Talking to 30 customers a week
When Snap ran coaches, I set myself a target of talking to 30 customers every week.
I had a standard patter that involves asking why they’ve chosen us and what we’d need to do differently for them to rave about us to everyone they know.
“Hi, I’m Thomas, can I ask you about your journey?”
”Oh, not him again…”
It meant that I started out talking to virtually every customer! Gradually, as we grew, the customers I was talking to became a smaller proportion of the total.
But the answers I got were remarkably consistent and it gave me confidence that I knew we were building the right features.
I’m a huge fan of star ratings as a way of algorithmically capturing the views of the customers on every coach (and I’d love to see more star ratings in mainstream public transport) but algorithmic data works best when you can test it against your lived experience.
I was the largest shareholder in Snap, I was the founder of Snap and I cared passionately about Snap. I had a real incentive to make it work and I was happy to give up my weekends to talk to customers (it had to be done at the weekend as virtually all our coaches ran at the weekend).
But I wonder whether public transport would work better if every senior manager made it their business to stay close to customers.
I know that many do, but I suspect that there are some that couldn’t honestly say when they last had a conversation with one of their customers.
Companies that succeed put a lot of effort into listening to customers. The richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, built Amazon as a giant customer-rating machine, with the entire marketplace designed to respond to live customer feedback. But, interestingly, he never lost personal contact with customers.
Even when Amazon became a £100bn business, he still personally read emails sent to his “jeff@amazon.com” email address. Forwarded customer escalations from Jeff Bezos were notorious within the Amazon leadership team. In principle, Amazon was rigidly built about hard data. But Jeff Bezos, personally, was heavily driven by personal customer anecdote. That doesn’t strike me as a bad combination.
Both MDs I worked for at Chiltern Railways (Adrian Shooter and Rob Brighouse) made it their point to regularly receive customer feedback and act on it.
These questions are about to become especially relevant to the railway, as one of my biggest concerns about the Shapps-Williams Plan for Rail is that it breaks the link between the people able to make decisions (who will sit in GBR) and the people who run the service (who will sit in the operators).
My hope is that whoever leads GBR will beat me and set themselves a target of personally talking to 40 customers every week.
