Last Monday (January 16 2012) one of the front page headlines in The Daily Telegraph was ‘Clegg plans a John Lewis economy’.
What this means, at least to Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, is that by rewarding the workforce with a share of the businesses they work for, people will – the theory is – work harder and more devotedly. The analogy with John Lewis derives from the well-known fact that the John Lewis organisation is, in fact, a partnership, owned by its employees. John Lewis distributes an annual profit share which, in recent years, has generally been about 15 percent of the employee’s salary.
While the fact of John Lewis being a partnership is certainly interesting from a business perspective; after all, it is extremely rare for large and commercially hugely successful organisations to operate in this way, to regard the partnership aspect of John Lewis as the most important thing about the organisation is to miss the point.
Yes, the partnership aspect does instil a genuine and passionate spirit of camaraderie among John Lewis people, but to attribute the organisation’s success to it being a partnership is like saying the Beatles produced great music because they used to spend a lot of time jamming together. People working well together is only the basis of a great customer proposition, not the full explanation of it.
The Beatles have gone down in history as the most famous twentieth-century pop group because millions of people loved their music. The customer proposition the Beatles offered was irresistible.
Similarly, the John Lewis Partnership (JLP) is a remarkable organisation, above all, because it provides great customer service.
Charteris partner Stephen Hewett, who spent 15 years at the JLP, says this about what working there taught him.
For me, the JLP was where I really learned to put into practice what has always been a passion of mine: to look after customers and offer them the level of service and quality of service that they wanted. I remember vividly that from my first week working there, I was struck with a powerful sense of how the JLP people I met came across to me as having a genuine and instinctive knowledge of what customers wanted, along with a determination to meet those needs.
By the time I joined the JLP, I’d worked in the aviation industry and already knew that I got a real kick out of finding out what my customers wanted and applying myself to their agenda. At the JLP I was fortunate enough to be introduced at a formative time in my life (I was 21 years old when I joined the JLP for the first time) to a structure that really facilitated customer focus.
I attended the JLP training course in my first week, a course that everyone who joined the Partnership had to join. There, I was introduced to a four-word principle that stayed with me all the time I was at the Partnership and which has stayed with me ever since. This principle is VASH, which at the JLP stands for:
Value
Central to the JLP’s entire thinking about customers is the need for them to be given what they perceive as value for money
Assortment
Also fundamental to JLP’s own philosophy of customer centricity is the need for customers to be offered a wide range of buying choices, which of course not only means a wide assortment of products generally but also a wide range of options (such as in terms of size, colour and other variables) within a particular range.
Service
The quality of customer service at the JLP is something the Partnership prides itself on, in my view entirely justifiably. The attitude at JLP is that everything of significance that partners do at the JLP should be done with a view towards furthering the quality of customer service.
Honesty
Honesty here means honesty in how customers are treated. I remember that during the training course I attended as soon as I joined the JLP, a woman on the course asked the trainer what we should do if, for example, a lady customer comes to try on a dress, which the sales assistant thinks looks awful on her, but she – the customer – likes it. ‘Should we conceal what we really feel,’ the trainee asked, ‘and tell her that the dress looks great on her?
The trainer said emphatically that no, not telling the truth to customers was unacceptable. Instead, the sales assistant should suggest some other dresses which look better on her, and should if necessary point out why the dress does not perhaps suit her as well as she thought it did.
The JLP, in its philosophy of honesty, and indeed in its philosophy of VASH generally, is seeking in all it does to build long-term relationships with customers that are based around giving value, assortment, service and honesty to the customer. This is the complete opposite of the ‘hard sell’ based around making a quick buck from customers, who will very likely soon realise that they have received neither value, assortment, service or honesty from the seller.
Many people talk about how fickle customers are during the internet age, when they can migrate to another seller merely by clicking on their mouse. That may indeed be, but few organisations selling across the internet – or in a physical sales environment – really do offer VASH. Yes, customers may be fickle, but customers have in truth always been fickle, they’ve always been ready to move on to another seller if they don’t feel satisfied. Victorian housewives would have had no compunction about dropping a supplier of any of the range of food and drink and household products they bought if they were not satisfied with the products and services offered. All that the internet age has done has been to make the process of moving on easier.
The old rules that applied when John Lewis began the JLP still apply now: give customers everything they want, and they’ll come back and enjoy the pleasure of buying from you again.
Today, Stephen Hewett believes that being able to deliver true customer centricity is an attitude of mind more than a technical skill, even though the technical skills do matter.
‘To be truly customer-centric,’ Stephen says, ‘you need to care about customers beyond the call of duty, you need to want to help them with their agenda because you enjoy helping them. Instilling that attitude in people is what the organisation John Lewis that set up in 1864 has been doing in the 148 years since its foundation.
As Stephen Hewett points out, it was not until 1928 that John Lewis’s son, Spedan Lewis, completed the organisation’s transformation into a partnership. ‘From the outset,’ Stephen Hewett says, ‘it was, above all, quality of customer service that was primarily responsible for the success of the business John Lewis founded.’
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James Essinger of Da Vinci Public Relations is an associate consultant to Charteris plc and its trade and professional public relations consultant
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