by Shaun Smith
(Soraya Loerts)
So, some great advice from the Liberty Global Business services team. You may wonder about why they have been so generous and open in sharing this level of detail with readers, some of whom will be competitors. The answer is that the value comes from the journey, not the destination. Remember, you can’t ‘force it, fake it or fudge it’. Attempting to copy some of Liberty Global’s output without going through the same process is a recipe for mediocrity.
Now let’s take a very different kind of organization from a completely different sector, but one that shares a similarly competitive environment and is part of a group that is equally results driven but also one that challenges another objection we often hear:
‘Customer experience is all very well if you are a Ritz-Carlton, Burberry or Singapore Airlines, but if you are a budget brand in a highly price-driven market you can’t afford to worry about delighting customers.’
Premier Inn proves them wrong.
Premier Inn – case study
Premier Inn is part of Whitbread PLC and is the UK’s leading hotel brand in the value segment as rated by YouGov, with nearly 700 hotels in the UK and forecast to grow by 45 per cent to 75,000 rooms in the UK by 2018. Whilst it has grown rapidly it has gained a reputation for providing a consistently good customer experience. But how do you take the experience to the next level and sustain it when you are adding a new hotel every 10 days? That was the question that occupied the then Managing Director, Patrick Dempsey, in 2012:
‘We have something in Premier Inn, which I call our “pixie dust”. I’ve been running the business now for eight years, and it has always been there – but I wanted to see how we could really galvanize it. How could we get that pixie dust to be a bit more formal? Half our estate used to be run by the restaurant business and now we have put it all together under Premier Inn and I wanted to get that one business behind one objective. That is why purpose becomes important. Why do people come to work? Why do they do what they do? So that was part of the motivation for starting this work.
‘The other is that John Forrest was new to Premier Inn in his role as Chief Operating Officer. I really wanted John to have something that he could lead, and people could see that he was driving. We talked about the idea together and agreed that I should sponsor it, but I wanted John to shape it, because it was his team that it was going to have the impact on. I wanted John to have something that would be his legacy as such, that people will always remember John for – our purpose and the campaign to deliver it, “Bigger, Bolder, Better”.’
Patrick could not have chosen a better person to lead ‘Bigger, Bolder, Better’. We have worked with many organizations over the years and hundreds of executives, but few come close to John Forrest in their ability to lead a customer experience initiative of this kind. The reason is that John is a passionate believer in the power of purpose:
‘My personal journey started when I was Operations Director of Whitbread’s Table Table restaurant brand. The brand was broken and we couldn’t fix everything, so the question was what were we going to do to win because we needed to turn it around. So that started me thinking about how to do that and I read your book Uncommon Practice: People who deliver a great brand experience – and that sowed a seed in my mind. I also came across some work by Simon Sinek about putting “why” at the centre of an organization. I recognized that we were phenomenal at the “what, when, how” but we weren’t very good at “why”. And then I took over the operations role in Premier Inn and found the same.
‘We are brilliant at looking after our guests because we’ve got these phenomenal team members, but no one knew why. No one could work out how come, despite the fact that we had grown from being a very small business to being quite a big business, we still had that same feeling. We had been through recessions and restructures that split up the business. We put it back together again, but one thing never changed, which is the consistency of the warmth of welcome, the wow of the team, and the lengths that they would go to for our guests.
‘So Patrick and I felt that this was really important to understand, because as we grow, as we expand internationally, as we have a more distant business model, we cannot rely on the personalities of the senior leadership alone to make it happen, so let’s try to work out why we are as good as we are and how phenomenal we could be if we grabbed hold of it and then took it to another level.’
It was clear that Patrick and John shared a common cause. There was a clear business need, strong sponsorship and a leader in place charged with implementation – but how to start?
Engage
Patrick had previously been involved in an organization-wide customer experience initiative when he was with TrustHouse Forte Hotels, and had seen the power of engaging people behind a common purpose. He decided to take a similar approach with Premier Inn, so Amanda Brady, director of HR for Whitbread Hotels and Restaurants, was made co-leader with particular responsibility for the employee elements. John and Amanda realized they could not do it alone – they needed the active support of the leadership team. So they decided to start with answering the question ‘Why?’ with the help of the Premier Inn leaders.
The first thing John Forrest did was to start introducing his own senior team to the notion of organizational purpose and the need to ‘stand up’ for something. He wanted them to get there ‘under their own steam’ rather than him launching a campaign and asking them to implement it. He did this through talking about his own beliefs, teaching them about Simon Sinek and exposing them to other people’s thinking:
‘I brought my operations team to hear you speak at the London Business Forum about being bold and on purpose.
http://www.londonbusinessforum.com/events/customer_experience_3
‘And at least two-thirds of them got it on the spot, and got really excited about it. And then we started engaging the executive group, step by step. Most of the executive team were behind it but one person said that if it wasn’t broken why were we going to spend money on trying to make it better? There were no numbers to support why we had to do it but there was a belief that we needed to have something to galvanize everybody, and to protect the difference we had achieved.
