Vijay Tank

…who combined a natural entrepreneurialism with a finance and commercial career route to lead the re-set of E.On in the UK from late 2011. The CEO at the time came out of the German trading business and into a hail of criticism in the UK – price increases and fat cats. He wanted to start again. Vijay had to make a difference, fast, and with no consultants involved. The first ingredient was listening to customers and colleagues and long lists of heartfelt frustrations were the result. The second was creating a customer board comprising people who had led bold, customer-led action before – Allan Leighton, Justine Roberts, one of Tony Blair’s colleague’s Paddy Tipping and Sahar Hashemi the founder of Coffee Republic. They were asked to promote and champion customers at Board level and their remuneration went to charities of their choice. The team worked at pace, making decisions NOT based on NPV, IRR or ROI but on whether they made things simpler, fairer and more transparent for customers, while still being commercially wired to decisions weren’t reckless. They worked for six months and had some dark moments, looking for a silver bullet ‘to make customers love us’. Justine provided a breakthrough – she kept saying she had no time and just wanted a simple bill on the best tariff. They kept ignoring it assuming it would be financial suicide, but then the head of propositions expressed it as ‘the best tariff for you’ and recognised people just wanted a fair deal, not ripped off – ‘you’re paying this and you could save this if you switched to that’ so transparent. Pricing had been simplified – it had been over-optimised, reflecting too many factors and now it became the same everywhere, gaining in some regions, losing in others, but in the middle of the market with the benefit of being fair, clear and trusted. It was supported with a massive TV campaign and went across all E.On agents with even the Sun writing that Reset was the real deal. NPS went from 5th to 1st in three years. By 2013 the business was leading the sector.   But then the focus moved on and arguably away from the customer, prompted by a new Regulatory regime introducing new policies, new products and an enforcement culture driving compliance through issuing heavy fines.  This added complexity to the products and the organisation as they became designed to fit with these new government policies.  It led to 6 years of focus on compliance, complexity and, ironically, not the customer.