How do I get my staff to see the world through the eyes of our customers?

Grant Leboff:          You invested quite a lot of time in ensuring that your staff understood what the customer’s challenges were, and one of the things that I talk about with my own clients is the importance of seeing the world through the eyes of the customer, and actually what that does is that it starts to open up opportunities because I think too many companies – I don’t know what your take is on this – too many companies see themselves merely as the supplier, and they need to actually go from being the supplier to the partner…

Lara Morgan:         Partner!

Grant Leboff:          But it’s a completely different mind set isn’t it?

Lara Morgan:         It is also a completely different level of arrangement, and a level of relationship, and a level of longevity and sustainability for the business. The upsides so outweigh the really hard work you’re going to have to do to become the knowledge base, and really smart about understanding the customer, and that’s why, again, if you can sector focus, and if you can be really passionate about the industry that you’re in, and you work hard at it, the payback in the longer term is just… it’s enjoyable! I miss my industry.

Grant Leboff:          And in terms of culture, I think it’s a really lovely idea to encourage staff to go out and spend the night in the hotel as a housekeeper because they see it from another point of view. Is that enough? It may have been enough, but is it enough culturally to get them to see it through their eyes?  What else could you do, or did you, do to reinforce that?

Lara Morgan:         First of all I believe in massive competitive study, because actually view can see what the competition is doing as well to try and serve your customer, who you’re trying to serve, and that is a fact, that you can also see the point of view that they see. I think that’s very important.

We used to hold competitions about calling up the competition and saying that we were a bed and breakfast and getting them to send us their toiletries, timing how long it took to get there, how well did the samples arrive, were they nicely packaged, did they look better than ours, what could we learn from them, how quick was the turnaround time, did they follow up? So now I’m understanding what my customer is getting from my competition, and I’m seeing the alternatives that all I’m selling against.

From a customer point of view I think it’s about… We used to take ‘customer service order-takers’ out with salespeople on a regular, monthly basis, people would go out for a day to also appreciate that sells isn’t all glamour, it’s running on the tube, it’s being late for this, sweating your backs off and trying to look decent when you’re running around in the heat of the Dubai sun, standing in a five-star hotel and having to go in and make a presentation, and look smart about it!

What other things did we do? We did endless things; so we had customer exchanges, facilitated conversations where you put customers in a room and have a nice dinner and say; ”Look what more can we do to be of service and take away your headaches. We are a problem-solving business?” We had staff exchange, so we had our factory teams coming to London to understand the business we were in. These are people who were running a factory in the Czech republic and in China. They had never been to London before or to major cities that had glamorous hotels, and they would go… [Lara’s jaw drops] when they saw this beautiful product that they made in some of the most famous institutions in the world…

Grant Leboff:          It made it real for them.

Lara Morgan:         Real for them.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English