Perry Price, Customer Operations Manager, Argos

Anyone in business today must not only put the customer first but must take every effort to see the world from the customer’s point of view. It’s only when you have a real empathy and understanding of customers and their needs and perspectives that you can hope to meet customer expectations and also ideally to exceed them.

Stephen has helped Argos generate a paradigm shift in how we see our customers. We used to, in effect, hand out edicts from head office to our branch managers; edicts we believed would maximise the quality of our customer service. I’m not saying all these edicts were inaccurate in what they tried to do, but the point was that they issued from the top of the organisation rather than being generated and created within the branches by the very people who dealt with customers on a day-to-day basis.

When I met Stephen, I realised I’d encountered someone who was talking and thinking about customers in a way no-one ever had before, at least no-one I’d met.

For Stephen, being customer-centric is not just something you do in business because you want to make money! No, for Stephen, customer centricity is a deep and wide-ranging business philosophy that he actually extends to all of life.

Stephen also taught me that the way any organisation sees a customer needs to be, in effect, a bloodline that runs throughout the entire organisation. Yes, of course, organisations have administrative things to do as well as working directly with customers, but they can only succeed in today’s highly competitive business environments if their entire focus is around what the customer needs.

In order to generate that focus on customers, there really is no alternative but for the organisation to take every possible step at a grass-roots level to find out what customers are thinking and feeling, and what they want the organisation to do that it’s not doing now.

Another problem is that the larger an organisation becomes, the more remote the organisation may find itself getting from its customers, whether culturally and often also logistically and geographically.

This happens partly because large organisations frequently think they have to be highly centralised to operate at maximum efficiency.

Yet it’s not just that which is the problem, but also that there is a tendency for executives in a big organisation to become too engrossed emotionally and professionally with internal political goings-on at the organisation’s head office, rather than thinking about customers and what customers need.

Reader, believe me, this short, highly-focused book you’re about to read is full to the brim with sensible, workable, practical advice for how to win the hearts and minds of your customers, and how to put your customers first. There are no cunning tricks in the book; every tip is logical, sensible and in the final analysis, also honourable.

At Argos, we’ve benefited enormously from allowing Stephen’s philosophy of customer service to inform and guide our initiatives.

As a result of his advice and help, we’ve conducted a full review of the business and now have what we believe is a first-rate ongoing dialogue with customers. We still have things to do to ensure that our entire organisation is completely focused culturally, strategically and tactically around our customer and their needs. But already every store manager in our organisation knows that he or she has absolute carte blanche to deliver the best service the branch can, and that we are supporting that delivery in every conceivable respect.

In essence, what Stephen has helped us do is to allow everyone at Argos to be brilliant with customers. I hope his excellent new book will help you to be brilliant with customers too!