The Pioneer interview with... Jo Moran

Jo spent much of her career pioneering on behalf of customers at M&S. As Head of Customer Service for the last 13 years of her 32-year tenure, she was responsible for ensuring that customers had a consistent and positive experience with the organisation. That involved redesigning how the business connected with customers and how it tracked its progress towards being genuinely customer-led.

Since leaving M&S, Jo has used her experience to steer Ofsted and three housing associations towards becoming customer pioneers as a Non-Executive Director. She also enjoys running, cooking and watching cricket (though presumably not at the same time).

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you?

Firstly, it’s about listening really hard to what customers tell you they really need and then challenging the status quo in the organisation to deliver that. It’s then about putting in place the systems needed to ensure that the voice of customers is at the heart of the business on an ongoing basis and not shirking from the responsibility to do the right thing for customers.

Finally, it’s about generating those real ‘moments of belief’ so that you can take colleagues on a journey with you, even those who say ‘we just can’t do that’.

How did you help M&S pioneer for customers?

In 2005, I became the first-ever Head of Customer Service for M&S, which was quite pioneering at the time. Before then, we’d had a Complaints Department, but we’d never had a whole customer strategy. The challenge was that, like many other organisations, M&S had structured its support mechanisms in an ‘inside out’ way, around functional divisions. Therefore, when customers encountered different parts of the brand, they got a very different experience and not one that necessarily aligned with our company mission.

So, I began by identifying what customers had told us they really wanted, which was friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable service. To then deliver on that meant reviewing our approach to recruitment to attract the right people; developing different support mechanisms to train, support and reward colleagues in ways that reinforced our mission; making sure that we had the right customer data and insights; and bringing colleagues along with me.

How did you bring senior colleagues along with you?

I have been very lucky to work with some amazing leaders and colleagues. But sometimes, it is not a question of ambition or desire. It’s that the structures, the operating model and the data are all engineered ‘inside out’. Colleagues might have the right intent, but their capabilities and skills are lacking.

You need to speak your colleagues’ language. When I started to be able to use data to point out that if we could get to the root cause of the customer complaints, stop the complaints in the first place and reduce failure demand, operating profits would significantly increase. Then I started to get people on board. Becoming customer-led was no longer a ‘nice to have’ but a commercial imperative.

I also realised that some barriers are more emotional than rational. It’s hard for some people to let go of bits of their portfolio. Perhaps there is also a bit of fear about what might come to light through the data or uneasiness among some senior colleagues about how to engage with customers on shop floors during immersions. It’s easy for me – perhaps because of my personality – but some people find this very stressful. What if they did not have the answer to a customer problem?

But over time, you get like-minded people around you. You have your ‘fire starters’ around the business that you can go and talk to.

In some cases, unfortunately, it takes a huge external event to force change. In housing, it took Grenfell to shake up the sector. Now, all housing associations are starting to understand that putting customers first may have prevented this tragedy from happening.

So, being customer-led sounds simple, but I think a lot of organisations don't do this because it is hard to get parts of the organisation redesigned and on your side. It takes a lot of sustained effort and energy.

How do you ensure that everyone buys into that vision?

In organisations, senior leaders and frontline colleagues often get a lot of attention. But middle management rarely gets the same positive treatment, so they can feel disengaged or unclear about why they are asked to implement changes.

At M&S, middle managers had a huge sphere of influence. They line-managed 92% of our employees. I wanted to engage them. So, for the first time, we took 3,500 middle managers out in groups and we talked to them about the organisation, about our customers, about the retail market, and about how important their role was. We also listened to them. For example, we learned a lot about how difficult it was for them to get pay progression. The results were phenomenal. They felt engaged. And you know what? The commercial results followed. It was kind of ‘pioneering from the middle’.  

How do you stay connected with what really matters to customers? 

Most large organisations have access to lots of customer data. At a board level, people tend to look at single figures, averages, traffic lights and so on, to track what is going well and what is not. But no customer is an ‘average’ customer. And if 90% are satisfied, you still need to find out what is going on with the 10% who aren’t.  For that, I implemented immersion events, going out, talking to customers in their homes or in their local stores, and keeping that going as a rhythm and routine.

In my Non-Executive roles, I encourage others to do the same. Spending time with customers in their own lives or accompanying them as they visit your stores helps ensure that you don’t just get feedback on specific product lines or communications but that you cover the wider customer experience.

What differences do you perceive between the retail, education and housing sectors?

I see more similarities than differences. My role as a NED is very much about getting organisations to think about their service users as customers. Instead of thinking that tenants or residents, for instance, are not customers because they don’t have a choice and cannot easily take their business elsewhere, I argue that we should think of our residents as customers. They might not have a choice about where they live, but understanding what it’s like when they arrive or what their journey is like as they are paying their rent or service charges, are all typical ‘customer’ questions. People might not choose their properties, but they do have a choice as to how they treat the property and how they behave in that community. Considering residents as customers encourages housing providers to treat people with greater respect and this leads to people being more considerate and engaged.