’ Customer Centred Framework anchors the vital themes that emerge from the Voice process onto the core organisational dimensions of: people and behaviours; organisation structure; process, and technology.

Building on the outcomes of the voice process, C3 Partners use the customer as a compass to inform and guide all gap activity. This ensures that the truth of the customer view is ever-present, enabling clarity, focus and simplicity in decision making.

The gap analysis embraces strategy, policy, process, activity, metrics and skills. C3 Partners examine behaviours and culture – determining readiness and blockers to change. This informs the evaluation of practical change options, balancing impact and cost. The result is a customer-centred strategy with broad organisational buy-in.

The strategy is developed into a roadmap that prioritises highest impact customer-centred change actions, with appropriately managed levels of risk.

Extensive practical experience at C3 Partners has shown that a well-planned and well-executed customer-centred change programme can deliver a highly significant return on investment and transform competitive advantage. It is often the case that the work we undertake for our client organisations has such a powerful positive effect on their relationship with their customer that our work pays for itself, and not just once but many times over.

A customer-centred change programme turns customers into advocates and can create new and powerful alignment throughout the client organisation – making the customers’ voice and the customers’ needs a kind of bloodline that runs throughout the client organisation and which continually inspires and guides fresh levels of enhanced Customer Centricity within it.

C3 Partners designs and delivers customer-centred change programmes that achieve the strategic objectives of our clients’ customer-centred strategies, to drive maximum Return on Investment and leading to enduring competitive advantage for the client organisation

The Customer Centric You now in Amazon's top 50 Books for Service

2014-06-19T08:03:00.001+01:00

You can find my books here on Amazon at great prices http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B004DPHNOO

A great story from a customer service internet site:

2014-06-17T14:49:00.001+01:00

MORTON’S STEAKHOUSE

Author and business consultant Peter Shankman was getting ready to board a flight that was the last leg of a long day of traveling. It just happened to occur over dinnertime, and he knew he would be starving when he deplaned and headed home. “Hey, @Mortons – can you meet me at newark airport with a porterhouse when I land in two hours? K, thanks. :)” Imagine his surprise when he got off the plane to find a tuxedoed gentleman holding a bag that contained a 24 oz. Morton’s porterhouse, shrimp, potatoes, bread, napkins and silverware. Shankman noted that the Tweet had to be noticed, someone had to get approval for the idea, a cook had to make his food, the food had to be driven 23.5 miles away from the nearest Morton’s, and someone had to track down his flight information and figure out where he was landing to meet him at the right location. All while his stomach was grumbling on a 2.5-hour flight. Pretty impressive.

People Centricity - State Side?

2014-06-17T08:37:00.001+01:00

Just had my personal development book "People Centricity" submitted to an american publishers http://www.changinglivespress.com/ fingers crossed!

Both Business Books Customer Centric You and Customer Are The Agenda will be out as Kindle Versions in February 2014

2013-12-22T21:02:00.002+00:00

The Customer-Centric You: Making Customers the Focus of Everything You Do by Stephen Hewett (21 Feb 2011)

~~£14.99~~ £12.24 Paperback
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Customers Are The Agenda: A Practical Guide to Customer-centric Management by Stephen Hewett (30 Apr 2013)

~~£12.99~~ £10.77 Paperback
Order in the next 13 hours and get it by Tuesday, Dec 24.
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People Centricity - 1 offer from Publisher hopefully more to come

2013-12-22T20:59:00.000+00:00

Hello Everyone,

I have already had one offer to publish my new book People Centricity.

The draft is now with a number of publishers in the UK and US.

Fingers crossed for deal for the New Year!

Best

Stephen

2013-08-15T22:04:00.001+01:00

Perry Price, Customer Operations Manager, Argos

Anyone in business today must not only put the customer first but must take every effort to see the world from the customer’s point of view. It’s only when you have a real empathy and understanding of customers and their needs and perspectives that you can hope to meet customer expectations and also ideally to exceed them.