‘When I think about how we developed our purpose, with hindsight, the most interesting part of it was the fact that it was an iterative process. At the time that felt really frustrating. Not because we weren’t doing what we needed to do, but because I couldn’t get all the executives to agree. At the same time, Patrick was making some changes at the executive level and so we had to keep taking a step back to align people. As a result, we ended up moving the launch back nearly six months in the end. But in hindsight that made it stronger.’
Patrick also believed that engaging the executive team in defining the purpose was a vital step in the journey, because whilst he could sponsor it, he could not implement it without the active support of his executive team:
‘Our purpose is to “Make our guests feel brilliant, through a great night’s sleep”. When people stay in a Premier Inn, or a budget hotel, they don’t stay there for a luxury stay, or a spa experience. They are staying there because they are there to do something else. And therefore our job is to give them a great night’s sleep so that they can be brilliant the next day. Getting to that purpose was the most difficult part but we did so by really talking it through as an executive team.
‘I wanted to get everybody in the organization to think about our purpose, because if they are not doing that, what are they doing? That meant we had to drive it through the organization. Having someone like John leading that, and really getting behind it, was important. I don’t think I could have driven the purpose through the organization on my own. I very much sponsor it, and I’ll talk about it. But, actually, in terms of implementation, we are very lucky to have John and the team who worked on the implementation, what we call our “Bigger, Bolder, Better” campaign. They all pulled t
ogether.’
Many organizations define a purpose or vision statement, but as soon as they hit the first poor quarter or are faced with making difficult decisions that impact short-term results they cave in and business-as-usual trumps the longer-term strategy. The Premier Inn purpose was tested earlier than Patrick expected but became all the stronger for it. We facilitated a workshop with the executive team and the regional operations managers to prepare them for launch of the ‘Bigger, Bolder, Better’ campaign that was to launch the purpose and training to support it. That workshop became a watershed in the commitment to the purpose, because Patrick Dempsey and the executive team took a multimillion pound investment decision in the moment to act in faith with the purpose:
‘One of the things that you warned us about was that our purpose would be tested at some point and the way we dealt with that as a leadership team was crucial. I remember we had quite a difficult meeting when one of our regional operational managers raised the issue of poor air conditioning in some of our hotels. It was clearly a “sticky moment” because the credibility of our purpose rested on the decision we took. We had been putting that decision off because it represented a huge capital investment for the business but as a result of that meeting and that moment we committed to a refurbishment programme across our estate. We invested in a five-year programme to upgrade all of our hotels. Our purpose of “Making our guests feel brilliant, through a good night’s sleep” has made us focus more on the fundamentals we need to fix to deliver on it.’
This was a real ‘Road to Damascus’ moment for Premier Inn and the executive group, and from the moment the decision to refurbish the rooms was announced the cynics faded away. Clearly, Patrick’s decision was hugely influential in aligning his leadership team, because Simon Jones, director of marketing and strategy, told me:
‘In terms of key success factors, there is an old Chinese proverb, “The fish rots from the head”. Unless you’ve got an MD who absolutely embraces the purpose and is continually driving the right behaviours and urging the organization’s success, it won’t happen. He is then supported by an exec that collectively buys into the programme. It’s the executive team who take ownership for all the strategy. We’ve debated it hard, and then we’ve brought it to life through our external brand promise and our internal brand purpose, and I think that’s very important.’
Insight
Having agreed the purpose, the next step was to get insight from customers that would allow the organization to define what it really meant from the customer perspective and how to deliver it operationally. Like many hotels, Premier Inn collects huge amounts of data from guest feedback surveys and they made this available to Smith+co. We took this data and analysed nearly half a million records of frequent customers to determine the value drivers for the brand and the current experience that customers were receiving. The value drivers are those attributes of the offer that encourage repeat and referral behaviour of customers and, as such, are very important to determine if you are to design an experience that differentiates. In the case of Premier Inn we discovered that value for money, room and bed comfort, and warmth of service were all important to the target customers. We also correlated top box satisfaction scores with intention to recommend and from this created our ‘ECG’ curves showing the actual and the desired experience for customers. Mark Fells, director of digital, explains how this data is used to create insight and inform new product development:
‘Because we have so many guests who stay with us, we send them questionnaires and a huge number respond – over 100,000 every month – who rate our products and services as part of their stay and therefore we get a very sensitive barometer about every element of the experience. For example, we offer a choice of pillows now in response to what our customers thought about their pillows. I think the challenge is how do you go a stage further and how do you start to build customers into almost an ecosystem? We’re starting to think about how should we involve some of our fabulously loyal customers in customer panels, whether they be virtual or real, where we would ask a group of customers to come and review our hotels before they open and tell us what they think works and doesn’t. Should they be involved in the building process and actually choosing the site?’
