So why did these 78 organisations choose the Daily Mail for their letter last week?

Hardly a paper most of them are likely to read. However from an impact point of view it has hit the Tory target really well and got referred to across the media last week. The Mail is really poking the government hard on this one, with their ‘Dignity for the Elderly’ campaign. Today Labour kept the pressure up with some headline earning news, after a ‘Freedom of Information’ exercise on the differing costs of Domiciliary Care across the nation and general reduction in the amount of ‘paid for’ care being provided by Councils. The pressure is on and the Minister was unavailable for the BBC this morning.

In his absence a very sanguine Richard Humphries from the Kings Fund told the BBC Today Programme that the 11% reduction is not at all surprising in the light of the spending reviews and policies of both the last two governments. A representative from Brighton Council gently explained the apparent high cost of Domiciliary Care which was perfectly sound and just made the comparisons from the FOI exercise look quite banal. Labour’s shadow minister talked about all parties working together on this one.

What exactly are they going to do?

Nothing seemingly – the White Paper (Caring for Our Future) should have been published at Easter and now has not made it into the Queens Speech, so there is no legislation tabled. This does seem to be in the ‘too hard’ pile.

So far no one seems to be listening to two very bright ideas to help solve this conundrum, both of which get very little mention from the much hailed Andrew Dilnot report.

1. It is well known but not really recognised that we give too many people too much care for too long. We’ve got to measure it out much more carefully and encourage people to regain as much of their previous independence as we can. This is extremely good for them and their loved ones and costs government a lot less. Such an approach defies the notion that today’s level of expenditure on social care is the starting point for all the demographic time-bomb doom merchants.
2. When a person needs a change of domestic setting, let’s not make this an irreversible move into residential care.  It’s an old fashioned word but convalescence can deliver great outcomes – like recovery, for example – such that a person can get back home. Too often it is a death sentence, with the home being sold to fund a place in institutional care. If the home did not need to be sold then an escape route back to independent living would be possible. Too little thought has gone into the use of equity release which could give people this possibility in life. It works by releasing money from the value of an older person’s house to pay for convalescent care which is only repayable after their death from the proceeds of their estate.

Both these ideas start with a very optimistic but also very sensible thought which we all have; that we can get better. If we can get better – even if it is just a bit better – then we will need less care because we can do more for ourselves. Even if we don’t get better then we can still strive to enjoy what we did before but in different ways. Maybe we get a friend to drive us to church or the pub, rather than walking. It’s still about regaining as much as we can of our lives and ensuring we continue to enjoy those things that are most important to us. Too often, different, far more pessimistic expectations are set and the social care system then is set up to deliver those. 

The future for older people should be seen as very bright, surely?

• we can remain active and independent for longer
• we are not so subject to the killer diseases
• we can connect with more descendants than ever (maybe three or four generations)
• we have hard won wisdom to offer them.

The only ‘but’ is that all this means that later in life we are likely to meet our end quite slowly from a degenerative disease. This is the bit everyone is currently fixated by – the cost to provide a dignified end. What we are missing is reaping the savings made possible by prolonging happy independence for as long as possible by only giving people what they need. Here could be, both a better life lived, and at a lower cost to us all.

Turning these ideas into practice is not fanciful or terribly difficult. We have helped one mid-sized local authority’s adult social care department and its care provider market to make the first idea practical – it is generating better outcomes for people at lower cost. It is now described by Professor John Bolton as “perhaps at the forefront of adult social care in England”. There are pockets of activity exploiting bits of the second idea but it needs bringing together. We are looking for a local authority, residential home provider and a financial services company who would be prepared to let us help them with designing convalescent homes, short stays at which are funded by equity release. 

Most of us are needlessly seeing through a glass darkly on this one which is causing total stultification. It’s time the practical optimists got a chance to influence this long delayed white paper and actually start the process of caring for our future.

Jeremy Labram, Principal

The good news is that transmitter costs will be covered by the BBC who will also be stumping up a bit of cash for Local TV stations over the next few years, and on channel 8 which will make it visible to viewers so that they will be constantly reminded that it’s there.  Jeremy Hunt (the UK Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport who is driving the creation of Local TV stations across the UK) hasn’t been too demanding of new Local TV stations either, requiring nothing other than the broadcast of one hour of local news a day.

