The Customer Copernicus with a Cause
How to be customer-led and a not-for-profit success – a not-for-profit customer pioneer
The Foundation Forum. Wednesday 24th November. Written up with the help of Simon Caulkin.
It is available to view via a video of the evening (90 minutes long) here and we have clips showing each speaker’s 10-or-so minute section too – Neil Patel here, Anabel Hoult here and Vernon Everitt here.
We heard three powerful stories from three very different not-for-profit organisations, The Neonatal Unit at the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow, the consumer protection and advice charity Which?, and the organisation running all of London’s public transport, Transport for London (TfL).
We also had a chance to celebrate the publication of our first book, The Customer Copernicus, with co-author Sean Meehan having travelled over from Switzerland to join Charlie Dawson in presenting the evening.
Our three main speakers were a great mix:
Dr Neil Patel, Consultant Neonatologist at The Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow. He and his team have found new and better ways to take care of premature and sick babies. It’s a field centred on keeping fragile newborns alive so is traditionally technology-led. But they gradually found benefits in parents being much more involved, an idea that superficially looks like introducing untrained carers into the middle of a high-risk situation. But being led by parents, the customers they could speak to, also led to much better outcomes for immediate health and growth and created better long term conditions for the family by reducing trauma and tension in their baby’s earliest days. Remarkably, even in this medical field, customer-led principles we’d uncovered in businesses translate well
Anabel Hoult, CEO at Which?, the self-funded charity looking out for the UK’s consumers. Despite its reason for being, it had become inside-out and detached from its customers. The team are 3 years into a turnaround, returning to a purpose they believe in, making life simpler, safer and fairer for all UK consumers. They have reinvented the membership proposition and business model so they are in tune with these values, and made sure the offer is genuinely attractive to long term subscribers and supporters so the organisation can grow healthily and as the true customer-led example that it should be.
Vernon Everitt, Managing Director for Customers, Communication and Technology at TfL. Their goal is to keep London moving which means providing public transport that’s easy, crucially more attractive than using a car. If they fail then an intense, fast-moving city becomes a more intense slower moving city in gridlock. He has steered through growth in population, in digital technology, in payments, in pollution and in safety threats from terrorists while negotiating with unions and navigating the Olympics and then Covid. All has been done as a true customer pioneer
Each had a powerful story in its own right, but each story beautifully illustrated what we’d learned matters in creating customer-led success in any organisation.
It’s a rare thing, but SO valuable – valuable to us all as users of services and citizens of a nation, and to the organisations who do it, becoming hugely successful by conventional definitions and in ways that tend to be more balanced and human than most.
Here is a summary of the evening’s three customer pioneer stories as viewed by distinguished management writer Simon Caulkin.
Customer-centricity is usually presented as something for commercial organisations to aim for. But non-profit outfits arguably have at least an equal need to take the ‘outside-in’ perspective, an idea described by Charlie Dawson and Sean Meehan in their new book, The Customer Copernicus, copies of which were signed for the first time by both authors at this 24th November Foundation Forum. It meant a dual celebration: both book launch and the first in-person Foundation event in two years.
A confident and effective public sector is an essential component of a functioning society – not just a cost centre but potentially a powerful source of wellbeing and social cohesion. As in health. A striking example of the benefits was outlined by Dr Neil Patel, the Forum’s first speaker, a consultant neonatologist at Glasgow’s Royal Hospital for Children.
Caring for premature and sick babies is traditionally a technology-driven, tightly structured process offering little scope for staff initiative – let alone that of parents – in care. Wanting to engage both staff and parents, and taking inspiration from practice developed in global settings with limited access to technology and medics, Patel’s group cautiously moved to a model inviting families to share responsibility for the care of their babies. That was a shock to some staff who had grown up in the previous regime. Despite proven benefits on the ground – better outcomes than in conventional settings – ‘it was a challenge: we got a lot of resistance,’ acknowledges Patel.
Fears were gradually overcome by listening to both staff, many long-serving, and to parents. The views of the latter, previously unheard, went a long way to creating the ‘burningness’ needed to kickstart the customer-centric journey: Patel says: ‘Once we heard from families what their challenges were, we all just wanted to rush out of the room and solve them straight away. It’s been a huge motivator ever since.’
The team quickly cottoned on that what families needed most was proper guidance on caring for their unusually fragile new-borns. From then, it became a matter of harnessing ideas and giving the team permission to take them forward. That triggered a wave of engagement – a revelation for managers, seeing hidden talents brought into play – and a flood of initiatives, from instituting daily baby-care sessions to activity classes encouraging parents to form self-help groups, such as a knitting group enthusiastically joined by previously uncommunicative fathers.