This is powerful but the real opportunity is to get upstream in the capture of customer data so that the experience can be enhanced real-time rather than post-stay. Personalization needs to be tempered with appropriate privacy but offers the means to customize the experience and deliver the purpose much more intentionally:
‘If we knew more about our guests upfront, if we could ask their permission to give us more information, we could probably start to serve them different choices that would probably meet their motivations more clearly and start to deliver our purpose earlier in process.’
Mark’s point about making different choices in the experience to align more intentionally with the brand purpose is a very important one. As we said in Chapter 10, the customer experience is rather like an ECG line and, just like with a real ECG, a flat line is bad! Customers who experience high points in the customer journey that are aligned with the purpose and promise are much more likely to remember their experience with affection. We will get to this point a little later but first we have to define the promise.
Define
With the volume of data that we had to analyse and the high level of insight this provided, we were in a terrific position to work with a cross-functional team in the Customer Experience Workshop to focus on how the brand would ‘stand up’ by defining the brand promise and designing the new experience. However, what is vital in this process is to anchor the definition very clearly in the purpose and strategy of the organization. Far too many organizations have brand purposes, strategies, visions, missions and values that are misaligned and serve to confuse rather than illuminate. Often the starting point for our work is to take these disparate messages and find a common thread running through them. Fortunately our task was made easier because Simon Jones shares a very similar view and his team’s work on the Premier Inn brand strategy provided a clear definition of the personality, values and tone of voice for the brand. All we had to do was to use this as a foundation on which to define the promise:
‘Purpose and strategy are clearly related, and therefore it’s not the case that we landed on a purpose and then retro-fitted our strategy around it. Nor did we come up with a strategy and then say, “Right, let’s think about a decent strapline that will bring this to life for the organization.” I think that’s where organizations fail in these kinds of exercises. What we have actually done is to be quite reflective about what it is that makes Premier Inn special and different, versus other budget hotel companies, in particular. And in doing so, we’ve hopefully landed on a series of strategic programmes that are adding value to the people we employ, the guests we attract, and our shareholders, and are really reflective of what we think our purpose is at its heart.
‘Therefore, we have a coherent whole, with our purpose expressing our strategy and a strategy that delivers our purpose. The two have been developed in parallel, as opposed to separate and distinct exercises. I’ve seen lots of examples where businesses have said, “Right, that’s our strategy but people are not going to find it very compelling so let’s try to give it a sexy sounding name to try and bring it to life.” Instead we have tried to run the business honestly, with a set of principles that we feel passionate about and we believe our people feel passionate about, and then we express those in the mantra that is our purpose.’
This is an important point because as we started this work there were a number of changes made at the executive level, including the appointment of Simon Jones as Director of Marketing and Strategy. As a result, the marketing team were working on the brand positioning in parallel to John and Amanda’s leadership of the ‘Bigger, Bolder, Better’ project with the Operations and HR teams. Our role in Smith+co was to help ensure that the vari
ous pieces joined up. This is a classic example of ‘triad power’, where Marketing, HR and Operations must operate as one around a common agenda. Every organization is different. Some have a very well-defined brand platform in place and we can use this as a firm foundation for the customer experience. Others have a loosely defined brand position or perhaps, as with Premier Inn, this is being reviewed, and in this case the purpose and brand promise can help to inform the brand work as well as the operational and HR components. Key to this, however, is that all of the elements are aligned. They came together in the form of a brand pyramid in Premier Inn.
The value of having a purpose and strategy that are closely aligned is that you can communicate this simply and clearly to customers in a way that is much more emotional and engaging than the usual tactical advertising used by so many brands. ‘A great night’s sleep’ is so much more compelling than ‘We offer weekend discounts’.
Figure 12.3 Premier Inn campaign: Bigger, Bolder, Better
This was shown very clearly a short while later when Russell Braterman was appointed as Premier Inn’s new Brand Marketing Director. After being briefed on the brand purpose, he said, ‘That’s the TV ad! I just need to turn it into something for an outside audience.’ He did.
In January 2014, Premier Inn announced the launch of a £15 million media campaign, its largest ever. The campaign featured the British comedian Lenny Henry. Russell Braterman said: