Customer Insight Spring/Summer 2013

WWW.CUSTOMER-INSIGHT.CO.UK SPRING/SUMMER 2013

“ What’s THE SECRET?”

by Adharanand Finn

LATEST UKCSI RESULTS IMPROVING CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION THE PERFECT PINT ART OR SCIENCE? WHY DO COMPANIES NEVER LEARN?

COMPANIES IN THIS ISSUE Overfinch Manchester University Irish Life Jurys Inn Taylor Walker British Egg Council Plus...

Latest Thinking Online Panels Book Review

Training & Half Day Briefings Customer Satisfaction v Net Promoter Score v Customer Effort Score Debate the pros and cons of different ways of surveying your customers. Find out which is the best measure for your organisation and how you can use the best bits of all three.

Wednesday 11th September 2013 09.15 – 12.30 - Central London

Wednesday 18th September 2013 09.15 – 12.30 - Central Manchester

Improve your Customers’ Satisfaction Take away ideas for your customer satisfaction programme by: 1. Bringing customers’ experiences to life in the organisation 2. Carrying out effective gap analysis and clearly prioritising action 3. Engaging staff to make long term behavioural changes Wednesday 11th September 2013 13.45 – 17.00 - Central London

Wednesday 18th September 2013 13.45 – 17.00 - Central Manchester

Customer Surveys Learn how to ask the right questions to the right people in the right way to get actionable customer satisfaction data. Valuable for anyone wishing to initiate customer satisfaction measurement or to improve an existing customer survey programme.

Tuesday 10th September 2013 09.30 – 17.00 - Central Manchester

Book by Monday 1st July to receive a 10% discount on these dates Enter the code EARLYBIRD at the checkout Book online at www.leadershipfactor.com/events

Tuesday 17th September 2013 09.30 – 17.00 - Central London

For further information or to book your place visit

www.leadershipfactor.com

or call Sandra on 01484 467000 Places are limited for maximum participation

6 Latest thinking

19 Case study

What’s the Secret? by Adharanand Finn

The aggregation of marginal gains

9 UKCSI

24 Case study

The latest results and insights from the UK Customer Satisfaction Index

Jurys Inn - Employee Engagement.

Maintaining the Momentum

27 Online panel The Perfect Pint – Art or Science? & The British Egg Council

15 Case study

29 Customer

Overfinch - Placing exceptional customer service at the heart of the business

Call centres - Why do companies never learn?

16 Case study

33 Book review

In this issue...

SPRING/SUMMER 2013

University of Manchester Enhancing The Student Experience

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Half Day Briefings

Map your Customer Journey Manchester London 09:15 – 12.30

– 18th June 2013 – 19th June 2013

A practical guide to help you map your customer journey.

The briefing will walk through how to map a customer journey at a high level using example case studies from UK companies.

The briefing will challenge whether your business delivers at all stages of the journey. Find out how you can build a model with operational data that links to customer metrics to really understand cause and effect.

The briefing includes: • Understanding that the customer journey matters • Draw your own high level customer journey map • How good are you at delivering against your customer journey • Identify the key touch points and how to measure them • Building an OMI (Operational Measurement Index) • The challenges of having not having all the data • Linking your OMI to your customer experience programme • Understanding a cause and effect model • Impact on satisfaction & loyalty

The Steps to Create a Customer Culture

Manchester London 13:45 – 17:00

– 18th June 2013 – 19th June 2013

This highly interactive briefing includes examples and discussion around how to build a customer culture.

Hear what has worked in other organisations to put the customer at the heart of the business and take away some clear ideas of what you can do to create a customer culture within your organisation.

The briefing includes: • • • • • • • • • •

What is a Customer Centric Culture?

How customer centric would you rate your organisation?

How do you transform the culture?

Why it needs you to make a customer culture happen?

Making customer culture a business priority Getting commitment from the top Employee reward & recognition links to customer loyalty Experience your own customer journey A customer service aligned with business strategy Win the recognition your customer service deserves - the power of external awards • Communicate, communicate, communicate

Ian Golding

As Former Head of Group Customer Experience at Shop Direct Group (SDG), Ian was responsible for building and embedding the customer experience strategy for all retail brands within the SDG portfolio in the UK. Ian is a passionate believer in putting the customer experience at the heart of everything any business around the world does and he is currently working with a wide range of companies on Customer Experience strategy, measurement, improvement and employee advocacy techniques and solutions.

For further information or to book your place visit

www.leadershipfactor.com

or call Sandra on 01484 467000 Places are limited for maximum participation

Nigel Hill editor

What’s the secret? The secret is that there is no secret says Adharanand Finn, author of ‘Running with the Kenyans’ and our article on page 6. As you’ll see in the article, the one tribe in the Rift Valley dominates world distance running more than any other group or organisation you can think of dominates anything. You can think of the world’s most successful companies. Coca Cola? Starbucks? Amazon? Microsoft? Even Google – if you translate the Kenyans’ dominance into market share they outdo any of them. What’s their secret? There is no secret. They just get the basics right.

You can apply the same logic to improving customer and employee satisfaction, especially maintaining an improvement trend over several years. There’s no secret, no quick fix, no latest gimmick that will bring success. It’s down to getting lots of little things right. Little things that we already know we should be doing. Just read the Irish Life case study on page 19 and Jurys Inn on page 24.

As the latest UKCSI results demonstrate on page 9, if you have high customer satisfaction it leads to all kinds of financial benefits. So why don’t all companies do the kinds of things that Irish Life and Jurys Inn do? It’s a very good question and on page 29 you can read about a very, very well known company (one of the leading credit card providers in the UK) that doesn’t even come close to doing it, despite the fact that there’s a strong link between customer satisfaction, Customer Lifetime Value and profits in their industry.

Customer Insight is the magazine for people who want their organisation to deliver results to employees, customers and any other stakeholders as part of a coherent strategy to create value for shareholders. We publish serious articles designed to inform, stimulate debate and sometimes to provoke.

We aim to be thought leaders in the field of managing relationships with all stakeholder groups.

Nigel Hill

Editor:

Production Editor: Chris Newbold Rob Ward

Designer:

Creative Director: Rob Egan

A big factor in getting the business basics right is who you recognise and reward, and why. When a Kenyan runner wins a big city marathon (and it could be say Paris or Budapest rather than a top one like London or Boston) they are made for life. They often come back home, buy a farm and a car and, in the eyes of their Kenyan peers, live like kings.

They are role models. In London’s East End in the 1930s, if you wanted a better life than your parents you probably joined the local boxing gym.

In Manchester you played football. Bjorn Borg spawned a generation of top Swedish players and there’s now an upsurge of cycling in the UK after the heroics of Sirs Chris and Bradley. In Kenya the role models are distance runners. You go to Iten, train very hard every day, rest and eat ugali. If you’re very good you’ll do well in a local race and get picked up by an agent who will fund a trip to a big city race.

Advertising:

And the lessons for business are similar. It’s getting all the basics right.

It’s having the right role models for your people to emulate. So if you want to be a customer focused business make sure your middle and senior managers live the right values and behaviours. Promote people you want others to copy. Like Irish Life and Jurys, reward, promote and celebrate desirable behaviours from across the workforce. Especially when they benefit customers.

NB: Customer Insight does not accept responsibility for omissions or errors. The points of view expressed in the articles by contributing writers and/or in advertisements included in this magazine do not necessarily represent those of the publisher. Whilst every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained within this magazine, no legal responsibility will be accepted by the publishers for loss arising from use of information published. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrievable system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent of the publisher.

Copyright © CUSTOMER INSIGHT 2013

Charlotte Ratcliffe

Printers of Customer Insight Magazine

www.customer-insight.co.uk info@customer-insight.co.uk Customer Insight c/o The Leadership Factor Taylor Hill Mill Huddersfield HD4 6JA

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Latest thinking

Whats the secret?

Whether it’s getting the best out of your managers at work, your customer service advisors in a contact centre, your assistants in a store, your actors on the stage or your athletes on the track, what’s the secret? Last year at The Leadership Factor’s annual Customer Insight Conference, Matthew Syed spoke very persuasively about the concept of 10,000 hours of purposeful practice as the differentiator. The keynote speaker at this year’s conference was Adharanand Finn, author of “Running with the Kenyans”, which was short-listed for the William Hill 2012 Sports Book of the Year prize. Finn spent six months living as well as running with the Kenyans to discover their secret. As you’ll see, there is some support for Matthew Syed’s 10,000 hours, but that’s not the only factor. The author of “Running with the Kenyans” now takes up the story.........

“You want to know what the secret is?

That there is no secret.” Brother Colm O’Connell, a retired Irish priest and one of Kenya’s top running coaches, is almost spitting with delight as he talks to me. We’re standing in the grounds of St Patrick’s school in Iten, Kenya. On the grass in front of us, his athletes are going through their warm-up drills. Among them is the tall figure of David Rudisha, the 800m Olympic champion and world record holder.

neighbour, Ethiopia. So why, exactly, are they so good?

For years the golden boy of British distance running, Mo Farah, struggled to even make the finals on the world stage.

In interviews he has repeatedly asserted that everything changed for him the day he moved into a house in south-west London with a group of top Kenyan runners. “To see them just eat, sleep and train and nothing else was a big shock for me,” he said recently.

Colm may joke about people looking Farah was already the top British runner for the secret, but something is going at the time, but the level of dedication he on here. Kenya was so disappointed to saw from the Kenyans was a revelation. only win 11 running medals at the 2012 Olympics that it launched a public inquiry Hard work and dedication after the Games. At the World Athletics Championships the year before, Kenya Yet up in Kenya’s Rift Valley there are thousands of runhad won an incredible 17 medals in “To see them just eat, sleep ners living like this, with an the middle and long and train and nothing else training intense, almost distance running was a big shock for me,” monastic focus. events. Even with Every morning, home advantage and the heroics performed by Mo Farah, in the town of Iten, where I lived for six Jessica Ennis and co, Great Britain only months, you can see them everywhere, won four medals on the track in London. striding past in a blur of faded wind jackets and Lycra, like commuters in any In marathon running, the east Africans other city. are even more dominant. In 2011, the world’s top 25 fastest runners – in what “This is the bit people miss when they is probably the world’s most universal look for the secret,” says Brother Colm and accessible sport – were all from later, as we watch his athletes race each Kenya. In 2012, the top 49 runners were other up and down a steep hill. Sheer all from either Kenya or its east African hard work and dedication, that’s the

secret, he says. But can the explanation really be that simple? The answer is both yes and no.

Running to school Virtually every Kenyan runner comes from a poor, rural background. From an early age they run everywhere. I had always thought the oft-recounted story of Kenyan children running miles to school every morning was a romanticised myth, but there they are, their pencil cases rattling in their schoolbags, chugging along, sometimes before the dawn has even broken. Daniel Komen, the world record holder at 3,000m, told me: “Every day I used to milk the cows, run to school, run home for lunch, back to school, home, tend the cows. This is the Kenyan way.”

One top coach – who has at least six world champions on his books – told me that it takes ten years of training to build enough of an endurance base to be good at long-distance running. “By the time a Kenyan is 16,” he said, “he is already there.”

The life of a western athlete, we are constantly told, is one of hard work and sacrifice. But these things are relative, as Farah found out. For the Kenyan runners, hard work is just part of daily life, ingrained in them since birth. Dedicating themselves to running doesn’t require any special sacrifice. In fact, in Kenya the

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Latest thinking

life of an athlete is one of relative comfort.

Eat, sleep and run. It beats digging the earth all day with a hand plough.

Role models For Kenyans, their focus is sharpened by the success they see around them. Up in the Rift Valley, every village has its star runner, someone who has gone off to win a world title or some big city marathon, and returned with enough money to buy a plot of land, a cow and a big car. There are role models everywhere. The children look around them and say, when I grow up, I want to be a runner.

Kenyans, conducting research into why they are so good at long-distance running.

He agrees that it is due to this perfect concoction of factors. I ask him, however, if he can put one reason above the others as the most important.

“Oh, that’s tough,” he says, thinking hard for a moment. Then he says pointedly: “The hunger to succeed.”

“Look,” he says. “My daughter is a great gymnast, but she probably won’t become a gymnast. She’ll probably go to university and become a doctor. But for a Kenyan child, walking down to the river to collect water, running to school, if he doesn’t become an athlete then there are not many other options. Of course, you need the other factors, too, but this hunger is the driving force.”

“ The hunger to succeed.”

I met a man in Iten who was trying to start a cycling team.

His thinking was that if they were so good at running, they might be good at cycling, too. He was offering good money to join his team, but nobody wanted to sign up.

“They all want to be runners,” he said.

“There are no Paul Tergats or David Rudisha’s in cycling.”

Bare feet, altitude and carbohydrates So here you have a population who from a young age have been running everywhere, mostly in bare feet – which gives them perfect running form, and stronger feet and legs – and who all aspire to become athletes. Throw in the fact that they all grow up at altitude, which increases the blood’s ability to carry oxygen (a good attribute for long-distance running), and eating a diet full of carbohydrates and very little fat, and you have the perfect recipe for producing great runners.

Poverty Underpinning all their efforts is the constant spectre of poverty. For every successful Kenyan athlete, there are ten others training in the hope of success. For them, making it as a runner, even modestly, is their only chance of escape.

Dr Yannis Pitsiladis from the University of Glasgow has spent 10 years studying

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it, “makes them strong, disciplined and motivated to succeed”. So motivated that every hill represents an opportunity. No wonder we can’t keep up. CI

Poverty exists in many other places, of course, and the will to escape it is not unique to Kenya. The difference, however, is that in Kenya that will is channelled into running. Every last drop of it.

The importance of that will to succeed was clearly illustrated to me one day when I asked one of the Kenyan coaches why the athletes ran faster every time we came to a steep hill. My natural (and to me, logical) inclination, when going up a hill, has always been to slow down.

“That’s because they see the hill as an opportunity,” he said, smiling, knowing the answer would bamboozle me. “An opportunity to train harder, to run harder.”

Genetics?

Many people point to Kenyans’ dominance in running, and say it must be down to genetics. The big problem with this argument, however, is the lack of scientific evidence. Dr Pitsiladis and others have been conducting research on this for years and have so far come up with nothing. Unless they do, we’ll have to continue to concur with Brother Colm, that there is no secret, unless you count an incredible level of dedication, borne out of a hard, physical life that, as Brother Colm puts

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Adharanand Finn Author Running with the Kenyans

UKCSI

UKCSI Latest Results – Customer Satisfaction Pays The UKCSI (UK Customer Satisfaction Index) is the national measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty for the UK. Owned and published by the Institute of Customer Service (ICS), more detailed results including reports for all 13 sectors covered by the UKCSI are available from https://www.instituteofcustomerservice.com/10560/UK-CustomerSatisfactionIndexUKCSI.html

Based on web interviews with a nationally representative sample of 26,000 UK adults, the six-monthly surveys are conducted for the ICS by The Leadership Factor. This article outlines the latest results and illustrates some of the considerable business benefits of having highly satisfied customers.

Figure 1: UKCSI trend

78.2

78.0 77.4

77.3 UKCSI

Customer satisfaction is going up

76.7 75.6

75.2

Customer satisfaction in the UK has continued to trend upwards, rising slightly to 78.2. The increase is driven by small gains in a number of sectors, notably Retail (non-food), which offset small losses in other sectors, such as Public Services (local).

Overall the message is one of stability, with little change in the relative standing of the sectors. The Retail (non-food) sector continues to excel, with only one scored organisation having a CSI below the national average of 78.2.

Jan 10

Jul 10

Jan 11

Jul 11

Jan 12

Jul 12

Jan 13

80

90

UKCSI wave

Figure 2: UKCSI sectors 50

60

70

UKCSI

78.2

Retail (non-food) Retail (food) Services Automotive Leisure Tourism Finance (insurance)

78.8

Finance (banks & building societies)

78.0

85.2 82.1 82.0 81.3 80.7 80.5

Telecommunications Public Services (local) Transport Public Services (national) Utilities

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74.8 74.3 73.7 72.8 72.4

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UKCSI

Small gains make a big difference

Figure 3: Distribution of UKCSI scores

76

Of the 181 organisations scored, 5 achieved a CSI of 90 or more – ASOS, First Direct, John Lewis, Waitrose and Amazon. 23 scored 85 or over, a CSI of 85.5 or more putting an organisation in the top 10%. This means that being only a few points ahead of the average is enough to give an organisation a fantastic reputation for customer service.

The top ten companies on the UKCSI are shown in Figure 4.

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

CSI - distribution of organisations

Figure 4: Top performing companies ASOS

93

Retail (non-food)

John Lewis

92

Retail (non-food)

First Direct

90

Banking

Waitrose

90

Retail (food)

Amazon

90

Retail (non-food)

Skoda

88

Automotive

Iceland

87

Retail (food)

The Co-operative Bank

87

Banking

Volvo

86

Automotive

Debenhams

86

Retail (non-food)

Customer satisfaction drives business success As we have seen, relatively small increases in customer satisfaction have a big impact on companies’ ability to climb the league table and differentiate themselves on customer service. They also have a big impact on the downstream benefits of customer satisfaction such as Harvard’s 3Rs – Retention, Related sales and Referrals. As the main components of Customer Lifetime Value, the 3Rs in turn make a big impact on financial metrics such as sales, market share and profit.

Figure 5: Food retail - Customer satisfaction and market share

We have seen evidence in previous UKCSI results of how customer satisfaction drives business success and the latest results further reinforce this link.

+0.6%

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Aldi

+0.4%

Food retail: market share gains for top companies Food retailers with the highest customer satisfaction have grown sales most and gained the most market share. Those with customer satisfaction above the sector mean grew sales by 9% and market share by 0.02% on average compared with 4% sales growth and declining market share of 0.05% for companies with below average satisfaction. The beneficial link between higher satisfaction and business performance is particularly striking with Waitrose, Iceland and Aldi who also have the highest customer satisfaction scores.

82

50% organisations

Behind the overall average of 78.2, there is a wide spread of satisfaction. The lowest scoring organisation has a CSI of 48.6, and the highest 92.7.

However, as Figure 3 shows, most score within a few points of the overall average—50% scoring between 76 and 82. In other words, the majority of organisations in the UK are providing a level of satisfaction very close to the national average.

Waitrose

+0.2% Market share change 112 weeks to 22 Jan 2012 vs 12 weeks to 22 Jan 2013 Source: Kantar Worldpanel

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Lidl 0%

-0.2%

Iceland

Tesco Sainsbury’s Asda

The Co-operative Food

-0.4%

-0.6% 75%

Morrisons 85%

80%

CSI

90%

UKCSI

Automotive: more revenue from satisfied customers There is also a strong link between customer satisfaction and sales in the car industry, as shown in Figure 6. There is also a very strong relationship between satisfaction and recommendation, with every 1% point increase in customer satisfaction resulting in 2.2% more customers who have actually recommended the brand – a much stronger measure than mere willingness to recommend.

Completing the picture on the 3Rs is the finding that satisfaction is very strongly linked to related sales in the car market.

The top five car brands on customer satisfaction all have more than half their customers choosing to get their servicing done at their branded dealership, with Volvo’s related sales as high as 70%. By contrast, the two manufacturers with lowest satisfaction see little more than 30% of their customers returning for a service.

Related sales form a particularly important component of Customer Lifetime Value and hence profitability across many sectors. Volvo is an interesting case in point. Figure 6 suggests that they are not translating their high level of customer satisfaction into sales as successfully as some competitors but they are the most successful at translating it into servicing.

In many industries subsequent servicing is more profitable than the original equipment sale and is much more strongly influenced by the quality customers’ all round experience with the brand.

Recommendation is also a big component of Customer Lifetime Value. In the automotive sector it generates more revenue from new vehicle sales and servicing and it reduces customer acquisition costs. In some industries companies delivering a great experience can acquire almost all their new customers through referrals – a very profitable business model. Apart from a couple of slight outliers (Fiat and Land Rover), Figure 8 shows a very strong link between customer satisfaction and advocacy.

Figure 6: Customer satisfaction drives car sales

Fiat

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Skoda Hyundai Toyota Nissan Mercedes-Benz BMW Citroën Audi Honda Ford Peugeot VW Volvo Vauxhall

15% 5%

% change in annual Registrations

-5% -15%

Mazda

-25% -35% Renault

-45% 72%

72%

76%

78% 80% 82% 84% Customer satisfaction

86%

88%

90%

Figure 7: More service revenue from satisfied customers 75% Mazda

70%

Volvo

BMW/Mini

Kia

65%

Mercedes-Benz

55%

% serviced at branded dealership

Audi

Nissan

60%

50%

Honda

Ford

Peugeot

Citroën Vauxhall

Toyota Hyundai

VW

Skoda

45% 40%

Land Rover Renault

35%

Fiat 30% 70

75

80 Customer satisfaction

85

90

Figure 8: More recommendation from satisfied customers 65% Land Rover

60%

Hyundai

55% BMW/Mini

Toyota

50%

% Have recommended

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Mazda Honda

45%

Volvo Audi

Mercedes-Benz Skoda Kia

Fiat

40%

Ford

35% Vauxhall 30%

VW Nissan

Citroën

Peugeot 25% Renault 20%

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Land Rover Kia

25%

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UKCSI

Banks and building societies: more recommendation Again on the stronger measure of actual recommendation rather than mere willingness to recommend, customers who are more satisfied with their bank or building society are more likely to recommend them. On average, improving customer satisfaction by 1% point means that an extra 1.6% of customers will have recommended a bank.

Figure 9: Satisfied customers recommend banks more 55% First Direct

50% 45%

The co-operative bank

40%

Nationwide % Have recommended

35%

Alliance & Leicester

30% 25%

This difference is most striking at the extremes—the worst performer in the sector has 17% of customers who are advocates, whereas First Direct has 51%—but the pattern holds at every level of customer satisfaction.

20%

Insurance: the 3Rs in action

35%

Bank of Scotland

Halifax RBS

HSBC

Barclays Lloyds TSB Natwest

Santander / Abbey Tesco

15% 10%

65

70

75 80 85 Customer satisfaction

90

95

Figure 10: Increase satisfaction and sell more policies to existing customers

In the insurance sector we can really see Harvard’s 3Rs working well. Customer satisfaction again shows a strong link to recommendation. Insurance companies who improve customer satisfaction by 1% add 1.1% of additional advocates. Related sales are a particularly important element of profitability in the insurance sector, and as Figure 10 shows, there is a strong link between customer satisfaction and holding multiple policies with the same provider. On average a 1% increase in customer satisfaction results in 1.4% more customers with two or more policies.

The insurance industry has a reputation of being price driven, with customers shopping around at renewal time and switching to the cheapest quote. But it’s not true. Some customers don’t just switch less than others they also shop around less and are more likely to accept their current supplier’s initial quote. Clearly, having more of these customers would be of huge financial benefit to an insurance company. As demonstrated

by UKCSI data there is a clear route to that business goal. As well as being more likely to use the same insurer for more than one policy, satisfied customers are less likely to shop around when it comes to renewal time. As shown in Figure 11, brands with high levels of satisfaction are more likely to see customers trusting them to offer fair value, and less likely to shop around.

SAGA Direct Line 30%

AXA AA

Zurich

LV=

Aviva / Norwich Union 25%

Legal and General Churchill More Th>n

% Multiple policies 20%

M&S

15%

esure

Hastings Tesco

Sainsbury’s

Admiral

10%

Sheila’s Wheels 5%

Virgin Money 74

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78 80 82 Customer satisfaction

84

86

Figure 11: Satisfied insurance customers shop around less 8.0

Sheila’s Wheels

7.8

Admiral

esure

SAGA

More Th>n 7.6 7.4

AA

Hastings

Likelihood of shopping around 7.2

Direct Line Zurich

7.0

Churchill Aviva / Norwich Union

6.8

LV=

6.6 6.4

M&S

Tesco

Sainsbury’s

74

Virgin Money

AXA Legal and General 76 78 80 82 Customer satisfaction

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UKCSI

Although 62% of highly satisfied customers are still likely to shop around at renewal time, this is the nature of the market, and it’s a lot less than the 82% of dissatisfied customers who will shop around. When you have a very large customer base like most insurance companies, 20% fewer of them shopping around at renewal time is worth a lot of money. And it’s money that goes straight to the bottom line.

Figure 12: Keep customers by improving satisfaction 9.0

Tesco mobile 8.5

8.0

EE (Everything Everywhere)

Intention to stay

Telecommunications

BT

In many industries cost of servicing customers is a very important component of Customer Lifetime Value and profitability. This particularly applies where margins are thin and customer service is delivered mainly through call centres. Poor customer service can hugely increase call centre costs and can be the single element that makes the difference between profitable and unprofitable customers.

Harvard’s Service-Profit Chain research has shown that for some companies 30% of their customer base is losing them money. Think about the large customer base that most of these companies have, look at Figure 13 and imagine the increased costs incurred if almost 25% of your customers have had a reason to complain compared with only 7%. CI

Sky T-Mobile

Virgin Media

7.5

Another highly competitive market, telecommunications companies rely heavily on customer retention as a driver of profitability. On this indicator, Tesco Mobile shows the benefit of building a satisfied and loyal customer base. Its high level of customer satisfaction (85.5) is matched by a high level of intention to remain a customer. Figure 12 shows an almost perfect linear relationship between customer satisfaction and intention to renew in this sector.

O2

Giffgaff

Vodafone 3

7.0

Talk Talk 6.5 65

70

75

80

85

90

Customer satisfaction

Figure 13: Poor service increases costs 25%

Talk Talk Virgin Media

23% 21%

T-Mobile

3

19%

BT

17% % reason to complain

EE (Everything Everywhere)

15% 13%

Sky O2

Vodafone

11% 9%

Giffgaff

7%

Tesco mobile

5% 65

70

75

80

85

90

Customer satisfaction

More information about benchmarking your organisation with UKCSI There are a number of options for organisations wanting to get more insight into how customers rate them in the UKCSI. 13 sector reports, available for purchase from the Institute of Customer Service, contain information about how individual organisations in each sector compare on a range of customer satisfaction measures. Organisations can also undertake a survey through the Institute of Customer Service’s UK Business Benchmarking tool, which will benchmark performance with the rest of the sector. For more information contact the Institute at enquiries@icsmail.co.uk

Authors Jo Causon Nigel Hill Chief Executive Institute of Customer Service Tel: 0207 260 2620 Email: enquiries@icsmail.co.uk

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Chairman The Leadership Factor Tel: 01484 517575 Email: info@leadershipfactor.com

Case Study

For almost forty years now Overfinch has been redefining the Range Rover, delivering new standards in luxury, styling and performance to create the ultimate expression of an iconic brand. From their Birstall base the company supply vehicles to wealthy and often famous customers all over the world; customers who will not settle for second best and who demand excellence.

Placing exceptional customer service at the heart of the business Overfinch brought in The Leadership Factor in 2012 to conduct their first customer satisfaction survey. The objective was simple – to define those areas of the product and service that Overfinch customers felt was of greatest importance and to understand how well the business was doing in satisfying those needs.

Initial qualitative research was carried out to identify customer priorities and ensure the survey asked questions about areas that matter to customers. Exploratory research based on depth interviews ensured that the questionnaire for the main survey was based on customers’ most important requirements as well as providing additional insight through detailed comments.

From the initial list of 50 criteria the 20 most important were identified and used for the main survey. They covered areas including Overfinch employees, the cars, alloy wheels, bodykit design, service and vehicle handover providing comprehensive insight.

