Today’s interview is with retail expert Peter Cross who until recently was the Customer Experience Director at John Lewis and Waitrose and prior to that spent ten years as Mary Portas’ business partner. Peter joins me today to talk about retail customer experience, some of the lessons he has learned over the course of the last few years, experience leadership and what he sees as some of the challenges ahead for experience leaders.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The top frustrations of customers and agents are the same – Interview with Jeff Nicholson of Pega — and is number 402 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at babelforce for sponsoring my podcast this month.

babelforce is the #1 most flexible platform for contact center service. Pierce Buckley, CEO and Co-founder of babelforce, and his team of telecoms veterans have created a powerful cloud communications solution focused on No-Code integration and automation. Their goal is to break down every barrier to great customer experiences by putting intuitive tools in the hands of people who live and breathe CX.

Pierce and Jonathan Baer of Vonage are running a webinar on the 28th October at 11:00am CET and they will be discussing exactly how businesses are getting maximum benefit from WhatsApp, one of the fastest-growing channels for customer service. Follow this link to sign up. You don’t want to miss out as you will get to see a demo of the babelforce platform in action!

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Peter:

• What customers want is actually really quite straightforward. But, identifying what that is and then ensuring businesses deliver that consistently does seem to escape many businesses.
• Big lessons learned along the way:
  • Appreciate the art of the detail.
  • Develop self-belief.
  • Hone your skills as an instinctive thinker because if you’re standing in front of a chief executive you’ve gotta be on the money and dig deep into your experience to find answers that she/he will find credible.
  • The importance of employee engagement.
• We need to start talking about experience leadership in all of its dimensions.
• Here’s three things that Peter believes experience leaders have in common:
  • 1. Experience leaders are able to articulate a compelling, unifying vision of an organisation, its purpose, its relevance, and then understand all the little things that join up to make it ‘sticky’. They are visionaries and are agents of change. They live in the future. They second guess where the market’s going. They get there first, which it takes bravery.
  • 2. Customer centric is one of those terms that’s thrown about a lot and is very easy to say but far harder to deliver. So, experience leaders need to be genuinely collaborative in order to make things happen.
  • 3. There’s so much data now that, as a customer leader, understanding what it means is key to your credibility in the organisation. Leaders develop an instinct and make it their business to know what customers want, but more importantly to to obsess about delivering to them every single time. The key to instinct is curiosity.
• I don’t think there is anything more noble than serving customers.
• The pace of response from retail, the adaptability, the resilience of the sector to keep going through these incredibly tough and difficult circumstances, particularly in the supermarkets and chemists, was really, really extraordinary.
• I’m concerned for physical retail because most retailers have just not got their heads around what having a shop needs to mean in a digital world. This might mean more casualties ahead.
• I’m also worried and remain worried for creativity, because creativity is, was and remains incredibly difficult when everyone’s apart.
• It’s really hard to spot the brilliant idea on a zoom call.
• It’s also really difficult because it’s often the quietest voice in the room that has the best idea.
• One thing which strikes me as an odd contrast, in my personal life, is the contrast between the joy I get from my Netflix subscription, which I think is a phenomenal business, from every single angle, to the irritation I get from my Spotify subscription, which is double the price. In the whole customer experience, I find the contrast between the two quite staggering.
• Once you get past the survival instinct of actually getting through the pandemic you’ve then got to get into the thriving stage. And the key to that, of course, is less about how can we keep going but more about how can we stay relevant to customers’ lives? What are their higher needs?
• Being where your customers are is the greatest source of relevancy.
• You also have to become preoccupied with differentiation, particularly digital differentiation, when so much of the experience is very lacklustre. That differentiation could be that you focus on being just brilliantly efficient.
• Taking more of a punk approach to CX requires that you question anything and everything.
• Peter’s best advice: Be the person in your organisation who really genuinely knows the customers.
• Peter’s Punk CX word: Exhilarating.
• Peter’s Punk CX brand: Netflix.

About Peter

Eight years in charge of the customer experience at John Lewis and Waitrose and ten more as Mary Portas’ business partner, mean there are few who can match Peter Cross’ unique blend of consulting and practical experience and step so confidently into the future of shopping to ensure brands and organisations remain irresistible to their target consumers.

Peter has worked in marketing communications for 30 years, in house at Burberry, L’Oreal and the Cartier group. For ten years he was Mary Portas’ business partner at her eponymous strategic retail agency Portas where the pair gave strategic advice to brands including Westfield, Clarks, Mercedes Benz and Louis Vuitton and launched a number of publishing and media ventures.

In his time at the John Lewis Partnership, customers slept in shops, staff were sent to theatre school, the organisation’s values and purpose were reset, a Christmas ad campaign became the global benchmark and latterly Waitrose supermarkets played a front line role in feeding the nation.

Peter sat on the Government’s high street task force, is an Ambassador for the industry charity the Retail Trust and is a Vice President at the Institute of Customer Service.

Find out more about Peter and connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Image by Radoan Tanvir from Pixabay