Customer Engagement with Peter Duffy, MoneySupermarket

I think it's really about hearing what your customers are telling you, whether they're saying that to you or whether that's just what they're feeling. They're easy words actually, but it's actually much harder I think to do in practice. So it's about aligning an organization to pick up all those data points, whether that's what the contact centre is hearing through the day-to-day conversations that customers are feeding back on the current service, whether it's the market research function who are looking at what customers are saying about the product or the future dimension of what that product could be, whether it's the product team who are kind of working up what this proposition should be and that kind of working through very usability-based processes. Whatever it is, it's about hearing how customers are thinking generally and then specifically about what it is that you're offering. So lots of organizations do lots of the sort of things you describe, but I wouldn't call most of those genuinely customer-led organizations. So what is it that makes the difference, you know, to when an organization really somehow responds to that in a productive way? Well, I think it's doing something about it. It's quite often hard to do something about it. I use easyJet as a very good example because we did some very structured work that broke down the customer journey from booking through to the airport experience, to the on-flight experience, through to getting your bag off a carousel at the end, and then really tried to understand what customers wanted from each of those stages of the process versus what it was that we were delivering. And you can imagine at the start there was quite a delta there. And actually then changing the orientation of an organization to begin to deliver against that customer agenda, the multiplicity of things isn't just one thing, it's probably a dozen, two dozen things in each of those big buckets, is a very, very tough thing to do. So it's about taking those theoretical projects, those research pieces of work, and actually converting them into real initiatives in the organization, which is I think much harder to do in practice than perhaps we think when we embark on these things.

Well, I think the best example of easyJet is something called allocated seating. So the way low-cost airlines work is they make their money from the planes being in the sky, and that means that when they land, they really want to begin to turn them as quickly as possible. The quicker you can do that, then the quicker the plane's back in the sky and you're making money again. Essentially, that's how the model works. Ideally, that would be circa 30-35 minutes in terms of making each of those turns happen. Now, the collective thinking in the industry was that the fastest way to turn the plane was for customers to take the first available seat. This is when a number of us joined easyJet in 2011, at the start of the big change program we put in place there. And for all good reason, everybody thought that was the way to get more flights in the sky, to get cheaper prices, to make the whole thing work more efficiently. Now, the reality when you spoke to customers is that they hated that process of free seating. They hated the fact that people would rush to the plane, charge past you, put blankets and bags over seats to reserve them for people back in the queue. What they really wanted was essentially the order that comes from a seat-allocated model, which is where we ultimately got to. But no one had really considered that because they thought it was more important that the plane actually went eight times a day and as a consequence the flight was cheaper, because that's what the customer really wanted. And it was true, cheap flights were certainly very popular. But when you began to talk to customers, the real challenge was how do you do both? How do you make it work in the way they would like it to work, plus give them the efficiency that drives those cheap prices? So that became the challenge for the organization. It was a really tough thing to do. It was tough to convince the board, operational colleagues, to prove it was the right thing. Yet once we did that and successfully implemented it, it added over 100 million pounds to the bottom line in the first year. The revenue economics were there because the customer said not only do I want this, I'm prepared to pay for it. So there was a complete linkage between revenue generation and meeting customer needs, but it's hard to do that in practice.

Well, I think it's about leadership from the CEO. The CEO has to set that customer agenda, has to say we're going to listen to our customers and we're going to do the things that they tell us are important, because it's only by then connecting all the different parts of the organization to deliver against that that you're going to get to success. Honestly, that was so complicated. There would have been so many opportunities to just get off that bus and say this is too hard, we're not going to do it. Let's continue doing it the way it's always been done. It's that leadership from the CEO that we had as a team at easyJet, it's that team working together with that common goal that really makes it happen. And again, they're really easy words to say, but it's making that happen in practice that is the challenge.

No, it's all about listening to customers. The great piece of analysis that I think surprised me when I first joined easyJet is that as a profile at the highest level, they were as ABC1 as British Airways. A very significant percentage of customers were second home owners. So you then look at who those consumers are and what they're wanting from the flight. Maybe they don't want the grimace gin or the cheapest crisp brand. When we began to switch to known and famous brands, like Bombay Sapphire, Hendrix, Fever-Tree, Coca-Cola, all of a sudden we were allowing you to buy it on the plane and it turned out to be successful. So it is about looking at data and who your customers are, then what they're asking you for, and then saying, 'Is your proposition matching that?' To be frank, it wasn't, and we did well by just aligning it to what our customers were wanting us to do.

The big difference between Just Eat and easyJet is there are no people involved at Just Eat. It's a pure digital platform. The customer is interacting with just the product. When I joined, it was a brilliant product because it showed you all the restaurants in your area, but essentially it was like the Yellow Pages; they may as well have been listed alphabetically. The big thing we did was get customer data to drive what those restaurant suggestions were. For example, something called menu ontology. We dug into our data and understood what you were buying. We could work out if you were vegetarian, buying halal meat, responding to value offers. The interface then began to change based on your individual buying behavior and then what people like you did. Before that, if you and I lived next door to each other, we would have seen the same restaurants in the same order. So nothing changed in terms of content. It was how we presented it based on customer information. For many modern businesses, data equals customer. That's the way we really understand what customers are doing and telling us they want, and how effectively you can utilize that data to personalize it around different customer groups down to what you want as an individual.

I think there are two very different systems. At easyJet, it's a defined model: how do we spec the product to deliver against customer needs. For Just Eat, I'm never going to be able to predict how hungry you are or what you fancy on a Tuesday evening, so I had to create a framework that algorithmically puts relevant suggestions in front of you. You're not trying to second-guess; you're trying to create a system where data becomes smart in suggesting relevant things. That's where the Bezos comment comes in: pour more choice in and the system will help the customer root to what they want.

No, I think the reason that Just Eat was a successful business was something called 'feet on the street.' We had teams of people who would actually go out and talk to restaurateurs and manage a patch. The pandemic is a great example. As a leadership team, we said government support will take time, so what do we do to commissions now, today, this week, to help restaurants? So we straight away cut commissions for a period to begin to help support them, take a level of cost down. That's all about listening to restaurants. Just Eat is a two-sided marketplace, so you have customers and providers. You need to understand how to help both. And to the first part of your question, listening to customers in a generic way, looking at how they interact with the product, doing usability work, that can only be done by a more traditional qualitative approach where you sit and work with customers one-on-one. We would go to customers' homes, sit in their environments as a leadership team, watch them order food, see where they're eating. Understanding the consumer context is critical, and there is no one methodology. You've got to use a range of different things together.

If you start from the proposition that there's no successful business that isn't trying to resolve some unmet customer needs, then that's where it comes from. You never really get there because customer demands and needs change and improve all the time. Businesses start off solving a problem for customers, and any current live business just has to stay current and live to those problems as they change. There was a time when none of us had broadband; now the issue is quality of service. At MoneySuperMarket Group, we're all about helping households save money. We have MoneySavingExpert, MoneySuperMarket, and we've just bought Quidco. There are different ways to solve the same customer problem. An organization has to stay live to each of those and hear what customers are saying, then adapt accordingly.

What is amazing about this group is its mission to help households save money. If you wander around any of our sites, it just bubbles up. Talk to any of our people, it's the reason they get out of bed. There was nothing that needed to be done there; everyone joined to do that. But some of our processes were a bit out of date. Where we were with data and the ability to respond to what customers are doing instantly was not where it would have been at Just Eat. We can do things to improve the technology platform and ways of working, but the brands are what makes it. Every customer doesn't care about that internal stuff. It's the brands and how compelling they are for consumers that really matters. MoneySavingExpert is the most trusted brand in financial services. How we helped during the pandemic, giving general advice about furlough, is a big part of it. With MoneySuperMarket, we need to move price comparison from something generic to something personal, using data to make switching easier, and adding Quidco.

Being conscious of that is the first thing. There are so many drivers on people's time, so many stakeholders, so much that is non-customer. You have to make the time for the customer and push that out. I was in a session with our customer contact team a couple of days ago. They said they have so much to tell the rest of the organization that they don't think we're hearing. My job is to connect them and ensure what customers say is heard by product people and other parts of the organization. I think we're pretty good at it, but you can always be better. So first, be conscious: how in touch am I with the customer-facing parts of this organization? That has to be a big percentage of time.

One of the things, the famous old analogy that Henry Ford said if he asked people what they wanted they'd have said a faster horse. As customers, we don't always know what's possible, and sometimes we don't even know what we really want because we're used to buying certain things. The idea of nice food quickly and Just Eat being an answer is not one you get to. Some people ask for things that are contradictory or unhelpful. So how do you work out what to do? I think you have to listen to everything and prioritize based on what's important and what can be delivered. There's a cadence of delivery; some things are big and take longer, some are easy and you get to faster. That runway of delivery becomes important. I think a lot is made of customers not knowing what they want. I'm not sure I always believe that. Customers want it to be efficient, to work the way they think it should. At easyJet, there were practices we called 'gotchas'—charges that would surprise customers. Customers were fed up, but those charges made an awful lot of money. We had to wean the organization off that and say, be upfront, tell them the cost, let them decide if it's good value. When we built our app, we enabled you to book a flight in 30 seconds. No one said they wanted that, but what they wanted was efficiency. So I think you can make a lot out of this unknown customer demand when for many organizations, what the customer wants is actually quite clear.

Yeah, so again the airline is a good example. We did complex customer satisfaction multivariate analysis and found that the plane taking off and landing on time was by far the most important thing. It was critical. If we got that wrong, people would complain about everything else and it would cloud the brand. Getting that to happen is tough, much tougher than building a nice new website. The operational colleagues did it fantastically, but it's hard day in day out. Organizations tend to do the easiest thing and herald it as customer-led, when it's the really tough things that consumers want that make the difference to the bottom line. And if people watching are earlier in the journey, are there tips? One thing I remember you telling me about easyJet was Carolyn started insisting on saying '180 people were delayed in Madrid' instead of 'a plane was delayed.' It helped people understand the impact. So customer outcome becoming the KPI is critical. Also, it's easy to tell these stories in the rearview mirror, but hard to do them in reality. It doesn't always feel easy. There were many opportunities to stop, but keeping doing it because it felt right for customers won through. My biggest suggestion: you can be brave. It doesn't always feel great as you're doing it, but sticking with the customer and delivering what they want is the surefire way to commercial success. I can't think of too many commercially successful businesses that don't deliver what consumers want. Certainly new businesses disrupting existing markets are meeting unmet customer demands.

Brilliant, good to catch up, Charlie. Thank you. Peace.