Stephen has helped Argos generate a paradigm shift in how we see our customers. We used to, in effect, hand out edicts from head office to our branch managers; edicts we believed would maximise the quality of our customer service. I’m not saying all these edicts were inaccurate in what they tried to do, but the point was that they issued from the top of the organisation rather than being generated and created within the branches by the very people who dealt with customers on a day-to-day basis.

When I met Stephen, I realised I’d encountered someone who was talking and thinking about customers in a way no-one ever had before, at least no-one I’d met.

For Stephen, being customer-centric is not just something you do in business because you want to make money! No, for Stephen, customer centricity is a deep and wide-ranging business philosophy that he actually extends to all of life.

Stephen also taught me that the way any organisation sees a customer needs to be, in effect, a bloodline that runs throughout the entire organisation. Yes, of course, organisations have administrative things to do as well as working directly with customers, but they can only succeed in today’s highly competitive business environments if their entire focus is around what the customer needs.

In order to generate that focus on customers, there really is no alternative but for the organisation to take every possible step at a grass-roots level to find out what customers are thinking and feeling, and what they want the organisation to do that it’s not doing now.

Another problem is that the larger an organisation becomes, the more remote the organisation may find itself getting from its customers, whether culturally and often also logistically and geographically.

This happens partly because large organisations frequently think they have to be highly centralised to operate at maximum efficiency.

Yet it’s not just that which is the problem, but also that there is a tendency for executives in a big organisation to become too engrossed emotionally and professionally with internal political goings-on at the organisation’s head office, rather than thinking about customers and what customers need.

Reader, believe me, this short, highly-focused book you’re about to read is full to the brim with sensible, workable, practical advice for how to win the hearts and minds of your customers, and how to put your customers first. There are no cunning tricks in the book; every tip is logical, sensible and in the final analysis, also honourable.

At Argos, we’ve benefited enormously from allowing Stephen’s philosophy of customer service to inform and guide our initiatives.

As a result of his advice and help, we’ve conducted a full review of the business and now have what we believe is a first-rate ongoing dialogue with customers. We still have things to do to ensure that our entire organisation is completely focused culturally, strategically and tactically around our customer and their needs. But already every store manager in our organisation knows that he or she has absolute carte blanche to deliver the best service the branch can, and that we are supporting that delivery in every conceivable respect.

In essence, what Stephen has helped us do is to allow everyone at Argos to be brilliant with customers. I hope his excellent new book will help you to be brilliant with customers too!

I am please to announce the launch of my new Customer Centred consultancy C3 Partners (www.c3-partners.com).

2013-06-05T09:15:00.003+01:00

C3 Partners brings a radically different approach to helping organisations drive business advantage through sustainable organisational change that is centred on their customers.

The potential business benefits from a customer centred strategy are huge, but many have failed to deliver on this promise. C3 Partners brings a blend of deep practical experience and well-proven techniques that unlocks the real business potential of the customer centred approach.

Our delivery is highly pragmatic and business-driven. We focus on business outcomes - measuring our success by the success we help our clients achieve. At C3 the emphasis is on working in close partnership with clients to deliver value many times greater than our costs, and with innovative commercial arrangements.

We have designed our approach around distinct stages, each with clearly defined scope and outcomes . With this approach, our clients can assess unambiguously the value we deliver at every stage.

C3 Partners people are recognised leaders in the field of customer-centred business change. Many of them have held senior roles in prominent businesses that have flourished by centring their businesses on their customers. As individuals and teams we work in close collaboration with clients, building relationships based on genuine business value and trust.

Our consulting is anchored in strong proven processes and the reality of the client’s circumstances. We bring practical techniques and tools to build intrinsically agile business structures geared to meet the needs and wants of customers.

My New Book at A Great Price on Amazon

2013-03-24T12:01:00.001+00:00

My new book Customers Are The Agenda is on sales on Amazon for £5.39 this is an error on their part it should be £12.95. Grab a bargin while you can!

Extract from my new book 'Customers are the Agenda'

2013-03-15T06:39:00.004+00:00

Tip 5: Make it easy for your customers to deal with you!

The secret of helping your customers deal with you so that the entire process becomes a doddle – is always the same: look at things through their eyes.

If you follow this rule, you can’t go wrong, because after all, the whole essence of Customer Centricity is to listen to customers and to give them what they want.