But then there’s the uncertainty, and at Charteris we have seen this in various parts of the country as we have been conducting public focus groups or been involved in community panel debates.  The most over-arching question, usually accompanied by a look of incredulity, seems to be, ‘How is it going to work?’  Because it’s TV of course, everybody has an opinion and it seems we’ve all had some poor experience of low budget Local TV that we don’t want to see repeated.  Yet we can’t even agree amongst ourselves on what ‘quality’ is: with some people saying features including local debates about the size of church pews would be relevant and interesting, and others saying that for example it’s going to have to feature the well-known Mrs. Jones being rushed into the local hospital ER-style before they’ll watch it.

At Charteris we believe that Local TV represents a real opportunity and we all need to toss it about a bit to develop a better understanding of what it is. Some good questions to think about are: What are the reasons for having local broadcast TV?  The schedule is key; what would be in yours?  How does local broadcast TV complement or be a portal to other media (such as the Internet)?  Our sense is that it is a good opportunity with positive (obviously) ramifications on local communities and the local economy and the people who should be interested are local communities and the public and private organisations that serve them. Importantly, it’s got to be seen as a medium for community engagement and dialogue (not just one-way traffic).

Someone is going to win the licences and the local communities need to know whether or not they want to get involved, and how best to do so. What’s really interesting is that the bid process is going to be a ‘beauty parade’ in which bidders are going to have to demonstrate how they will enable the attainment of Jeremy Hunt’s vision of Localism (local engagement and debate) (VISION), their relevant and compliant schedule (QUALITY), and their financially viable business model (SUSTAINABILITY).

We think the best bids will be those produced on the back of some serious engagement in the relevant local communities and with the whole-hearted support of those communities and the public organisations that support and serve them.

Based on our research conducted in conjunction with Deluxe (www.bydeluxe.com), there is a way to make local TV work, where everybody could be a winner. The essence is that it needs to be owned and run by the Local community with a clear mandate to support the attainment of relevant local community outcomes, supported by private and public investment but not requiring a profit, and enabled by media services supplied ‘in bulk’ to a consortium of local TV stations.

If you wish to learn more, here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions:

What’s the government (BBC) investing and how will the funding work?

http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/consultation_responses/Local-tv_making-the-vision-happen.pdf Go straight to page 31 for the answers to this question; the whole document is quite informative though if you really want to get into it.

Would anybody watch it?

http://www.attentional.com/farid-el-husseinis-blog/2012/04/03/the-value-of-epg-prominence/

By making it visible it will draw attention; of course to get repeat viewers it’s going to have to deliver something worth paying attention to.

Compared to other media, how effective is Local TV advertising?

http://www.thinkbox.tv/server/show/nav.1818

Even with concerns about viewership, would local businesses divert some of their advertising investment? There is a compelling case to give this serious consideration.

What parts of the country are covered, and what’s the potential audience?

http://maps.ofcom.org.uk/Localtv/downloads/ofcom-uk-Local-tv-report-2011.pdf

Ofcom have provided some very useful information and statistics; now we really need to understand thelLocal populations.

Hear it from the ‘horse’s mouth’; podcasts of Jeremy Hunt and others at a recent event.

http://www.salford.tv/multimedia/2012/podcasts/podcasts2012.html

You could spend a whole day listening to all of this, at least give Track01 an hour of your time.

Nick Vat, Charteris Plc

In that blog I suggested that (generally speaking) a key feature of public sector service delivery is placing the people you serve at the centre of decision making, as opposed to the private sector’s focus on the financial bottom line. As I said:

The way to do this is to start with the customer in the clearest focus, keep your focus on customers at all times, and let all the processes, methods, culture and philosophy of your social enterprise all be designed around them.

Now here’s a new question: are different management disciplines necessary to manage private sector organisations as compared with public sector ones due to the difference in ethos?

I tend to think the answer is, ‘no’ because the vital dynamics of management – working with people to get certain vital things done making efficient and cost-effective use of resources that are available now and which are becoming available – is equally pertinent to managing public and private sector organisations.

What is different between the private and public sectors are the goals of the organisations in the two sectors and how these affect prioritisation, decision-making and behaviour. Goals affect the focus or emphasis of management and how different management skills are developed and applied. And the goals of the public sector are different to those of the private sector thus requiring different levels of skill in different management capabilities.  For example, political skills, although becoming increasing important in the private sector, are not as well developed as those in the public sector.  And sales and marketing skills are not as well developed in the public sector as they are in the private sector.