Telephone interviews were selected as the most appropriate methodology for conducting the survey to combine both scoring and comments with The Leadership Factor’s dedicated interviewers able to gather detailed comments and probe for reasons

behind the scores given. Matthew Hall, Marketing Manager for Overfinch said “The survey is very impactful. It is really good to have a view of how the business is doing overall.”

The results and analysis gave the Overfinch Directors the depth and detail that clearly showed the areas for investment and development. The survey identified the criteria that are satisfaction maintainers (those areas customers expect you to get right as a minimum) and the satisfaction enhancers (the opportunities to wow the customer). The results clearly supported the business in putting customer service at the heart of its strategy as criteria including knowledge of staff, staff keeping promises and commitments and being kept updated on progress through the sale were all vital.

With an emotive subject such as a luxury car clearly recommendation / Net Promoter was a key measure alongside The Leadership Factor’s Customer Satisfaction Index and the results demonstrated a very clear link between satisfaction, recommendation and repeat purchasing.

The results were delivered to the board

by Michael Ball, Client Manager at The Leadership Factor and concluded with the

Priorities for Improvement, those areas that the survey results demonstrated would deliver the greatest impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty from investment and improvement. Andrew Mccarthy, Managing Director of Overfinch said “The presentation, analysis and information across the board offered us real value. It was easy to understand with lots of visuals and graphics making it easy to digest.”

Since the results the business has been busy making improvements to their already impressive customer service and has already noticed an impact with positive feedback from recent customers who said the exceptional service made their car purchase feel special. CI

Mike Ball Client Manager The Leadership Factor

Mike can be contacted on: 01484 467057 or via email at: mikeball@leadershipfactor.com

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“It is imperative we understand the ‘student experience’ and the more open channels we have with our student residents the better we can gauge their opinions.”

University of Manchester Enhancing The Student Experience ‘Open for Feedback – 24/7’ With nearly 40,000 students, the University of Manchester is one of the UK’s largest and most popular Universities. Also, being ranked 48 in the World University Rankings, it’s an extremely popular choice with international students, with students from 180 countries choosing to study at Manchester.

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Case Study

With changes in university financing and the introduction of tuition fees, higher education has become increasingly competitive, with universities having to find new ways to attract both UK and international students.

Employability, academic reputation and arming students to face a tough job market are increasingly important, as is improving the student experience.

The Problem For the 8,000 students living in the University’s 29 halls of residence across 3 campuses, the Residences Division is responsible for a very large part of the student experience. Consequently, the Residences Management Team were keen to further understand and improve the students’ views of their experiences in their hall of residence. According to Paul Burns, Accommodation Office Manager in the Directorate for the Student Experience, “It is imperative we understand the ‘student experience’ and the more open channels we have with our student residents the better we can gauge their opinions.”

The University already conducted an annual satisfaction survey with regards to the accommodation and had a complaints procedure, but lacked a communication channel which could collect feedback and comments from students on an on-going basis. Real-time feedback would highlight any issues or areas for improvement regarding maintenance, security, pastoral care, catering, internet provision or any other important element of the students’ experience in halls of residence. This would enable the Residences Management Team to react immediately to any problems and it would provide reassurance to students that the university really does want to hear what they think – good, bad or indifferent – about their experience of living in hall.

survey, with a small number of qualification questions, followed by a few specific questions on a particular aspect of hall facilities or services. These questions tend to be changed on a monthly basis and so far have covered the moving in process at the beginning of the academic year, the pastoral care system and internet provision.

Finally students are asked to share their thoughts on any aspect of their hall of residence experience in the form of a text comment, video upload or audio recording.

This new approach allows students to give their feedback in whichever way they wish. It is possible for them to record a video or audio using a webcam or smartphone and simply upload to the feedback channel, just as if they were uploading something to Facebook.

‘Don’t just talk, BE HEARD!’

The Solution Working with The Leadership Factor, the solution was an online feedback channel, available 24/7 that students could access to provide their feedback. The feedback channel starts with a very short web

The comments and media files are then received by TLF, analysed and coded as required and put into an Opinion Dashboard designed for the University. As well as showing all text comments, the audio and video responses can also be played within the Dashboard. The user of the Dashboard is also able to filter the content using various segmentation variables such as by campus, hall or comment type.

In addition to the Dashboard, a summary report with frequencies of comment types and analysis is provided to the University on a weekly basis, and any comments regarded as ‘urgent’ are flagged as ‘Hot Alerts’, meaning they require immediate action. As well as the central Residences Management Team, this information is very useful to staff on the ground in individual halls and to contractors providing specific services.

‘Don’t just talk, BE HEARD!’ The University has successfully promoted the feedback channel by branding the whole mechanism as ‘Don’t just talk, BE HEARD!’ Through this branding, the feedback channel has been promoted using social media, on email signatures, email news bulletins, university publications and signage in the halls. Regularly promoting the feedback channel to students has resulted in a high level of awareness of the channel, and a large increase in the number of students providing feedback.

In the 3 months since going live, the feedback channel has received 1,400 pieces of feedback and 1,300 individual students have used the channel, which equates to 16% of all the students in halls. The text, audio and video comments have provided an insight into the student experience of living in halls and have helped the Residences Management Team to identify areas for improvement. According to Paul Burns, “Even the ‘negative’ comments about our services have been offered in a very constructive format and have helped us better understand our customers’ needs.” The feedback is also used in managing the contractors and internal departments who are responsible for services like repairs, maintenance and catering.

The feedback channel and Opinion Dashboard has proved an effective way to obtain opinions from students on an on-going basis and has already helped to improve the student experience. CI Darren Wake Business Development Manager The Leadership Factor

01484 467012 darrenwake@leadershipfactor.com

All students who leave their name (they could choose to remain anonymous) are personally responded to so they know their comment has been heard and will be acted upon. Students who have not taken part also receive general feedback via the student newsletter and through a weekly email sent by the Accommodation Office to all residents in halls.

www.customer-insight.co.uk

Paul Burns Accommodation Office Manager The University of Manchester

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To view this Dashboard:

The Opinion Dashboard is an online tool where you can watch, listen to and read the thoughts and views of your customers or UK consumers.

Individuals can respond to your questions quickly, bringing research to life and provide in-depth qualitative insights.

For more information please contact: Darren Wake 01484 467012 darrenwake@leadershipfactor.com

To view this Dashboard please visit: www.leadershipfactor.com/dashboard

Everyone knows about British Cycling and their growing success at the Olympic Games from Sydney onwards culminating in complete dominance on the track in Beijing plus a gold and silver from the four road events. Nobody thought they could match it in London but they did. Not only that but in the meantime, they had entered professional road racing (as Team Sky) with Performance Director Dave Brailsford making the bold (many said ridiculous) claim that they could win the Tour de France within five years. As we know, they won it in three, and placed second and dominated the race. And they didn’t do it by signing the top riders. True, Wiggins had come fourth in 2009 but wasn’t seen as one of the main contenders and couldn’t make the top 20 in 2010 in Team Sky’s first year. Outside aficionados, no one had even heard of Chris Froome. They did it through sheer professionalism, leaving no stone unturned. Every little thing that could make a 1% improvement to anything was researched, planned and managed. Dave Brailsford called it ‘the aggregation of marginal gains’. In Ireland, there’s a company that’s achieved continuous improvement in customer satisfaction over a ten year period, which is every bit as impressive as British Cycling’s story. And it’s still happening. This is an update on Irish Life’s customer satisfaction journey.

Iain Law Client Manager The Leadership Factor

Amanda Cusack Customer Satisfaction Manager Irish Life Retail

If you have any thoughts about this article you can contact Iain at: iainlaw@leadershipfactor.com

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Since we wrote about Irish Life in 2008, see: http://www.customer-insight.co.uk/article/918 the company has maintained its focus on customers and continued to improve customer satisfaction. Achieving high customer satisfaction, especially in financial services, is not an easy task, but continuing to improve it during the biggest financial crisis that Ireland has ever witnessed is nothing short of amazing. Even more admirable is that fact that it has not been achieved by throwing mega-bucks at it but by getting the basics right and by maintaining the momentum behind multiple small initiatives that make a substantial cumulative difference. As Dave Brailsford would say, ‘the aggregation of marginal gains’.

Intouch When we last wrote about Ireland’s largest life assurance company, Irish Life had already launched ‘Intouch’, a dedicated cross-departmental, branded team that took ownership of the customer satisfaction improvement programme. Right from the outset, Intouch had full backing from the top. The CEO personally launched the programme, introduced competitions and handed out prizes. Prizes for staff who went above and beyond the call of duty to satisfy a customer included a trip to Barcelona, preceded by a meal with the CEO in a top Dublin restaurant.

third significant piece of training was about letter writing, building on Irish Life’s commitment to Plain English since 1998. Customer surveys consistently show that trusting their financial services provider and understanding their communications (the two are strongly correlated) are two of customers’ most important requirements. By the time of our initial article, Irish Life had already been awarded more Honesty marks by the Plain English Society than any other company in the world and in 2009 they won the Best in the World Plain English award – ahead of 12,000 organisations from 80 countries.

Customer surveys Irish Life’s surveys have also progressed since our previous article. The big change was the move to customer transaction-based surveys. 220 customers are telephoned each month across six transactions, each with their own questionnaire including importance criteria. In addition there is an e-mail survey for self-service web customers and for new business with over 200 customers responding each month. Customer experience questions are also included in the questionnaires for more detail and comments. Importantly, customer satisfaction targets are set for each transaction at the start of each year, aggregating into an overall company-wide target. Monthly results show progress towards meeting the targets.