Never assume that just because your organisation has been dealing with customers in a certain way for a long time, your customers will want to continue with you in that way for the rest of eternity. They won’t. What they want is to be able to deal with your organisation as effortlessly as possible and to get the products and services they really need from you.

Too much is spoken about multi-channel, as if it were some Open Sesame to the perfect customer relationship. But the truth is that what customers want isn’t actually multi-channel, but the biggest choice of channels relevant to their particular needs.

For some customers, this means just one channel: they want to visit a retail outlet and pay cash for something they want to buy. If you install an internet-driven automated sales machine in the store which requires them to use their debit card, and they don’t want to use their debit card, you’re not helping them. I know that such internet-drive devices are important because they allow your customers to access your entire range of products and services when you aren’t able to keep everything in stock. But give customers what they want: why force them to pay by card when they don’t want to? It’s irrelevant that debit cards are easier for you: you’re not in business to make things easier for you; you’re in business to make things easier for your customers!

Give customers the ease of access they want; find out what they really want and how they want to buy from you.

Gear yourself up to what your customers want. Conversely, there’s no need to over-service your customers, if it’s not what they want. For instance, many organisations can order in a product for the following day for a customer who wanted it but it was not in stock. However, maybe your customer does not want the product the following day; next week will do just as well. If you order it in for them the following day and they don’t want that, all you’re doing is devoting resources to doing something that could be used better elsewhere.

Too many organisations set an initial Key Performance Indicator (KPI) which matters to them rather than their customers. The classic example is call centres, which effectively give their operatives a time limit on how long a call should take, and if the goal of the call (from the organisation’s point of view) is not met in that time, they will want the call ended. However, a KPI should be based on what customers want, rather than what the organisation wants.

My latest article - Engage yours customers or die

2013-03-13T03:35:00.001+00:00

Cover story for Customer Engagement Magazine

Argos explain how they have become more focused on customers

2013-03-13T02:58:00.001+00:00

Perry Price, Head of Customer Operations, Argos is speaking at the Customer Engagement Retailers Director Forum on 20th March, London.

'Customers First, Colleagues always

Perry will describe the journey that Argos Store Operations has taken in the creation of a customer lead culture, through the application of simple, yet powerful customer & colleague focused principles. The story will explain, how Argos discovered its reality with respect to being customer focused. Defined the key principles that enabled its approach to change, including the re-education of senior leadership team and utilising the power of the colleague, those that are closest to the customer. Perry will explain how this initial work is now helping to influence the organisations customer vision for digitally lead future.'

Customer Engagement - Directors Forum

My new book 'Customers are the agenda' is now available on Amazon for Pre-order.

2013-03-13T02:36:00.000+00:00

Customers are the agenda

2012-01-18T15:43:00.002+00:00

What a ‘John Lewis economy’ really means

by James Essinger

Last Monday (January 16 2012) one of the front page headlines in The Daily Telegraph was ‘Clegg plans a John Lewis economy’.

What this means, at least to Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, is that by rewarding the workforce with a share of the businesses they work for, people will - the theory is - work harder and more devotedly. The analogy with John Lewis derives from the well-known fact that the John Lewis organisation is, in fact, a partnership, owned by its employees. John Lewis distributes an annual profit share which, in recent years, has generally been about 15 percent of the employee’s salary.

While the fact of John Lewis being a partnership is certainly interesting from a business perspective; after all, it is extremely rare for large and commercially hugely successful organisations to operate in this way, to regard the partnership aspect of John Lewis as the most important thing about the organisation is to miss the point.

Yes, the partnership aspect does instil a genuine and passionate spirit of camaraderie among John Lewis people, but to attribute the organisation’s success to it being a partnership is like saying the Beatles produced great music because they used to spend a lot of time jamming together. People working well together is only the basis of a great customer proposition, not the full explanation of it.

The Beatles have gone down in history as the most famous twentieth-century pop group because millions of people loved their music. The customer proposition the Beatles offered was irresistible.

Similarly, the John Lewis Partnership (JLP) is a remarkable organisation, above all, because it provides great customer service.