What about social enterprises spun out of the public sector then? Well, these are organisations that are part of the not-for-profit sector but which compete in the open market to deliver public services for surplus. This surplus is then reinvested entirely in the business and/or in social or environmental initiatives of their choosing.  There are over 60,000 social enterprises in the UK today and whilst only a small proportion of them are spinouts, they’re proving to be recession-busters and must be doing something pretty good in combining public and private sector management capabilities.

The challenge for spinout social enterprises is to get the blend right fast. Start early in the planning phases; bring together private and public sector managers and let them build and run the new business. This may lead to some conflict, but conflict breeds creativity. Let them do it with the support and mentorship of social enterprises that have ‘been there, done that.’ And when the going gets tough, remind everybody of what’s really important… the customers. Make them your focus and think things through again.

by Nick Vat, Charteris plc

-ends-

It seems to me that, ultimately, both consultancy and mentoring, while different disciplines in many respects, are all about helping people become the very best versions of themselves.

It’s true that consultancy services are usually directed at organisations rather than people, whereas mentoring is by definition a people-focused process. Yet ultimately consultancy, too, is mostly directed at helping people improve their own knowledge and skills.

The only exception would seem to be where consultants make improvements to the infrastructure of an organisation, such as where information technology consultants enhance an organisation’s information and communications technology resources.

But in fact, whether or not the consultancy services are being directed to the people at the organisation or to the organisation’s infrastructure, the goal is the same:  to help the organisation and its people become the very best version of themselves.

In mentoring, the aim of helping the person being mentored become the very best version of themselves is, if anything, even more explicit.

I really like this notion of becoming the very best version of oneself. It’s a simply stated, extremely powerful idea and it can be used as a guiding light in all of one’s life: personal as well as professional.

It’s not an idea I originated; I have it from exposure to the thinking and work of personal development mentors David CM Carter and Matthew Kelly.

Once you’ve become acquainted with the idea of becoming the very best version of yourself, it’s an aim that I think becomes a useful part of our thinking and which can helpfully be used to infuse everything we do as people and as professionals.

Precisely what you see the idea of becoming the very best version of yourself as meaning in your case will, ultimately, be personal to you.

It’s not for me to suggest what the notion of becoming the very best version of yourself could mean in your personal life. In your professional life, too, of course, what being the very best version of yourself really means is up to you.

The following is a twelve-point list of just some of the things you might choose it to mean for you. Of course only you can finalise the list, and no doubt everyone will have more than twelve points here, but perhaps some of the following will strike a chord with you in terms of how you can become the very best version of yourself:

• Recognising that, at its core, professional life is about supplying services to a network of customers who are people first, and customers second. The more you care about your customers as people, the more fun your professional life will be and the more effective and efficient you are likely to be at what you do.
• Aligning yourself to become ever more aware of, and in harmony with, your customers’ agenda.
• Devising tactical and strategic solutions to meet your customers’ agenda.
• Constantly increasing your expertise at the professional discipline you practice.
• Constantly increasing your knowledge of the practical and technical aspects of  the professional discipline you practice.
• Maximising the professional time you spend doing what you are best at and what your clients really want from you.
• Minimising time spent doing administrative things that are more focused around your own needs rather than the needs of your clients.
• Practising good ‘email hygiene’. It is too easy to spend too much time dealing with emails that are not especially important and which take up time you could be using to do something more productive. One useful approach, if this works for you logistically, is only to go on-line to your emails at certain times of the day rather than to have emails streaming in to you all the time.
• Switching off your mobile telephone, Blackberry or other personal digital assistant more often and ensuring that you rule it, rather than vice versa.
• Keeping your worklife well-organised and clutter-free so that you can focus your attentions on doing what really matters
• Overall, aiming for a professional life where ideally everyone on your network is a friend, or at least someone you like.
• Remembering that maintaining a good balance between work and leisure life will actually make you work more contentedly and more efficiently. (I don’t like the phrase ‘work-life balance’ as it implies that work is not life!)

All the very best in your quest to become the very best version of yourself!

James Essinger

Firstly, mentoring is a very solitary activity. In my experience it’s all about equipping individuals to improve their specific performance rather than coaching a team of people to reach maximum potential.

Mentoring inevitably leads to a greater sense of responsibility on the part of the mentor to give the right level of support. Mentoring is typically provided to a specific senior manager who is then relied upon to direct both strategic and tactical initiatives that directly affect large numbers of people and business functions.