Transaction Teams Training The high profile Intouch campaign was backed up by an extensive training programme, much of which was also branded.

For example, ‘Sense and Respond’ helped staff to build empathy with customers whilst also responding in an appropriate manner, e.g. more business-like or friendlier as the situation demanded. Complaints training focused, very successfully, on increasing (yes increasing) the number of complaints that were recorded and responded to.

Sense and Respond helped staff to understand when a customer was even slightly unhappy and to act as a customer champion by logging a complaint about the issue.

Which, of course, would then be dealt with straight away, rather than be ignored. The

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The move to transaction-based research and the formation of Transaction Groups have enabled Irish Life to ‘close the loop’, i.e. facilitate the process of using regular survey data to feed quickly into effective action. The Transaction Teams are: • Customer Service Centre Enquiries • New Business • Financial Reviews • Online Services • Withdrawals • Complaints Transaction Teams include a mix of senior management and Customer Champions (see figure 3) from each of the six areas. They meet every two weeks, go through all survey results and cus-

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tomer comments for their area and have responsibility (and take ownership) for fixing issues arising from the surveys.

Each Transaction Team has its own CSI target, is responsible for achieving it and is rewarded for doing so. This is one of the most crucial factors in improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Make sure customer feedback results in action, and you do that by motivating the people who can make the biggest difference. None of the Transaction Teams want to under-perform other departments and they do want to get rewards for hitting their CSI target. Marketing still play a key role by facilitating and co-ordinating all the Transaction Teams, managing the agendas and minutes and, from the survey results, identifying the ‘perfect customer experience’ for the area, which are explicit actions given to each Team to improve the customer experience.

However, while Marketing provide the guidance and support, it’s the people “on the ground” who make the real changes and difference.

Figure 1 shows the ‘perfect customer experience’ for the complaints process.

Please see “The Perfect Experience” section for more on this.

The Perfect Customer Experience: • Easy to contact us to make your complaint • The exact nature of your complaint clarified • Receive an acknowledgement letter • Receive Irish Life’s complaints charter with this letter • Told how long it would take to resolve your complaint • Keep you updated during the process Figure 1

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Figure 2 Continuous improvement in Irish Life’s CSI

82 80 78

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72 2012

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The customer satisfaction scores from each Transaction Group are weighted according to the relative volume of transactions handled by each group. This results in a weighted Customer Satisfaction Index for the company. The target in 2012 was 80%, and they reached 81.3%. Figure 2 shows Irish Life’s ‘improving customer satisfaction’ journey that now spans more than a decade.

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Scores going up

Customer Champions Irish Life has no fewer than 60 Customer Champions across the business. Every area has a Customer Champion. They act as the customer’s ‘eyes and ears’ in their department/team and champion the Intouch agenda. There are three Champ Forums each year addressed by CEO Gerry Hassett. As well as bringing them all together, the forums help to motivate and recognise the role of the Customer Champions. They might, for example, hear about a new customer-related initiative before the rest of the business or share ideas on how other areas can best tackle a customer issue. The importance of their role is also recognised more formally through the objectives and appraisals process. The importance of the Customer Champions’ role is clearly seen in Figure 3.

Regular communications have always been an important part of Irish Life’s ability to keep the customer at the top of the agenda internally and to motivate staff to work on the actions required to improve customer satisfaction. Every month the internal feedback posters are updated with transaction-specific posters updated quarterly. There’s also a monthly update given on progress to the Senior Management within Irish Life. Gerry Hassett, the CEO, updates staff each quarter on how the company is doing against its CSI objectives. There’s also monthly communications promoting the winners of the Intouch Rewards which play a key role in acknowledging exceptional customer service and customer initiatives.

Intouch Rewards – empowering Customer Champions Customer Champions can nominate their

team members for Intouch Rewards and have a budget for this, and managers can nominate Champions. €100 vouchers are presented to award winners and more than one person from each team can win in any one month if they have delivered outstanding customer service.

In the current climate money speaks so they are very high profile throughout the company and this is enhanced by strong communications. The winners are profiled every month, including the stories behind their nomination and the CEO writes about them in his weekly blog. Importantly, cash rewards also demonstrate to everyone that the company is consistently putting its money where its mouth is. This is rein-

forced by the fact that these rewards have been running for a number of years now.

However Irish Life keep reviewing them each year by surveying Champions on how they’re working and identifying anything needed to keep them “fresh”.

Aim of Intouch Rewards

To recognise the times where you or members of your team have gone to that bit of extra effort to work on something that impacts our PFI or to provide great service to a customer.

Figure 4: Intouch Rewards

Put customers first!

You are the driver of the intouch customer satisfaction programme within your team.

You encourage your team to be mindful of how satisfied your customers are with the service you provide.

lead by example!

You offer the highest standards of customer service You ensure that all activities/processes in your team have customers needs at the centre Customer Satisfaction is your No.1 priority... Keep asking: is this the best thing for the customer?

keep everyone updated!

Drive initiatives!

Encourage suggestions!

Generate ideas!

You are the communicator for the intouch programme on your team.

You take time at a team meeting to update everybody on what’t happening with CSI and Intouch.

You take ownership for any initiatives that are taking place as part of intouch and ensure that these are being implemented on your team.

You encourage suggestions and solutions from your team to improve customer satisfaction and feed the information back to the relevant areas.

You look for feedback from customers to identify areas where your team/area could improve the service for customers. This feedback can be gathered through call backs, reviewing the EAR data, review of the Leadership Factor survey, conducting mini surveys etc You attend regular meetings with othe intouch champions to share ideas and find new ways to drive the intouch programme and actions that matter to our customers.

Figure 3 The Customer Champions’ role Internal Communications www.customer-insight.co.uk

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Team Rewards As well as the monthly individual Intouch Rewards there is a Team Incentive initiative in the last quarter of every year. Teams work on issues that could drive up their customer satisfaction score. This ensures that the company maintains momentum for Intouch as it heads towards the final CSI score for the year and also identifies ideas/action for initiatives for the start of the following year.

Groups work on issues that could drive up their customer satisfaction score. At the end of 2012 for example, Groups worked on improving their scores for individual elements of their Perfect Customer Experience (see below). Teams (or Groups within Teams) could enter for the award and in 2012 there were no fewer than 24 entries.

A two-stage judging process narrowed these down to a short list of 10 finalists who present their work to the Executive Management Group in late November. All 10 finalists get €500 for their team and the top five teams get €1,200. The winning team does not get any additional cash, but gets a lot of high profile publicity around the company with pictures of their award being presented by the CEO (who also writes about it, with appropriate praise, in his blog).

To give a flavour of the outcomes of the Team Rewards process, the 2012 winner, the Withdrawals Team tackled a specific sub-segment of customers who the research told them were less satisfied.

As well as general improvements in the process and the communications, such as keeping the Financial Adviser informed and involved, they specifically told the customer how long the process would take and kept to the promised deadline. They then produced a training guide and went out and trained groups of financial advisers on the new process for these customers. This resulted in a 10% increase in the customer satisfaction index for this customer segment - a massive gain directly as a result of the actions taken.

Figure 5: Group Rewards launch poster

launch poster for the initiative in 2012. For example this year each of the members of the Irish Life Executive Management Team (EMG), who are the judges for the Team Rewards, had their own Dragon’s Den character created in their likeness – these were so popular that some EMG members put them up in their offices while others took them home to show their family!

Lots of little things Each year, the Marketing Team create a theme for the Team Rewards to maximise engagement and promotion of the rewards.

This is implemented and supported with a strong internal communications campaign, as shown in Figure 5 by the original

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High profile rewards are great for motivating people, for keeping the momentum going on customer satisfaction improvement, and, as we have seen in the Withdrawals example, for achieving real

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gains in customer satisfaction. However, to achieve continuous and sustainable gains in customer satisfaction you have to build a culture in which your people are always thinking about how to make things better for customers. The aggregation of marginal gains.

For example, in 2011 the Customer Service Centre moved to a product team structure. This was based on customer surveys showing that expertise of staff was a key driver of customer satisfaction. The CSC was therefore divided into teams such as the Expert Pension Team, Expert Savings Team and Expert Protection Team. Each product team within the CSC was given

Case study

questions. CEM questions are best if they are closed with a dichotomous scale. This facilitates modelling of the customer experience and the construction of a Perfect Customer Experience – i.e. all the steps of a customer journey that would leave customers delighted if all were performed flawlessly every time.

The big advantage of the perfect Customer Experience is that it pinpoints steps on the journey, ‘moments of truth’ and highlights those that are detracting most from customers receiving that Perfect Customer Experience. This is achieved by reporting what percentage of customers received the Perfect Customer Experience at each step of their journey. Figure 6 shows the Perfect Customer Experience for each Transaction Team. Each team can then be given targets for improving its Perfect Customer Experience score, with information pinpointing the precise steps in the journey that need to be addressed.

Unlike the customer satisfaction questions, which should be changed only if customers’ requirements evolve, the CEM questions can be changed any time. Irish Life is still adding more CEM questions in 2013 to gain an ever deeper insight into customers’ perceptions of their customer experience.

