The Customer Copernicus - Preview

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8

INTRODUC TION

According to area manager Sid Hubbard:

Too good to be true? Sounds like it, but it is true. Timpson knows that how the front line takes care of customers every day is what matters, so they go beyond the normal in supporting the team and giving them freedom. 8 Getting to this point has been a relentless battle. John Timpson describes a ‘strong rubber band pulling us to be like everyone else. People joining from the outside don’t understand that we give total freedom to the people who serve the customers and that they are not allowed to issue orders. They have to work out how to look after the team to help them be the best they can.’ According to Janet Leighton who has the uncommon title of director of happiness and whose role is to ‘push the culture,’ this is now the estab- lished and well-shared belief and practice. 9 We will return to all these themes later, but our overall aim is to explain why this is all so much harder than it looks. In fact, The Customer Copernicus sets out to answer two connected questions: 1. Given that customer-led success can be extremely rewarding AND tends to look obvious in case studies, why is it so rarely achieved? 2. And once a company does manage this unusual feat, why doesn’t the success last forever? This is an area where it is easy to talk at cross-purposes. When we say ‘customer-led’ we don’t mean just asking customers what they want and then doing it. That’s not what Timpson does. Or Amazon. We mean understanding what customers value – the problems they are really try- ing to solve or the outcomes they want – and then fnding new and bet- ter ways to create this value, solve their problems or achieve the results they want. It looks like leading in a market, not following, like invent- ing, not benchmarking, and it creates tremendous value in all sorts of ways. When companies do this well, their customers do well – they, or we, get a better quality of life, better solutions, lower costs of all kinds – fnancial but also effort, time, emotional pain, attention and so on. Think Deliveroo versus a traditional takeaway or Sky against a handful

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