Mentoring is about asking powerful questions that help guide people to their own answers. The learning process is very different from consultancy, where consultants are hired for their specific expertise and show clients how to do what needs to be done, or indeed the consultants may of course actually carry out the activity themselves.

For me, a good indication of when mentoring is working well is when the mentee feels confident enough in their own decision-making not to look for help in relation to individual situations because they feel empowered and confident in their ability to arrive and enact their own answers.

So what is mentoring, at its core?

The starting point is usually one where the agenda is set by the mentee, with the mentor providing support and guidance to prepare them for the future. Mentoring can be informal and meetings tend to take place as and when the mentee needs some advice, guidance or support. Mentoring structures and methodologies are numerous as they need to reflect specific and individual support needs. However, mentoring approaches are predominantly facilitating in style as the key outcome of the work is for the mentee to be confident in their own decision-making abilities without the ‘hand-holding’ that is such an important aspect of a mentor’s early work with clients.

But isn’t that just consulting by another name?

In a word, no.

A consultant tends to provide professional or expert advice in a particular area of expertise. A consultant is usually expert in a specific field and has a wide knowledge of the subject matter. Consultants tend to work with senior management teams and perform identified tasks and decision-making work directly and to an agreed timescale for the client.

Given the obvious differences outlined above, what should organisations do for the best when they need both mentoring and consultancy services?

One answer is to commission separate services for each requirement, but is this really the best approach?

As someone who regularly acts as both a mentor and consultant, I think there is real benefit in a blended approach, where mentoring of individuals becomes an integral part of a consultancy service. At Charteris we have a strong track record in providing ‘knowledge transfer’ as an integral part of our consultancy service. What this means in practice is that we ensure tasks performed in our consultancy roles are as inclusive and accessible as possible to members of the client’s own project team.

I think this process is analogous to clients taking up a traditional apprenticeship, except that in this case the core skills have probably already been learnt, but are rusty though lack of practice. As consultants, we can create a guided opportunity for people to build-up essential skills and confidence just like that provided by an ‘on-the-job’ apprenticeship scheme, with seasoned consultants available to act as the all-important ‘master craftsman’ or mentor as required.

The result is a ‘win-win’ situation, where much better informed clients are capable of moving forward independently and successfully confronting new situations, whilst consultants focus on the complexities of future challenges prior to starting the evolutionary circle again by engaging with and coaching their new ‘apprentice mentees.’

Alan Miles, Charteris

Service users of a social enterprise enjoy the benefits of services provided in a competitive environment, where service quality will typically be maximised, while costs will often be reduced.    Staff working within a social enterprise are likely, above all, to enjoy the benefit of being able to focus on the activity itself that the social enterprise was set up to carry out. The lower rates of absenteeism and illness at social enterprises testifies to the increased morale that a social enterprise will often engender. The social enterprise will be a vehicle for this activity without any of the constraints to creativity that are sometimes found in the public sector environment.

All this said, a social enterprise is not right for every PSO, so every potential situation where a social enterprise might be a useful solution needs assessing on its own merits. This is inevitably a lengthy process and requires expert advice.

The main challenges of building a social enterprise for a public sector body are likely to be:

• getting the social enterprise planned and setting down its objectives
• creating it, organising its structure and setting it in operation
• ensuring that where people will be leaving the PSO to join the social enterprise, the residual parts of the functions that the people used to carry out at the PSO and which the PSO will still need will be carried out and any contractual issues with third parties are resolved.
• Making the social enterprise happen requires plenty of hard work. Some of this work will be technical, some of it will be about organisational design and much of it – inevitably the most difficult part – will be about people.

Overall, the major challenges of setting up the social enterprise are likely to be:

• gaining political, staff, union and wider organisational support
• preparing the social enterprise’s financial and marketing plans and ensuring that the social enterprise will be viable and can operate in a financially satisfactory way
• creating the social enterprise
• setting up the business and ensuring that all the key aspects of legal compliance are in place. These would include: governance, contracts, service specifications, licences to operate, staff TUPE, bank accounts, insurance, asset transfer, tax and VAT arrangements, ledgers, pension arrangements and branding
• ensuring that the business is fit-for-purpose. Among other things, this means implementing the agreed operating model, adapting performance management arrangements and taking every step to exploit and develop the new commercial opportunities that will arise from the creation of the social enterprise
• making sure that any ‘gaps’ in the PSO are closed
• managing the change process so as not to impact negatively on service delivery and also to ensure that the benefits of the creation of the social enterprise are gained absolutely as soon as feasible.