The aggregation of marginal gains

Figure 6: The Perfect Customer Experience

its own customer satisfaction index, its own targets. To maintain reliable sample sizes, monthly results for product teams were rolled up and reported to them each quarter. By focusing on the needs of specific customer segments in this way, you are better able to identify and respond to those needs. This is an approach that Irish Life wants to focus more on in coming years as they seek to do best what matters most to each individual customer.

The Perfect Customer Experience One of the other key elements in the evolution of Irish Life’s customer satis-

faction survey was the addition of more CEM (customer experience measurement) questions. Customer satisfaction questions need to be scored on a scale (a 10-point scale is best) and must be based on what’s important to customers, not on what the company wants to ask. This gives a reliable measure of customer satisfaction – i.e. it’s an accurate reflection of how customers feel. However, customer contact staff often want to ask their own questions, either to provide more insight into certain aspects of the customer experience or to generate more specific, actionable information about how to address the PFIs (priorities for improvement) from the customer satisfaction

Irish Life’s success in sustaining its customer satisfaction improvement path is succinctly encapsulated by Dave Brailsford’s philosophy of focusing a lot of time and effort on continuous improvement.

Putting posters in lifts, and telling customers for example how long their withdrawal will take, may not in themselves seem like big deals but for improving customer satisfaction, lots of small actions will almost always out-perform periodic initiatives, however lavish they are. Another small but good Irish Life example is texting customers. Surveys showed that customers liked receiving texts at key customer journey milestones if it kept them informed or simply showed that Irish Life valued their business. So they now receive texts at key moments of truth such as thanking them for an application or telling them when their claim has been paid. All part of the Perfect Customer Experience. CI

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Employee Engagement Maintaining the Momentum at

Last year one of our Customer Insight case studies featured Jurys Inn, owner of 32 hotels in city centre locations in the UK, Ireland and the Czech Republic. Jurys sees exceptional customer service as one of the main differentiating factors that sets it apart from other three star hotels, and its employees are the key to delivering that service consistently. Consequently, the company has placed HR in the forefront of its strategic objectives. Last year Jurys improved its scores in its annual employee engagement survey, placing it in the top decile of all organisations. In the previous article we described in detail the huge amount of work undertaken by HR at Jurys to communicate the survey results and PFIs (priorities for improvement) and galvanise managers, especially in the hotels, to work throughout the year to address issues arising from the survey. HR also worked hard to give managers the tools for the job. These included a bespoke Leadership Programme for all hotel managers and departmental heads, plus extensive work on vision and values, reward and recognition, internal communications and career development. You can see the full story at http://www.customerinsight.co.uk/article/994

Iain Law Client Manager The Leadership Factor If you have any thoughts about this article youcan contact Iain at: iainlaw@leadershipfactor.com

Jennifer Lee HR Director Jurys Inn

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Case Study

Every second month one employee in every hotel is recognised for being ‘exceptional’ and at the end of the year each hotel selects an overall winner to represent it at the annual gala dinner where ‘Oscars’ are awarded for exceptional performance or behaviours.

Figure 1: Jurys Inn employee satisfaction 2010 to 2012 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

2012 - 78.6% 2011 - 75.9% 2010 - 73.8%

another 10% from last year. According to HR Director Jennifer Lee, three factors account for this excellent response rate. Firstly, the hotel General Managers’ employee engagement bonus is based on response rate as well as employee satisfaction. Secondly the appointment and role of the ‘Survey Champions’, has been extremely beneficial as they ensure the survey is always on the agenda – whether they are encouraging employees to fill it in, or assisting Managers in taking action on the PFIs after the survey.

Employee engagement still going up In November 2012, The Leadership Factor conducted Jurys latest employee engagement survey and the scores increased again. Jurys employee satisfaction index of 78.6% places it in the top 4% of all organisations on a very tough measure compared with the top 10% in 2011 and the top 20% the year before.

Response rate Equally impressive is the consistent improvement in Jurys Inn’s response rate, which has now hit a very high 88%, up

The third factor is partly driven by the first two. Hotels and General Managers really compete with each other on response rate as well as satisfaction and engagement scores. In 2012 two hotels achieved an amazing 100% response rate. There’s another vital reason as well. Jurys has acted on the results of previous surveys and made things better. Where organisations go through the motions of conducting employee surveys but never really take any serious action afterwards, it’s not surprising that employees become cynical. If they can see management taking it seriously and improvements happen-

ing they start to believe in the process and the response rate always goes up.

Learning and development Jurys has maintained its emphasis on learning and development and HR continues to enhance the impact on its new training initiatives by branding them. Last year saw the launch of Grow, starting with the induction of new employees as the first six months are so critical in determining employees’ future engagement with the organisation. Grow is supported by a comprehensive suite of e-learning materials and new employees get a logon as soon as they’re offered the job so that even before their first day at work they can see the company video, the vision and values, the company structure and all the background information leaving their first day free for hotel specific induction. This starts with two hours on values, what’s expected and cultural matters such as customer focus and this session is always conducted by the Human Resources manager. This is followed by six modules of induction training, some of them certified, which has proved very popular with employees at all levels.

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Job chats As well as the formal appraisal process, hotel managers are encouraged to hold less formal ‘job chats’ with everyone and these have also been very successful.

Employees who have had a job chat are typically 10% more satisfied than those who haven’t, and this data is available at hotel level as well as company-wide, giving hotel managers a very actionable measure they can take this year to improve employee engagement further.

Reward and recognition As we reported last time, praise and recognition are very prominent in the Jurys culture. Every second month one employee in every hotel is recognised for being ‘exceptional’ and at the end of the year each hotel selects an overall winner to represent it at the annual gala dinner where ‘Oscars’ are awarded for exceptional performance or behaviours. There are team awards such as ‘Best Hotel’ (Edinburgh was 2011 winner) and other categories such as ‘Best Accommodation Standards’, ‘Best Eco Friendly Hotel’ and ‘Best Employee satisfaction score’ (NewcastleGateshead was 2011 winner).

Oscars 2013 In February around 150 employees gathered in the Jurys Inn Milton Keynes to celebrate and reward 35 Exceptional Employees, from a mix of employee levels and job roles. Each employee brought a friend, colleague or partner along with them and the General Managers and HR Managers were also in attendance. The theme for this year was a Mardi Gras Carnival, with the room in Milton Keynes was

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decorated with bright colours, drapes, flowers and feathers and there were even masks for those employees wanting to really get into the spirit of it.

Following some rigorous interviews and discussions between the Judges, the Exceptional Employee prize was awarded to Ela Biskup, Reception Supervisor from Jurys Inn Edinburgh. The judges felt that Ela demonstrated the company values (being Genuine, Positive, Friendly, Willing and Consistent in everything that they do) and was loyal to the company, her colleagues and Inn. Her ethos is to treat people (guests or colleagues) as special as she would like others to treat her family.

Ela received a gift from Jurys Inn of £1000.

Amongst the various awards for the Inns were the following based on employee engagement and guest satisfaction.

E dinburgh: highest employee satisfaction score 88.6% Manchester: most improved employee satisfaction up 11.1% Bradford: best TLC score (guest satisfaction) – they were consistent all year averaging scores of 90% Exeter: most improved problem solving score which was based on TLC guest feedback scores.

Rounding off a very successful night for the Inn, Jurys Inn Edinburgh took the coveted award for Inn of the Year, based upon financial results versus budget and employee and guest satisfaction scores.

Narrowing the gap One of the things that most pleased HR Director Jennifer Lee in the 2012 employee engagement survey was the significant reduction in the gap between the highest and lowest scoring hotels for the sec-

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ond successive year. In 2010 two hotels achieved an employee satisfaction index around 85% (Limerick and Cork) but the gap between the highest and lowest was almost 30%. By 2011 the gap between the highest and the lowest had narrowed to just over 22% and the average employee satisfaction level of hotels in the bottom quartile had improved by 4.5%. In 2012 the average score for the bottom quartile had improved by a further 4.5% and the gap had reduced to 18% even though the score for the top hotel had gone up. In 2012 employee satisfaction at the lowest scoring Jurys Inn would place it almost in the top quartile of employee satisfaction levels compared with other organisations generally. This improvement is down to the special efforts that the HR department at Jurys focused on the lowest quartile.

Every two months in 2012 Employee Relations Manager, Deborah Taylor, had visited all eight hotels in the bottom quartile to review progress with managers and hold focus groups with employees to really understand whether the PFIs were being effectively addressed. She could then feed back to the hotel managers and help them to tweak their actions plans if necessary.

Take action. Improve engagement As we saw from the above figures, Deborah’s work with the bottom quartile hotels has certainly paid off. As have the efforts made by everyone at Jurys from John Brennan (the CEO), the hotel General Managers to the Survey Champions to make a difference. Basically, Jurys Inn has listened to its employees, taken action on the PFIs (priorities for improvement) that have come out of its surveys and employee engagement has improved. Every year. CI

Case Study

The Perfect Pint – Art or Science?

Despite having a long history and owning over 100 pubs mainly around London, Taylor Walker thought it would be a good idea to get a bit more scientific about what the Great British beer drinker wanted. A spokesperson for Taylor Walker, said:

“We commissioned the research to help us better understand what makes our drinkers really tick.

We’ve been serving pints for over 200 years and know a thing or two about how to help people better enjoy their drinks, but the research certainly has enlightened us on a few key facts.”

