Having just read some research findings on www.consumerforum.org.uk David has been recalling his time back at Tesco when the now iconic retail giant was languishing in third place in the market behind Sainsbury and Asda. The management of Tesco at the time aligned the whole business around it’s customers (and the vision to become number one and lead the way in food retailing…which outsiders kind of laughed at back then). It didn’t just feel like the right thing to do at the time…there were some statistics (no clichéd responses please) that made focussing on customers the right thing to do financially.

Look at the numbers from the Consumer Forum research:

• 80% of consumers tell their friends, family and associates about their good or bad customer experiences
• three times as many (25.2%) relay bad experiences over good (8.4%)
• nearly 100% of respondents said bad customer service would compel them to take their business

The statistics around before Tesco hit the top (in 1995) was that on average if a customer received service that in some way surprised or delighted them they would tell 20 people about the experience. Back then and now according to the research quoted above the key to the ‘delight factor’ is a personal, human response.    All common sense stuff but what the hell do you do?

First of all put the numbers into your business plan. Let’s say that you have 10,000 front line people and you could convince them to spend five minutes each day doing something to delight a customer…just five minutes during their shift!

Using the pre 1995 figures, that means each day 10,000 people get delighted and 200,000 people get told about what happened. That in turn means in a week 1.4 million people get to hear about a story from your organisation and the entire population of the UK gets to hear a ‘delight story’ by next May bank holiday. Now if you are thinking ‘aha… but there would be duplication as some people would get told multiple stories’ or ‘yes but every employee does not work every day due to weekends, sickness, holidays and the like’ worry not as there is a buffer in the maths. The factor of 20 people was from 1989…not only before Facebook and friends but before most people had ever even heard the term internet or seen a mobile phone…what would the factor be today…and whatever that answer is, it must be more than 20…and whatever that answer, it must be more tomorrow!

The other buffer in the maths is the best news of all. Employees don’t do it for five minutes a day…because the response one gets from a delighted customer is actually very enjoyable…employees start to do it all the time, they start to share stories and copy and outdo each other….an internal epidemic happens once a ‘tipping point’ is reached (see Malcolm Gladwell’s fab book by the same name) and this causes an external epidemic…five minutes a day to market domination with all the staff having a good time and the marketing budget untouched…why not?   No really…why not? 

Here are some reasons Rambutan have encountered over the last 15 years. Let’s call them ‘reasons to be really miserable – part 1’:

1/ it requires a leap of faith not a spreadsheet, initiative or project plan
2/ it requires trust that employees know how to use their common sense (because they do)
3/ it requires a culture of forgiveness of errors made trying to delight
4/ it requires the management to truly believe that the core purpose of the organisation is to serve its customers
5/ it requires freedom to let the epidemic spread (interesting one of the reasons behind the prolific spread on the internet was that there was no central body trying to make it spread)
6/ it requires management to stop stopping people
7/ it requires all measures to measure what is wanted (things gone right) not what is not wanted (things gone wrong) as the ‘light side’ gets rid of the ‘dark side’…e.g. don’t count customer complaints, count smiles
8/ it requires all measures to link back to what the customer wants (not what we wish they wanted)
9/ it requires that the hierarchy is turned upside down. The customer at the head and the head wags the dog
10/ it requires listening at every opportunity and at every level

It requires new thinking and a new paradox that says ‘actually this is really easy to do once we figure how to use all the spare time that management will have’.  David says that the internal tipping point at Tesco is burned into his memory:

“Looking back it seems like it tipped overnight but I am sure it took a few weeks. It felt like we went home one day, after spending our time as managers telling the staff what to do and checking that they had done it….. and came back the next day and started asking the staff what we could do to help them to serve their customers! They looked at us a little oddly at first (we also suddenly went from surnames to first names) and some were a little uncomfortable being trusted all of a sudden after years of being told what to do but hey it soon caught on and made my job a darned sight easier!”

Stalin told his generals that Germany wouldn’t invade Russia…when they did the generals didn’t tell Stalin for three days!

David was amazed when he heard this for the first time but over many years in many organisations, industries and cultures he has found that fear – and not lack of listening skills is the main reason why messages/content/employee and customer insight doesn’t flow up a hierarchy.

“Without the fear there is no need for listening groups and suggestion schemes (which rarely add any value to the organisation’s goals or to employee’s feelings of being listened to and taken seriously). Without the fear there’s openness and collaboration. In my experience the fear in organisations comes from two sources that need only one solution. Either the fear is a direct result of the personal style of the people on the board or it’s a perception created about their style by those aspiring to reach the boardroom. Either way the board must act…not in the theatrical sense as this cannot be stage managed…to show their human, open, ‘real’ side as if not, there is a danger that the next great idea or risk to the business is kept a secret until it’s too late to act.”

Picture the scene and conversation: it’s mid-afternoon in a ‘coffee and sandwich’ shop at London Bridge station and a conversation between customer and shop assistant ensues:

Customer: a regular tea please
Assistant: would you like a baguette with that?
Customer: no, thanks
Assistant: would you like a biscuit, flapjack or muffin?
Customer: no, thanks
Assistant: anything else?
Customer: NO!

As a sales technique (and it’s one we’ve heard all too often) it’s neither customer-focused nor sales-focused!  Perhaps a little refreshment about the different impacts that open and closed questions have would be in order?  (Not to mention the need to know when stopping an onslaught is a good option!)

Certificates and stickers often come home from school and reward all sorts of things.  In Sarah’s (albeit limited) experience, they’re usually for things like perfect spelling test results or a sporting achievement – both of which have an important place, of course…  

But being a Rambutan, when her son came home with a certificate for thinking, she was both surprised and thrilled to bits!  A teacher that rewards thinking as well as academic and sporting prowess – now that’s refreshing! Read the rest of this entry »

This week has been a double celebration for the Rambutan bunch.
We celebrated the company’s 2nd birthday and were chuffed to appear on the front page of our local paper.

The Harborough Mail reported on our refreshing response to the series of reports by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. The full article can be viewed here: http://tiny.cc/uvb41