Creating a viable social enterprise that harvests all the potential benefits that a social enterprise can offer is a significant challenge for most PSOs unless they already have experience of doing precisely that.

Charteris is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of expertise in this important, growing area. Charteris combines knowledge of local government, health and social care with specific experience in creating and running social enterprises. We also have a partnership with SEQOL, a large social enterprise that Charteris consultant Nick Vat helped to build.

Charteris provides its help and consultancy services relating to social enterprises in various ways, including:

• executive support, strategic advice and guidance
• learning and development, including knowledge transfer
• project planning and implementation
• change management

A key capability that Charteris offers any public sector organisation (PSO) is a tried, proven and tested ability to spin public sector services into the open market in the form of a social enterprise.

Please contact me if you need any further information about social enterprises and how Charteris could help you to create a social enterprise that matches and indeed exceeds your expectations.

Stephen Hewett    stephen.hewett@charteris.com

What I said was, ‘You’re faced with a wonderful opportunity to deliver better services, supporting better outcomes for people by combining forces and stepping out into the open market as a social enterprise. If you opt to deliver your services through a social enterprise, you’ll be able truly to focus on the business that you love without the distractions of politics and bureaucracy; you’ll have more autonomy and more creative freedom; and you’ll be able to choose how the fruits of your labour benefit your community’.

It’s early days still, but at least some of these words have been fulfilled today in the operation of the employee-owned social enterprise that was incorporated a year later to deliver integrated health and social care services.

In this series of blogs I plan to address the challenges of spinning public sector services out into the open market in the form of social enterprise.

The key challenge

Let’s start by identifying the key challenge.

I still see today the fear, tension, anticipation, and – yet – excitement and determination in the faces of those middle managers. The journey we all embarked upon that day continues to be a difficult journey during which we have all been placed under considerable strain; some of this driven by politics (after all, these managers were responsible for delivering services to some of the most vulnerable people in our community), some of it by staff (they were being asked to TUPE from the public to the private sector), and some of it by economics (after all, it is money that seems to drive so much of our thinking in both the public and private sectors; and right now it’s pretty tight!)

In the toughest times, when it all seemed like an impossible dream, we stopped, took a deep breath, and refocused our thinking by saying, ‘Right, stop, let’s put the people we serve back in the centre of this; let’s remind ourselves of what is right for them, let’s draw strength from this, and let’s start again from there.’

So we did, and it was good.

There’s a great deal written about the differences in the ethos between the private and public sectors. There doesn’t seem to be any universal agreement about what those are; the strongest appear to be a public sector commitment to duty, fairness, openness and accountability. I work in both the private and public sectors and I can’t easily pinpoint differences in ethos between the two and make bold and authoritative statements about it that will stand unchallenged.

Were I to generalise, though, I’d say that the key challenge of public sector service delivery is placing the people you serve at the centre of decision-making, as opposed to the private sector’s focus on the financial bottom line.

There are good reasons for this general difference; in my view the main one is competition. When spinning public services out into the open market there is a significant challenge for organisations to find a balance that brings out the best of each ethos, ensuring that the right outcomes for people are supported by a financially viable business.

The way to do this is to start with the customer in the clearest focus, keep your focus on customers at all times, and let all the processes, methods, culture and philosophy of your social enterprise all be designed around them.

by Nick Vat, Charteris plc

This first one challenges a well-worn assumption that the current level of expenditure on adult social care (ASC) is ‘a given’ and is thereby used as the basis for future forecasting.

We now have developed a very robust business case which promises to make savings well beyond traditional expectations. It now has credibility in the marketplace and with local authorities who are compelled through cuts in mainstream ASC funding to find further savings.

Savings on current expenditure

I’m using approximate figures here – from the Department of Health (DH) and my own estimates. In England, the 150+ councils with responsibility for adult social services (CASSRs) each spend annually £100 million on average. The total spend is therefore about £15 billion. There is another smaller slug of expenditure commissioned by the NHS for people with primary continuing health care (CHC) needs. In our work, I’ve directly tackled 10% of that spend which goes on ‘domiciliary care’ services as well as ‘supporting people’. This therefore is worth conservatively £1.5 billion. Our clients are now realising for themselves some of these hard savings promised in the business case, and what is also attracting industry attention is that we’ve got a comprehensive specification for a new service which gives better outcomes to social care customers and we’ve found a way to commission it which will drive out 25% savings. At the macro level that suggests there is £375 million worth of sustainable savings ‘out there’. That is the prize.