One suggestion came from a parent who took inspiration from his workplace repairing cars. He described how they now made simple videos to show customers explaining what was wrong and what the technician did. He wondered whether the idea from this parallel setting could transfer to the ward – he wanted videos of his long-stay infant from when he wasn’t around to see things himself. This was a challenge – but when short videos of babies with a parent unable to visit went up in the cloud the venture took off in a way that took everyone by surprise.
Another idea came from the team – a simple whiteboard by each baby where parents could ask questions and share their concerns, and staff could update them on how their baby was doing at hours when parents weren’t present, as well as reassure and share whatever else seemed like it might help.
Now the Unit could communicate with families remotely, and families with their babies. Two previously sceptical nurses said the introduction of video was the greatest advance in care they had seen in their lives. The idea has been taken up by 200 sites in the UK and overseas, to the benefit of over 50,000 families. ’All from just one patient's family who raised the idea in the unit’, marvels Patel.
At Which?, Anabel Hoult faced a very different situation. When she took over as CEO in 2018, the venerable consumer rights organisation was under fire from a section of members over governance issues. It turned out they screened a more fundamental operating problem: ironically, the iconic brand had lost sight of its customers and its role as consumer champion.
Yet in the subsequent turnaround, Hoult drew on exactly the same processes as Patel at the Glasgow hospital: reflecting on purpose, listening to what customers really value – and then allowing the energy generated by intrinsic motivation to take effect.
The Which? purpose, says Hoult, ‘is to make life simpler, fairer and safer for consumers’. But clarity had become diffused in a blizzard of unproductive activity.
This has been stopped and focus has switched to four priority areas where Which? can be more useful to the people it serves, the areas being; consumer rights, money, the new digital life, and scams. Covid provided early confirmation of both the need in the world for a strong consumer voice and the correctness of the priority choices: thousands of people have been helped to get their money back on cancelled events and holidays, says Hoult. Meanwhile, prompted by the proliferation of online scams, 300,000 people have signed up for the Which? scams alert service.
That feeds into Hoult’s second concern, creating value for consumers. An unsubsidised, self-funded charity, Which? needs a steady and reliable income stream. But its scattergun work programme, neglecting its respected reviews and advice business in favour of activities intended to be directly money-making, and was paralleled by a high-churn subscription business model requiring a huge advertising spend to replace the thousands of members a year who were opting out because the service ‘had lost its relevance’.
Now with a business model based on retention rather than churn and solid value in beefed-up reviews and easy digital access, the good news is that Which?’s membership has returned to growth as retention figures move upwards. ‘At some point you have to be brave,’ notes Hoult. ‘Even if it is a bit scary’.
The third element in the Which? story is diversity and inclusion alongside sustainability. Practically this meant taking note of a gap in addressing the needs of those in lower income households, numbers of whom have rocketed during Covid, and helping people make sense of confusing offers and choices around sustainability. What seemed like lofty initiatives were found to be pushing at an open door: ‘On reflection, [sustainability in all its forms] is something our employees really pulled from us. As soon as we gave people the framework and the permission to work on those things, they just ran with it, because they really care about them.’
As an organisation with 27,000 direct employees operating the capital’s sprawling public transport system, Transport for London (TfL) unsurprisingly took a longer route to becoming customer focused. As Vernon Everitt, TfL’s MD for customers, communications and technology, tells it, it wasn’t that there was resistance from anyone so much as mild scepticism about the need. After all, TfL was a monopoly with a captive population – so why bother? No one’s going to get on a competitor’s tube train.
The reason for bothering (aka ‘burningness’) emerged naturally out of the iterations of purpose that ended up with the idea that ‘we're about moving London forward safely, inclusively and sustainably. And with a vision of a strong green heartbeat for London,’ as Everitt puts it.
Taking this perspective, it was obvious that TfL does face competition, not to mention a stubborn roadblock to the achievement of its purpose in the shape of the private car. Hence the ambitious goal of the mayoralty that 80% of London journeys should take place on public transport, bike or foot.
‘To engineer that shift (pre-pandemic we were at 63% and we’re a bit behind that now) we had to give people better options, actually to treat them like customers,’ says Everitt. At the same, the route to the destination also became obvious. ‘If we work together to put an integrated front end on our organisation and make it easier to access, make it easier to pay for, won't we be more successful?’ he reasons. In a phrase now understood by everyone, ‘Every journey matters’.
