Customer Pioneer Stories - The Foundation | The Customer-Led Growth Consultancy

Mumsnet

Serena Luff — Tue, 28 May 2019 15:13:10 +0000

Follow this link for a summary of the framework explaining why customer-led success is so rare and the journey organisations go on to get there. Each story uses this framework so if you’re not familiar with it or you want a reminder, it’s worth reading this first to make sense of descriptions of terms like ‘Burningness’ and ‘Moments of Belief’ which are crucial.

There is a version of customer pioneering that starts before a business exists, one that creates a whole new approach rather than changing an existing one. It’s often triggered by a founder-to-be experiencing a need that no one seems to be meeting. Instead of moaning about what happened and wondering why someone doesn’t do something about it, they decide to tackle it. Will Shu did it with Deliveroo in a high-profile way. Martha Silcott is doing it with fablittlebag. And at the turn of the millennium, Justine Roberts did it too, with Mumsnet.

It’s a source of personal burningness, the fuel we found to be essential in creating a successful customer-led organisation. And with the Mumsnet story Roberts experienced burningness three times over - as a customer, as a woman in business and as Mumsnet’s co-founder.

Read more

Permalink

The Glasgow Neonatal Unit

Serena Luff — Tue, 28 May 2019 15:12:55 +0000

This is a story about a policy change in the Neonatal Unit of The Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow. That might sound like a technicality but it’s fundamental, a change in the shared beliefs that guided the way care was provided.

It has seen parents (the customers in this situation, at least the customer group old enough to speak) controversially taking the lead in the treatment and nursing of their premature and sick babies. Despite the perceived risks, this has had a profound positive effect on the lives of the babies, the families and the culture of nursing and care in the unit.

Read more

Permalink

giffgaff

Serena Luff — Tue, 28 May 2019 15:12:09 +0000

giffgaff takes being customer-led, pioneering innovatively on behalf of customers, to the extreme. For twelve years and counting giffgaff has grown and led in its sector with its outside-in thinking, trusting the community which the business serves and being steered by them to an extraordinary degree. First conceived in April 2009, it launched as an innovative new venture by O2 (by then owned by Telefonica) in the UK with the aim of seeing whether a mobile network inspired by social media and digital collaboration could create value in new and better ways for a segment of the market. CEO Ash Schofield sums the giffgaff ethos up with one word. “It’s about mutuality,” he says. We believe that giffgaff’s approach epitomises customer-led success. They have been prepared to lead, to believe that they will ultimately succeed if they make things better for their customers (or members as they call them) by listening, trusting and reflecting what matters most to them in the ways they operate.

Read more

Permalink

Transport for London

Serena Luff — Tue, 28 May 2019 15:11:49 +0000

From the Second World War until the late 1980s, investment in public transport in London was limited, and much of the system fell into disrepair. Londoners avoided it because it was unreliable and expensive. But the creation of the mayoralty in 2000 alongside a decade of PPP-based capital investment in public transport meant that the network was being significantly improved just as London had started to boom again. The twenty-first century has seen relentless growth in the UK’s capital to a population of nine million people more enthusiastic about using, and so more reliant upon, public transport than almost any other city dwellers in the world. But despite high demand being in many ways a good thing, TfL’s capacity is largely fixed and the opening of a brand new train service, the Elizabeth Line, is a very rare injection of 10 percent extra rail capacity.

But, for London to remain a sustainable and liveable city for hundreds of years into the future, they need to keep public transport options working and attractive to provide affordable and reliable alternatives to car travel. TfL is responsible for London’s strategic road network (the boroughs run most roads in London) but they need to be the supporting act to effective public transport and walking and cycling, not the main event.

Serving customers well has been a core area of focus for TfL from the beginning. But given a tough backdrop and this huge human challenge, it has accelerated its customer thinking so that alongside its existing expertise in engineering and safety it has become an organisation that is genuinely customer-led.

Read more

Permalink