Charteris partner Stephen Hewett, who spent 15 years at the JLP, says this about what working there taught him.

For me, the JLP was where I really learned to put into practice what has always been a passion of mine: to look after customers and offer them the level of service and quality of service that they wanted. I remember vividly that from my first week working there, I was struck with a powerful sense of how the JLP people I met came across to me as having a genuine and instinctive knowledge of what customers wanted, along with a determination to meet those needs.

By the time I joined the JLP, I’d worked in the aviation industry and already knew that I got a real kick out of finding out what my customers wanted and applying myself to their agenda. At the JLP I was fortunate enough to be introduced at a formative time in my life (I was 21 years old when I joined the JLP for the first time) to a structure that really facilitated customer focus.

I attended the JLP training course in my first week, a course that everyone who joined the Partnership had to join. There, I was introduced to a four-word principle that stayed with me all the time I was at the Partnership and which has stayed with me ever since. This principle is VASH, which at the JLP stands for:

Value

Central to the JLP’s entire thinking about customers is the need for them to be given what they perceive as value for money

Assortment

Also fundamental to JLP’s own philosophy of customer centricity is the need for customers to be offered a wide range of buying choices, which of course not only means a wide assortment of products generally but also a wide range of options (such as in terms of size, colour and other variables) within a particular range.

Service

The quality of customer service at the JLP is something the Partnership prides itself on, in my view entirely justifiably. The attitude at JLP is that everything of significance that partners do at the JLP should be done with a view towards furthering the quality of customer service.

Honesty

Honesty here means honesty in how customers are treated. I remember that during the training course I attended as soon as I joined the JLP, a woman on the course asked the trainer what we should do if, for example, a lady customer comes to try on a dress, which the sales assistant thinks looks awful on her, but she - the customer - likes it. ‘Should we conceal what we really feel,’ the trainee asked, ‘and tell her that the dress looks great on her?

The trainer said emphatically that no, not telling the truth to customers was unacceptable. Instead, the sales assistant should suggest some other dresses which look better on her, and should if necessary point out why the dress does not perhaps suit her as well as she thought it did.

The JLP, in its philosophy of honesty, and indeed in its philosophy of VASH generally, is seeking in all it does to build long-term relationships with customers that are based around giving value, assortment, service and honesty to the customer. This is the complete opposite of the ‘hard sell’ based around making a quick buck from customers, who will very likely soon realise that they have received neither value, assortment, service or honesty from the seller.

Many people talk about how fickle customers are during the internet age, when they can migrate to another seller merely by clicking on their mouse. That may indeed be, but few organisations selling across the internet - or in a physical sales environment - really do offer VASH. Yes, customers may be fickle, but customers have in truth always been fickle, they’ve always been ready to move on to another seller if they don’t feel satisfied. Victorian housewives would have had no compunction about dropping a supplier of any of the range of food and drink and household products they bought if they were not satisfied with the products and services offered. All that the internet age has done has been to make the process of moving on easier.

The old rules that applied when John Lewis began the JLP still apply now: give customers everything they want, and they’ll come back and enjoy the pleasure of buying from you again.

Today, Stephen Hewett believes that being able to deliver true customer centricity is an attitude of mind more than a technical skill, even though the technical skills do matter.

‘To be truly customer-centric,’ Stephen says, ‘you need to care about customers beyond the call of duty, you need to want to help them with their agenda because you enjoy helping them. Instilling that attitude in people is what the organisation John Lewis that set up in 1864 has been doing in the 148 years since its foundation.

As Stephen Hewett points out, it was not until 1928 that John Lewis’s son, Spedan Lewis, completed the organisation’s transformation into a partnership. ‘From the outset,’ Stephen Hewett says, ‘it was, above all, quality of customer service that was primarily responsible for the success of the business John Lewis founded.’

-ends-

James Essinger of Da Vinci Public Relations is an associate consultant to Charteris plc and its trade and professional public relations consultant

2012-01-05T22:00:00.001+00:00

I am very excited as very close to the final final version of the new book -

People centricity

the secret of winning the trust, friendship and affection

of other people

What can running a small business teach people about being customer-centric?