Other milestones quickly followed. Using information it already possessed in the form of complaints, research and incident reports from staff, TfL put together a simple customer model that remains a constant thread. ‘People wanted to know who we were and what we stood for, a safe and reliable transport service, value for money, making progress with innovation so that they could deal with us as easily as with Amazon’, Everitt sums up. Next came work on pain points – payment, how to avoid crowded stations and understanding how demand was managed – which, lo and behold, turned out to be exactly the same issues as those that bothered staff.
So in turn, ‘we learned that it was important to harness all of the thoughts, insight and personality of our people – again, something we'd failed to recognise before’, and which fully came into its own with the London Olympics in 2012. ‘That was terrifying,’ admits Everitt. ‘The athletes were ready, the stadiums were gleaming, everything else was stripped down and it was, “You're on!”' We were the only ones who could screw it up.’ With London's reputation on the line, everything learned about staff and customer care suddenly came together. There was no option but to work as a team. The customer care score went through the roof – and has stayed there and even increased since as TfL has taken the lessons of the games to heart.
The most recent big breakthrough followed much sucking of teeth, as TfL opened up its trove of data for free, making it available to external organisations including Google and Apple on the basis that they were best at turning it into useful tools for TfL’s customers who would then benefit from better-informed journeys. ‘This plethora of new products and services wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t opened our data up’. Latterly, and only to plug a gap, TfL also developed its own app because the market wasn’t delivering for disabled travellers.
Most recently TfL has had to use all of this learning and more to confront, in the pandemic, the opposite crisis to the Olympics: a dearth of passengers. ‘It doesn’t stop’’, says Everitt. ‘You have to keep going’.
Public and third-sector leaders are often represented as a plodding version of management 1.0, contrasting unfavourably with the disruptive innovation emerging from places like Silicon Valley.
Yet the three remarkable stories above suggest that the clichéd view is at the very least an oversimplification. What the public sector lacks in a guiding ‘rudder of profit’, it gains in the priceless advantage of a built-in purpose, which when properly identified and shared (as in the Forum examples) generates huge motivational energy and engagement. It is rarely matched by purely financial incentives with their ever-present risks of gaming and purpose-sapping unintended consequences (perhaps not uncoincidentally, a controversial incentive scheme for top executives seems to have been a contributor to the historical troubles at Which?).
Is it too much to suggest that in the three examples, different as they are, lurks the tantalising outline of a purpose-driven management model that is at last fit for the times?
As Dawson notes, customer-led organisations are almost by definition human-centred, and it has been shown over and over that trust and engagement are a more durable basis for effective and efficient organisation than extensive rulebooks and monitoring bureaucracy.
They also offer something to nourish the spirit.
Patel: ‘For me, it's been a journey of discovery. I’ve changed from someone who was command and control, focused on the technical aspects, to valuing even more the importance of family involvement. And the value of the team and the skills that can just be unlocked by giving them the opportunity’.
Hoult: ‘We're making life simpler, fairer and safer for consumers. Expect to see and hear more as we modernise Which? to be the UK consumer champion for the next 60 years.’
Everitt: ‘Every now and again when you step out you think, “Actually, that was all right.” You can demonstrate what it is you're doing for London, and why you are the strong green heartbeat of the city as well’.
Speaking for them all he adds: And you know you must always keep at it, always be ready to go again – because nothing's ever fixed’.
The Foundation’s view
As an event, this was a milestone – a first Forum held in person since 12th March 2020. What a relief. Maybe temporary…
The way we heard the conversation, having spent a good while writing the book and understanding the territory, led to four big points standing out.
1. It is remarkably rare yet unerringly powerful to simply listen attentively to your customers. Often leaders and their teams believe they’re too busy and they already have a function that looks after market research. But there are two problems with this way of doing things.
One is the framing of the questions. What customers are asked in surveys reflects what the team internally already thinks – if you’re asked to rate the pricing of the product you’ll give marks out of ten, but you have no opportunity to say more, maybe that it doesn’t really solve the problem it was bought for. So the business gets superficially reassuring feedback that’s like anesthetic – it makes teams sleepy, satisfied with their status quo.
