When it comes to great customer service, Peter Cross knows his stuff. At John Lewis and Waitrose, where he was customer experience director for several years, “king-sized service expectation came with the territory”, he writes in Start with the Customer (out 8 September, Pearson).
But achieving that goal isn’t straightforward. To help, his book is full of practical advice on understanding the modern customer and what shapes their behaviour, plus “golden rules and cardinal sins of service” to help businesses build a world-class service culture. A big takeaway: the customer “may not always be right, but they must always win”.
There are interviews with leading retailers, including Ocado Retail’s CEO Hannah Gibson, who reveals her vision for grocery shopping being “more of a conversation” – and less about picking products. The future could also entail shoppers taking “a virtual stroll down a street full of restaurants, [to] choose the dish they like and add those ingredients to their basket”.
As Mary Portas puts it in her foreword, the book is “for businesses who have already recognised that despite all the dosh that has apparently been invested in the technology to improve it, customer service is actually going backwards”.
As Cross admits, “putting customers first is an idea as old as business itself” but somewhere along the way business “got more complicated”. Service being “difficult to measure and hard to justify” meant investment “started to drift elsewhere”.
It’s high time we reprioritised.
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