2011-10-18T16:34:00.004+01:00

Many of us have at some point in our careers helped to run a small business, or a semi-autonomous department of a larger business, which can amount to much the same thing.

Don’t you remember the buzz you had when you went to work? The excitement on Sunday evening of looking forward to getting in on Monday morning and making things happen?

How often do people running small businesses or a semi-autonomous department of a larger business, ignore the customer’s agenda? Not often, perhaps, because quite apart from the inevitable pressing financial incentive to meet customers’ needs, the physical and emotional proximity of the customer makes it much easier to generate Customer Centricity than when one is working within a large organisation.

Mark McCormack, in What they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School, has some pithy and well-made observations about what it’s like running a small but growing business. These are drawn from his own recollection of the early days of the sports agency he created, IMG, when he and his team were representing, among others, great golfers like Arnold Palmer and Gary Player. He talks of the thrilling entrepreneurial feeling he had when he started out. As he puts it:

There is no other feeling like that in business, or at least any that I have ever experienced. It’s not just the excitement, although that is certainly part of it. It is more a sense of the immediacy and importance that everything takes on, the feeling that what you do from day to day matters, and generates a desire to do even more.

Unfortunately, in many cases, perhaps even in most cases, the larger an organisation grows the worse it becomes at devoting itself to customers.

As an organisation grows in size, its customers all too often become increasingly remote physically and emotionally from the people who work at the organisation. This has been a problem since the earliest days of industrialisation.

Also, when an organisation is becoming larger and more complex, it accumulates more and more of its own internal ‘stuff’ that it wants to focus on.

This is more of a problem today than it was, say, in the early years of industrialisation, when there was little legislation affecting large organisations, as governments adopted a laissez-faire (= ‘leave alone’) attitude towards business. Today, organisations must operate during a climate of intense regulation. Overall, the great complexity today of the commercial, economic, legal and technological frameworks within which organisations must operate require a correspondingly more collaborative and sophisticated approach to management.

But whatever the nature of an organisation’s operating environment, no organisation can afford to use the excuse that its size means it needs to focus on its own internal stuff rather than on its customers. Any organisation that thinks like that is most likely simply too lazy to take the trouble to look hard at itself and strip away the dead wood from its processes so that the whole organisation becomes truly customer-centric.

A useful (there are of course many) definition of customer centricity that I prefer is:

the process of ensuring that every individual and department within an organisation is taking every step feasible to add value to what the organisation does for its customers.

What it really means to be ‘customer-centric’

2011-10-16T13:07:00.001+01:00

It’s much easier for organisations to pay lip-service to the notion that their customers should be at the centre of their attentions, than for organisations actually to put that philosophy into practice.

Paying lip-service to the ‘customers-first’ philosophy is easy; implementing it is more difficult. It requires a real imaginative effort, and often an emotional investment, to understand and empathise wholeheartedly with your customers’ agenda.

How much easier it is to focus on your own organisational stuff, your own agenda, your own preoccupations! Research carried out by Charteris suggests that most organisations devote about 70 percent of their time and energy to their own internal stuff and only about 30 percent to adding value for customers.

In fact, the ratio should, ideally, be numerically exactly the opposite. If you’re not devoting at least 70 percent of your time and effort to adding value for your customers, the chances are you’re not impressing your customers very much and very likely also risking your market share.

‘Customer centricity’, a term that has been around since the 1990s, is being spoken of today with more and more respect by an increasingly large number of professionals. They believe it represents the way ahead for organisations that a) really care about their customers and want to be all they can be to them; b) want to take that feeling of caring and put it into practice.

A useful definition of customer centricity would be the process of ensuring that every individual and department within an organisation is taking every feasible step to add value to what the organisation does for its customers.

Today, Charteris is one of the UK’s leading consultancies in the area of customer centricity, bringing a powerful combination of strategic and tactical techniques to help organisations put their customers at the very heart of everything the organisation does.

Charteris’s theory and practise of the philosophy of customer centricity is encapsulated in Stephen Hewett’s The Customer Centric You (Management Books 2000) published in February 2011 (ISBN 978-1852526726). Stephen Hewett is Charteris’s head of business consulting.

James Essinger