The other issue is that it lacks emotion. A market research report is an abstraction of what real people feel out there – it’s become words and numbers on a chart. Neil put it well when he described his parent and colleague groups. Parents told the team they wanted to know what the rules were – but there weren’t any so the team would never have thought this could be an imagined problem. And they desperately wanted to be involved in the care of their tiny children, something that when heard directly by the team, gave them the ‘burningness’ (as we call it in the book) that they needed to embrace changing how they did things. Hearing it in person had the impact needed to dramatically shift motivation – from wanting to keep parents away, to finding good, safe ways to bring them in. It started an innovation journey that led to multiple changes in approach, big steps forward in outcomes for the families concerned and growing belief that this parent-led approach was a better way to do things.
2. Organisations that are customer-led are, more broadly, human – they intrinsically believe in and trust people’s potential. We have been struck by the way so many customer-led successes are interested in people. This means the people they serve and colleagues that work for the organisation too.
The people they serve we describe in short-hand as their customers although that term sounds a little transactional and narrow – these organisations recognise them as people with wider lives and concerns that might give clues to how to do a better job for them.
With colleagues what we commonly see is a high degree of empowerment all the way to the front-line, people dealing with customers directly. There’s a rational reason – the person in front of a customer is most likely to fully understand what they want and if they’re able to respond immediately with freedom then they’ve got the best chance of helping fully and fast. There’s also a deeper reason – that if you believe that everyone’s very capable and intrinsically wants to do a good job, then what they need is freedom and support to work within a framework that gives just enough guidance to be useful. This has been fundamental to the Neonatal story and to TfL where Vernon described the white boards at tube stations now used for colleagues to share ‘thoughts for the day’ or poems, adding welcome warmth and humanity for all involved. He said that just occasionally it goes a bit wrong, but when it does you need to accept, support and encourage so learning comes with reinforcement of the freedom not a return to the more expected command and control.
3. The nature of the journey to customer-led success always needs bravery, courage and conviction at crucial points – it’s what makes it so rare. Customer-led initiatives are always ideas to make things better for customers. They always come with definite costs for the organisation and the costs are usually incurred soon. The problem is that the benefits to the organisation are both uncertain and usually later on, after cost is committed. That’s a tough combination to make a case for or to feel good about when you have responsibility for people’s livelihoods and possibly a great deal more at stake.
Anabel described the challenge to get the Which? organisation away from chasing numbers of subscribers through huge recruitment drives and high drop-out rates, to constructing offers that would be initially attractive to far fewer people but in ways that meant they would find value in their experience and want to stay on. Making the change meant the immediate loss of reassuring volume and initial income and then having to wait… wait to find out whether the assumptions about retention turned out to be true
Vernon talked about the big picture burning challenge of realising Tf’L’s competition was the car because car-led growth for London would lead to a capital grinding to a halt and massive health and sustainability issues. Later on, the 2012 Olympics was a crisis for TfL the moment it was won. They were one of the only bodies who could go on to screw things up. It was enough to get people out of silos and into focused outcome-led working together.
Neil found ambition from learning about the ways premature babies were cared for in low resource settings like Cambodia and Vietnam – low tech, high parental involvement – and found pain in the immediate feedback he heard in person from parents struggling and upset but hiding it well as they dealt with the early life of their newborn. He also got confidence and ideas from seeing Timpson’s first-hand, with their human and empowering approach with colleagues a great model to learn from.
4. Overall what’s remarkable are the commonalities – the learning from commercial organisations is reinforced by not-for-profits. Although financial success is less obviously the motivation, chasing the numbers can affect non-profits too. It was a problem for Which? in days gone by. The nature of the journey from the way things have always been done to something that works a whole step better for customers of one kind or another is NEVER easy. It always needs Burningness and then grows through Moments of Belief – the full framework from the book is explained here. What non-profits often bring is a closer connection for all involved with the human purpose of the organisation – but while that might seem helpful initially, it can be another way for colleagues to feel committed to current ways of doing things because the risk of getting it wrong is not just a financial hit but an emotional one that goes to the heart of their identity.
The stories from this evening will live long in the memory – we hope the learning encourages more people to do the same. If they do then life will get better for lots more people out there as organisations do something similar, whatever context they’re in.
If you’re keen to read more, here are some useful links…
A long read story about Transport for London showing in depth how the organisation has been a customer-led success, using the framework from the book to tell their story https://www.thecustomercopernicus.com/post/transport-for-london
The similar but different story about The Glasgow Neonatal Baby Unit that we published in the summer showing how they achieved their version of customer-led success https://www.thecustomercopernicus.com/post/the-glasgow-neonatal-unit
The book’s website home page including links to buy https://www.thecustomercopernicus.com/