The survey of YourSayPays panellists covered all aspects of the ‘perfect beer drinking experience’ including the thorny subject of temperature (chilled or warm?) and you might be surprised how well warm pints scored! As well as the perfect temperature, the survey probed how long drinkers like to spend enjoying each pint, what mood they have to be in to really enjoy it and where is the best place to do so.

Although a surprising number of people like to down each pint in under five minutes, most opt for the full half hour! Not surprisingly, warm summer weather and beer gardens contribute strongly to the perfect beer drinking experience as well as air conditioned pub interiors, music that’s not too loud, access to food and snacks and congenial company with three or four good-spirited friends.

The Perfect Beer Drinking Experience Taylor Walker used the research to devise a formula to manage the perfect beer drinking experience. As you can see, it’s rather more science than art!

The results were discussed nationwide in newspapers including Daily Mail, The Sun, Daily Star, and, internationally, the New York Post. Findings were also discussed on radio stations including BBC Radio.

The Perfect Beer Drinking Experience

E = -(0.62T2 + 39.2W2 + 62.4P2) + (21.8T + 184.4W + 395.4P + 94.5M - 90.25V) + 50(S + F + 6.4) Where: E is a factor describing overall enjoyment.

T is the ambient temperature in degrees Celsius.

W is the number of days until you are required back into work.

P is the number of people with whom you are drinking.

M is related to your mood whilst drinking the pint.

www.customer-insight.co.uk

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Case Study

The British Egg Council The British Egg Council represents the egg industry, providing standards for eggs and using the ‘lion mark’ mark to denote quality.

As well as understanding more about consumers’ egg preferences and behaviours, the British Egg Council wanted to generate some interesting facts to drive a PR campaign about their work.

Eggs and personality!

At the end of last year, a representative sample of 1000 YourSayPays respondents took part in a survey all about eggs. As well as some fairly conventional questions about consumers’ preferences for cooking eggs and how often they eat them, there were some much more creative questions. For example, respondents had to rate their personality traits, including how organised they were, how emotionally stable, how imaginative etc. They were even asked questions about their star sign as well as more conventional segmentation questions such as media consumption.

Amongst the findings were that:

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• Poached egg eaters are happier than most people • Scrambled eggs are favoured by secretive people who are typically without children • If you’re partial to boiled eggs you may be impulsive and reckless

method for generating strong media coverage for PR campaigns. Following this survey the British Egg Council received media coverage in the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Star, Mail on Sunday, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. CI

• Women are most likely to enjoy poached eggs whilst men prefer fried eggs, so no surprise there then!

Media coverage Asking the kind of creative questions that generate quirky findings such as impulsive boiled egg eaters, is a tried and tested

www.customer-insight.co.uk

Darren Wake Business Development Manager The Leadership Factor

01484 467012 darrenwake@leadershipfactor.com

Customer

WH COMY DO NEV PAN ER L IES EAR N?

When you’ve been in this game as long as I have you do wonder sometimes how companies can just keep on making the same mistakes over and over again. In the name of performance improvement they spend vast amounts of money on consultants, training, learning but still make schoolboy errors when it comes to getting the basics right.

To illustrate, I’m going to depart from my normal nerdy statistician rule of not generalising from the particular and relate a story that’s happened to me over the last couple of weeks.

Victim of fraud The story actually begins three weeks ago when I was on a business trip to London. Having successfully used my credit card that morning I was surprised when it was declined at Sainsbury’s for a very small purchase. When I called the “customer service” number from my hotel room it was answered by someone in what was clearly an overseas call centre. Mainly because I couldn’t decipher a single word he was saying, a long “conversation” ensued following which I was surprised to find that I had been transferred to the fraud department. This was clearly UK-based, so I was soon up to speed with the fact that the card issuer’s computer systems had unearthed a fairly widespread scam that included my card amongst many others, explaining why the card had been cancelled. No money lost, very pleased that the scam had been detected and well worth the minor inconvenience of managing for a few days while

the new card was issued. They also set up an additional password with me and gave me a direct dial UK number to call when the card came so I could authorise it with the password. (Apparently, the scam is to intercept replacement cards that are sent out). Finally they told me to destroy the old card just to be on the safe side. The new card duly came, I called the number, got straight through, understood every word of the conversation and the card was authorised. All very efficient, very safe, a negative experience turned into a very positive one.

No train tickets Until, that is, I turned up at the station last week for my next trip to London. Having bought advance tickets on the website, I went as usual to the ticket machine to collect them. Problem. The tickets kept being declined and after a while I realised that I must have paid for them with the card that had since been cancelled so couldn’t

match up the card with the payment reference. With ten minutes to departure, the train company’s information desk made a few ridiculously impractical suggestions (e.g. call your card company and ask them for a statement showing you have paid!!!), so buying more tickets, now at full price, was my only option. But I wasn’t unduly worried. I was sure it would just be a formality to get the original purchase refunded.

Avoid talking to customers So back I went to the overseas call centre on Monday this week. Back we go through the same rigmarole where the recorded message tells you the answer to just about every question you might ever be calling about. Apart, that is, from the one you want to ask. I’m sure they’re very disappointed when you haven’t lost the will to live and hung up before the end of this monologue, but if you’re still there they do finally give you multiple options for proceeding.

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Customer

be connected without one. Thanks for the text “complaints”.

Pass the parcel Having recounted the story above, the girl decided I needed “disputes”. I tell the story again. The guy is very keen for me to have a dispute with the train company. I explain it’s not their problem. Once he realises I’m having a dispute with him, he decides I need “fraud”. More lengthy hanging on while I’m transferred, but at least, being “fraud” I’m now through to a UK location. Being able to understand each other’s vocabulary, however, didn’t do anything for the customer service. After more attempts to make me have a dispute with the train company, then trying to blame me for cutting up the card that they had told me to destroy, they now decided it was not “fraud” it was “disputes”. Well it was certainly becoming one.

A complaint is a privilege Since I didn’t have another half hour to spare I declined the offer of a transfer back to “disputes” and asked about the procedure for making a complaint. Clearly, a complaint is not seen as a gift at this company! Having explained at considerable length why I didn’t have a case for a complaint (almost all of which was going over old ground), she finally agreed to “escalate” the matter and get a manager to call me back. Later that morning the same girl called me back and recounted, at length, the reasons why her manager does not think I have grounds for a complaint. Which, surprise, surprise, were the same as the ones she had already lectured me on earlier. Now call me pedantic, but I had previously held the naive view that it was the customer who decided if they wanted to make a complaint, not the company. Well with this company, one of the best known credit card providers in the UK, you have to be very, very determined to be granted the privilege of making a complaint. In the end, she agreed to ask someone from “complaints” to contact me. A few hours later I received a text, with a UK number for me to call. She did say they were going to call me, but perhaps they wanted to save the call cost. So I called it, only to be asked for an extension number then informed that I couldn’t

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How not to handle a complaint Two days later they did call me. UK voice, sounded educated, called Adrian and very polite. Good start. Which didn’t last long. To cut an increasingly tedious story very short, Adrian and I spent half an hour debating exactly the same issues, although Adrian was capable of operating at somewhat higher level. After 29 minutes he let fly with his left hook.

Treating Customers Fairly (TCF), to which, as with many other customer experiencerelated matters he seemed to apply the company’s own unique twist. If the company refunded my money it would be in breach of its obligation to treat customers fairly since it had not made any refunds to other customers in the same situation!! Having pointed out to him that the idea of TCF wasn’t really to treat all customers equally unfairly, I gave him a little lecture on the value of customer loyalty, the cost of complaint handling, the viral impact of word of mouth and my absolute amazement that such a well known company could go to such lengths arguing with a customer over........£94.60. I tell him there’s no point our both wasting any more time on this pointless discussion and would he please send me all the details about how to make a formal written complaint to the CEO and to the Ombudsman.

Complaint handling or Monty Python?

Perhaps because he was satisfied that he’d now had his full half hour rather than just the five minute argument, or possibly due to the pending “escalation”, Adrian now tells me that purely as a matter of goodwill he can give me a refund. He then sets off on a long re-cap about how I’m not entitled to this, the company is completely within its rights not to.............. I rudely interrupt and suggest that rather than risk spoiling a beautiful friendship, why don’t I just magnanimously accept his generous offer and we’ll leave it at that.

Which is how this (much abridged) tale ends. Happy ending?

www.customer-insight.co.uk

Customer Lifetime Value There are two key things that Adrian was missing during this encounter:

1) No empathy. There didn’t seem to be any attempt by Adrian (or his predecessors on other calls) to understand the customer’s feelings. It was very clear that any ‘apologies’ (e.g. “I’m sorry you feel like that”) were perfunctory as well as being few and far between. One assumes this is part of the training process rather than my randomly speaking to the least sympathetic advisors.

2) No business logic. It is well known that the cost of handling complaints is very high compared with most other call centre transactions, especially as the process escalates. The cost of my transaction far exceeded the £94 they eventually refunded. Even if the company’s strategy is based totally on cost competitiveness rather than customer focus this doesn’t make any sense. Hopefully the call handlers could detect that I wasn’t a complete dimwit, so if the policy is to refund as a last resort, it should have been possible for them to have anticipated this outcome much earlier in the transaction. But that completely under-estimates the financial illiteracy underpinning this approach.