Who can help councils win these savings?

In the self-evident views of the Miinster of State and the Local Government Association (LGA), it will require outside help from consultancies.  In fact Paul Burstow has announced that his initial £300,000 fund for this has been expanded to £1,000,000.  John Bolton’s view is that Charteris are a leading consultancy in this area and are probably unique in really making possible the delivery of savings whilst also delivering better outcomes for social care customers and Wiltshire are the first council to put this into practice. At our suggestion he is now reviewing and writing up this Wiltshire case for a DH paper. So, in summary, we have a proven proposition capable of making savings of £375 million for the country which is building traction and of course is getting advocated by one of the biggest influencers in the industry.

How can consultancies help?

Last month the DH and the LGA  asked Professor John Bolton to lead their latest Adult Social Care Efficiency Programme (ASCEP) which is allocating  the £1 million (50 x £20K) to be spent on outside consultancy. He has explicitly said that though there is no more funding to come and each LA has, in a memorandum of understanding, signed up to 2 years work which will be evaluated twice during that time by him.

The duty of any consultancy is to make our first deliveries so compelling that our client LAs will continue to fund the rest of their efficiency programmes. Our double proposition of  ‘Hidden Value’ and ‘Supporting People Better for Less’ can do just this by finding immediately available savings which can then be used to fund the bigger programme of transformation and savings. The two main propositions are entirely complementary.

In addition the lessons learned thus far show that our propositions can be equally applied to other parts of the £15 billion market – particularly the larger institutional care market – which has proved extremely difficult thus far for LAs to make inroads into savings.

If this seems to make sense to you please look out for the next post which considers how Dilnot’s ideas on bridging the funding gap can be made much more sustainable and also cost less.

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.’

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

What organisations really need to focus on this: just as a delighted customer who is an earnest advocate of some product or service generates, through word of mouth, a ‘multiplier’ effect of positivity for the organisation that supplied the product or service, the disenchanted customer can and very likely will do precisely the opposite.

Especially, we might add, in a time such as ours when the media is so powerful and when there are so many consumer programmes about, all

As I write this in the background is a TV programme called ‘Rip Off Britain’ is on, later on in the week is the TV programme ‘That’s Britain’.  Both these programmes talk about things people don’t like and largely features people complaining about it.  It seems the idea is to inform and maybe it will encourage people to act in a similar way. As a company being seen on these sort of programmes is seldom good publicity!

We have all seen organisations’ spokespeople on consumer programmes and confronted by interviewers who uses the tactic of asking a question and not allowing a measured answer or indeed any sense of perspective to be applied.

The truth is that a wronged customer is not only likely an ex customer but is also, on balance, much more likely to damage you by talking about their experience than a happy customer who often say nothing.  I wonder how many times these shows get happy customers ringing in to defend the company that is being discussed on these shows.

It seems to me that what often goes wrong is a misunderstanding between client and provider; either the client expects much more than the provider was offering or the provider fails to honour what the client was right to expect.   .

To take an example of the first problem first, a provider offering a £99 holiday in a UK based holiday park maybe you need to be clear that it is unlikely to be sun/sea/sand/etc on a 24/7 basis, and make that clear in your advertising.  Many people who book such a holiday know this, and yet advertising seems to ignore that you are staying in fairly old facility and it might rain from time to time.  This is precisely the sort of poor communication with customers that can lead to complaints.

To take the second example, a recent coupon offer went badly wrong when advertised cup-cakes from a bakery in Reading were so popular on a national basis that the provider had to massively and unsustainably increase production to meet demand, making a huge financial loss.  This is a particularly dramatic case of a retailer not able to cope with justifiable but unrealistic customer demand.

Both these examples demonstrate the importance of proper contracts that make it clear what is offered and the scale of the offer are vital to prevent disputes.  In the cases above; maybe show the odd rainy day, or mention that the park is old and under improvement.  Similarly if you make cup-cakes in Reading, maybe don’t sell them nationally without a clear understanding of what you are getting into.

Above all, take the trouble to see things sensitively from the customer’s perspective and to imagine how they will feel about a situation if things go wrong.

Sensitive and imaginative: is that too much to ask an organisation to be if it wants to delight its customers and enter the glorious world of running an organisation whose customers love it?

Andy McKenzie