Crowning the Customer

How To Become Customer-Driven

Feargal Quinn

• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781847174505
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Relations clientèles

How to become Customer Driven

Customer service is the competitive business battleground of the twenty-first century. This book, by an internationally acclaimed entrepreneur, is a hands-on guide for people who run businesses or work in them, written in simple jargon-free style. He explains:

• The 'Boomerang Principle' (bringing the customer back)
• How to get the feel of the market place
• How to listen effectively to the customer
• Customer panels
• Why you should increase the number of complaints
• How to introduce fun and surprise into business.

An essential handbook for managers, company directors, employees and students.

CHAPTER 1

This book is about how, not why

IF I HAD SET OUT TO WRITE this book twenty years, or even ten years ago, my starting point would have been very different.

Then I would have had to focus it on the reasons why I think every business should be customer driven. It may be hard to believe now but only a short time ago that idea was off-the-wall.

Every business had customers. Every business took them into account to some extent. But very, very few were genuinely customer-driven.

By customer-driven I mean a company where all the key decisions are based on an over-riding wish to serve the customer better. A company where everyone in it sees serving the customer as their only business.

That’s the principle on which I started my supermarket business in 1960.

I didn’t do so because I believed in it as a theory. I did it because it came naturally to me, and because my first business experiences as a teenager convinced me of it.

Once the company was up and running, I learnt two things very quickly.

First, that the customer-driven approach pays off.

For us in Superquinn, it gave a strong competitive advantage right from the start – and still does today, thirty years later. That competitive advantage allowed us not alone to survive in a cut-throat business, but eventually to become the market-leader in the region where we operate.

From the beginning, our customer-driven approach marked us out as pioneers in our field. It created a national reputation for us as innovators, in spite of the fact that we were then only a very small local operation.

Second, I also found that the customer-driven approach that came naturally to me was incredibly rare. I say “incredibly” because I found it hard to believe that people could so often ignore something that was at the root of their profitability.

In those days, none of our competitors shared our approach – despite the fact that retailing, of all businesses, offers the easiest ways to get close to the customer.

Needless to say, I shed few tears about the opportunities our competitors were missing. But what did concern me was this. I saw the same lack of customer drive in many of the manufacturers that supplied us.

Even the sophisticated manufacturers – the ones who certainly saw themselves as marketing organisations – often lacked the feel for the customer that I believe is the essential core of marketing.

That was how, and why, I turned into an apostle of the customer-driven approach.

I needed to talk about it inside our company, of course, because as Superquinn grew (from a staff of eight to the several thousand it is today) I had a selling job to do. I had to work hard to make sure everyone on the team shared the approach that had created our early success and that I saw (and still see) as the key to our future growth.

Outside the company, I also talked a lot about being customer-driven. First, because people were curious about our success and it made good commercial sense to make our approach as widely known as I could.

But more than that: I felt strongly that Irish industry as it fought for a place in an increasingly tough competitive environment could compensate for the disadvantage of its small size by the quality of its customer focus.

The strange thing, though, was how few people listened.

The fact was that during the 1960s and 1970s, business had priorities other than the customer. In very many cases, manufacturing companies became increasingly production-focused and service companies became more system-focused. The arrival of new technology heightened these trends.

The day of the customer seemed to have passed.

The fact that our company thrived on being customer-driven was seen as a hangover from the past, not a harbinger of the future.

And when, at the beginning of the 1980s, I told groups of international retailers of my belief that the future competitive battleground in our business would be service rather than price, many of them simply could not see it happening for large organisations such as theirs.

But now everything has changed.

The 1980s saw a sea-change in the attitude of people in business. Books like In Search of Excellence changed international business culture virtually overnight.

I remember the impact that Tom Peters’ book In Search of Excellence had on me. It arrived from America shortly after it was published, and I started reading it one evening after work. I didn’t go to bed that night I was just so excited about it. Because the book focused again and again on what I had been doing for years and years, and had finally begun even to apologise for.

An example was when someone joined the company and asked me for our organisation chart. And I found myself saying:

“Well, actually, I know I should get around to doing one, but I haven’t had the time.”

In fact, we didn’t have an organisation chart because I don’t believe in them – but I was too timid to come out and say it.

And then Peters comes along and says the best companies in the world don’t have one!

Suddenly what I was doing became respectable. All the time I spent away from my office out on the floors of my shops – a practice that I sometimes found myself on the defensive about – was now elevated to an acceptable principle: “Management by wandering around.”

Though the message of In Search of Excellence covered the whole range of management activities, some of its most important lessons were about customer focus. The overall message was: “back to basics”, and one of the basics that was rediscovered was the customer.

Now, nearly a decade later, everyone wants to be customer-driven. It is, for better or worse, the conventional wisdom of our age.