Even the most rudimentary Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) information on their database could have highlighted that I was an account worth keeping.

A customer for approximately twenty years, well above average account value and flawless payment record. They could be basing their strategy on the notorious inertia of customers with this type of financial product but even if only 10% of transactions like mine result in a defection, the net CLV loss to the company would be immense. The only conclusion that one can draw is that more than twenty years after CLV became well understood, many companies are either still unaware of its full financial benefits or choosing to ignore it.

Customer

Are call centres core?

In the 1990s there was a trend towards outsourcing the call centre function and in the last decade, offshoring it. The two are not the same. You can outsource to a company like Capita and have UK call centres. You can offshore to India and manage your own call centres there, or outsource them.

Offshoring is not working out as well as originally expected for five main reasons: 1) The labour arbitrage (staffing cost differential) benefit is declining, especially between the West and China. This is more relevant to offshore manufacturing than call centres, which are mainly based in English language countries such as India. However, India is already following China’s route towards a more educated, more productive and better paid workforce. Just more slowly.

2) The growth of automation means that you just don’t need to have as many people, so reduced staffing costs matter less. Again, this is particularly pertinent to many manufacturing processes but with the growth of alternative customer service delivery channels (online, IVR, voice recognition), the same trend is evident in call centres.

3) It’s now increasingly recognised that offshoring was over done. Not for the first time, companies adopted a herd mentality and followed their competitors. Often the expected savings have not materialised since the influx of offshore factories or call centres has been one of the main causes of wage rate inflation in many locations.

4) Management has also proved more difficult and costly than expected. Indian graduates might be well educated and much cheaper than British ones but there are other training requirements and management demands that don’t occur in a UK call centre, mainly due to reason five.

5) Not surprisingly, advisors in UK call centres can relate better to UK customers than staff in India. Their degree level education doesn’t prepare them for all the subjects that often crop up in conversations with UK customers, whether the current state of the weather, today’s must-watch TV programme or a multiplicity of local knowledge trivia that form a core part of most people’s every day conversations. There is a cost to training Indian graduates to be aware of even a small proportion of such topics.

Are cen call tres core ?

There is also now more questioning of outsourcing. Over the last twenty years some organisations, public and private sector have outsourced just about everything.

Catering, security, building maintenance, travel, vehicles, IT....... Just about everything apart from the core business. But what is core and non-core? Experience has shown that when you outsource, often with contractors tasked on cost reduction, efforts are focused on keeping things running as they are, but as efficiently as

possible. Companies are now beginning to realise that if you want development, you’re better managing the function inhouse. So, for example, GM outsourced its IT function but is now reversing that since it sees IT as core to the company’s ability to compete in the future.

So are call centres core? If the future profitability of your company will depend on maximising CLV there’s only one answer to that question. CI

Nigel Hill Founder of The Leadership Factor and Editor of Customer Insight. info@customer-insight.co.uk

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Book Review

Book Review RUNNING WITH THE KENYANS

By ADHARANAND FINN

Recently I read “Running with The Kenyans” by journalist and runner Adharanand Finn. As an average club runner for 15 years doing middle to long distance road and off road races I, like Finn, was keen to grasp any little shred of insight that might help me to improve my times by maybe getting just 1% closer to running like a Kenyan. I also had a more academic interest. As a lifelong athletics fan, I had grown up watching British stars like Ron Hill, David Bedford, Ian Thompson and Brendan Foster winning medals and breaking world records. So it was no surprise when we dominated world middle and long distance running for at least a decade with Coe, Cram and Ovett on the track, plus Jones, Gratton and Spedding winning the London Marathon for four consecutive years in the 1980s.

So what happened next? How did we get reduced (pre-Farah) to making up the numbers, thinking it was amazing if a British runner made a world final or managed the top 10 in the London Marathon? And how did the Kenyans not just take over top spot but go on to dominate middle and long distance running much more than we, or any other nation, had ever done before?

And I had a more practical, businessfocused interest. How does anyone, any organisation, any nation, raise themselves to world class performance? Plus I like reading books. Especially if they have a good story.

And this one certainly starts off as a story rather than a book about running faster or achieving world class performance.

A good story You don’t have to be a runner to enjoy this book. For a start, Finn is a very good writer. As a news editor at the Guardian he ought to be, but it is quite unusual to find a running book authored by someone who can write good English. But this isn’t just a running book. Part of it is a serious analysis of Kenyans’ running, part appealingly self-deprecating descriptions of Finn’s running all inter-woven with quite a gripping story of the family’s experiences and observations of rural Kenya. You could think of him as a more likeable version of Peter Mayle.

The story starts with a bit of agonising about how he had abandoned running and fitness after a promising start as a county-level schoolboy cross country runner. (The answer of course is the same as the rest of us. There are more interesting things to do at university, then life takes over, unnoticed). But now, in his mid thirties, Finn was on a quest to re-vitalise his running and discover how good he could have been. He could have joined a running club. He could have entered the London Marathon. And, of course there was a third choice. He could go and live, run and race with the Kenyans. And take his whole family including three young children to live for six months in a very small, very remote, very basic town called Iten in the Rift Valley. Here they live in very basic accommodation, eat local food, try the local school, make friends and occasionally travel to running events. But if you’re going to run like the Kenyans your life has to revolve around running and resting.

Why are Kenyan runners so good?

Amby Burfoot of Runner’s World, calculated that the odds of Kenya achieving the success they did at the 1988 Olympics were less than 1:160 billion. So they must be good and we do know that Kenyan runners are good, but most people, even quite serious club runners, don’t realise how good. As Finn says in his article earlier in this magazine, every single one of the top 25 ranked marathon runners in 2011 was from Kenya. If that’s not dominance, what is? In his article, Finn summarises all the theories that have been advanced over the last decade or more to try and explain the Kenyans’ success. Some, like genetics and altitude can be dismissed quite easily since many others have those advantages without achieving the same success. The interesting thing about the Kenyans’ success is that it’s not really the Kenyans. It’s only a small part of them – the Kalenjin tribe, whose population numbers only five million.

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Book Review

Is their superb running technique down to running barefoot to school every day as children? Much has been written recently about the advantages of the barefoot running style, although most of it seems geared to selling runners a different style of minimalist running shoes rather than seriously suggesting that Westerners who’ve been running and walking about fully shod all their lives should suddenly become Zola Budd. And guess what? The only thing that stops Kenyan runners wearing shoes is having enough money to pay for them. Kenyans will run incredibly fast over long distances in ill-fitting borrowed shoes rather than run barefoot.

Perhaps it’s the hard endurance lifestyle they’ve taken for granted for many generations. Hunting, herding cattle, farming, fetching water. But that’s hardly unique to one small area of the Rift Valley. And what about their high carbohydrate low fat diet?

Their favourite food is ‘ugali’, which seems to be a grain that produces a kind of semolina style gruel that is often eaten on its own or perhaps with a few vegetables thrown in. Finn describes a visit to one of the houses in South London occupied by a group of Kenyans who had based themselves here for the lucrative track and road running season. They had sacks of the stuff in the house and it still formed their staple diet. Apparently they get quite upset if they’re travelling and have to eat something else. There’s little doubt that this is good distance running food. But this type of diet is far from unique in less developed rural economies.

achieved success on the global stage they were made for life. In a country with very little previous sporting success, they were famous. Heroes. They came back, bought a farm, bought a car and, in the eyes of Kenyans if not ours, lived like kings. They were role models. In London’s East End in the 1930s, if you wanted a better life than your parents you probably joined the local boxing gym. In Manchester you played football. Bjorn Borg spawned a generation of top tennis players and there’s now an upsurge of cycling in the UK with Hoy, Wiggins, Pendleton and Cooke as role models. In Kenya the role models are distance runners. You go to Iten, train very hard every day, rest and eat ugali. If you’re very good you’ll do well in a local race and get picked up by an agent who will fund a trip to the European or North American circuit.

And the lessons for business are similar.

Despite what some ‘experts’ would tell you, there isn’t a magic formula. It’s all the little things that combine to produce results. It’s getting all the basics right.

It’s having the right role models for your people to emulate. So if you want to be a customer focused business make sure your middle and senior managers really walk that talk. Promote people you want others to copy. If you promote assertive, overtly ambitious managers, don’t be surprised if teamwork suffers. And, like Irish Life and Jurys earlier in this magazine, reward, promote and celebrate desirable behaviours from across the workforce.

Especially when they benefit customers. CI

In Iten they get up at 5am and are running at 6, before sunrise. Sometimes they have an afternoon session too. And they work very, very hard. But when they’re not running they’re resting, helped by the fact that there isn’t much else to do. And we do know that the combination of very hard work and plenty of rest is a good recipe for athletic success.

So whilst there isn’t one secret, all these things add up. From Kip Keino in 1968, Kenyan distance running has become stronger and stronger. And if there is one determining factor we’re now getting closer to it. When the first Kenyan runners

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www.customer-insight.co.uk

Nigel Hill

Founder of The Leadership Factor and Editor of Customer Insight. info@customer-insight.co.uk

Listen to your customers / target groups give their views on your company product or brands.

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n Case Study contacts for PR

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n Vox-pops for Marketing n Evidence for R&D projects nR eal life comments to reinforce research statistics

n Insights that can be shown to internal stakeholders

nA nother channel to encourage customers to get their message to you

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