So I no longer have to sell the why.

But believing in the customer-driven approach is one thing; delivering it is quite another.

To judge from what we see around us, many people and many organisations have changed what they say – but not what they do.

When you look around, you don’t see a dramatic change in the level of customer service that organisations deliver.

And yet a dramatic change is exactly what you would expect, given that everybody is now preaching customer service.

Too often, customers still feel like the poor relations.

Too often, excellence in customer service is hailed as the exception – rather than as the norm.

Why is this?

The reason seems to be that people in business don’t know very much about what being customer-driven actually means.

In a nutshell, they don’t know how to do it.

And therefore we are in danger of ending up with the worst possible thing: a principle that everyone admits is a winner, a principle that gets lip-service, but a principle that is not acted upon.

So my aim with this book is to help you turn that lip-service into action.

To do that, I can tell you what being customer-driven means to me, and what I have learned about it in thirty years of running a retailing business.

I can tell you the techniques that have worked for me, and how I think they can be made to work in any business.

I can spell out what being customer-driven means for the person at the top of an organisation, and for the people who work in it at every level.

What I cannot claim is that becoming customer-driven is easy. It is not.

But I do hope to show you that it is simple – there is nothing terribly complicated about it. This is not a book loaded down with esoteric theory. It is a book full of rather obvious things – some of which, indeed, you may well have heard before.

Even more important, I also hope to show you that it is fun. Being customer-driven is, by a long shot, the most exciting and rewarding way of doing business.

CHAPTER 2

This is where it starts: the Boomerang Principle

IN THE NEXT FEW PAGES you will find the most important lesson in this book.

It is an umbrella idea that embraces pretty well everything else I believe about being customer-driven.

But before explaining what it is, let me tell you how I discovered it.

My first business experience was not in retailing at all, but in the tourism business. In the 1950s my father Eamonn Quinn ran a holiday camp called Red Island, just outside Skerries on the coast of north County Dublin.

Pioneering obviously runs in the Quinn family blood: before going into the holiday business, he had set up and successfully run a chain of retail shops called Payantake that were in many ways the precursors of modern supermarkets. And having blazed a trail there, he moved into the then infant Irish tourism industry with a concept that was very different from the traditional seaside hotel.

I worked at Red Island during my school holidays, doing anything and everything and – though I didn’t realise it then – getting an excellent grounding in the basics of customer service. I was a waiter, I was a pageboy, I was a photographer, I was a bingo caller.

But the most important thing I learned was rooted in the particular way the product at Red Island was sold to the customer.

When a holidaymaker booked a week or a fortnight at Red Island, he paid a bill that included everything. Travel, meals, accommodation, entertainment – everything was included. From the moment the holidaymaker arrived, he didn’t have to put his hand in his pocket. There were literally no extras.

In those days in particular – just after the Second World War when everything was tight and there wasn’t much money around – that all-in price was a tremendous attraction. The customers knew exactly where they stood. But what I want to focus on is where it left us.

The fact was that when guests arrived, we had made as much money from their visit as we were going to make. No matter how hard we worked to give them a good time, we would not increase our profit from their stay. That was already fixed.

So why did we work our tails off, week after week, trying to create for these visitors the best holiday experience they had ever had?

The reason was because we wanted them to come back. My father wanted to hear people say:

“We’ve had a great time. We’re coming back again.”

That was the challenge: we wanted them to go away so satisfied with their experience at Red Island that they would be certain to come back the following year.

Every single thing we did was centred on that one over-riding aim.

And we had a ready benchmark to judge our success by – the number of repeat bookings. Before many of them left the holiday camp, they paid a deposit for the next year’s holiday. Week by week, we had immediate feedback as to how well we’d done – the number of deposits that departing guests put down for the following season.

If it was a good week, we might get perhaps 50 bookings for the next year. If it wasn’t a good week, we might only get 12. At the end of each ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Reviews
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Feargal Quinn and his company
• How a small (165cm) grocer got to write a book
• CHAPTER 1 : This book is about how, not why
• CHAPTER 2 : This is where it starts: the Boomerang Principle
• CHAPTER 3 : Getting a “feel” for the customer
• CHAPTER 4 : Listening to customers: the first big secret
• CHAPTER 5 : Listening to customers: the second big secret
• CHAPTER 6 : Listening to customers: the third big secret
• CHAPTER 7 : How to make customer panels work
• CHAPTER 8 : How (and why) to create more complaints
• CHAPTER 9 : How to see customers as people
• CHAPTER 10 : The secret weapon: availability
• CHAPTER 11 : The jokers in the pack: fun and surprise
• CHAPTER 12 : Don’t let the accountants win!
• Copyright