Welcome to the POSITIVE Customer Experience Newsletter!
Welcome to the latest issue of my newsletter. I'd like to offer a particularly warm welcome to my new subscribers. Please do let me know what you think of the newsletter, and feel free to share it with colleagues who might find it useful.
So, yesterday was #BrexitDay:
The day that, according to your view, was either "the beginning of the end", or "the end of the beginning", to paraphrase Winston Churchill.
Whichever way you look at it, the world has now officially changed. To quote Churchill again (as I did in a recent post on my blog), "When there is a bear in your bedroom it is not a matter for speculation."
In other words, it's time for action. Or at least, it's time for a new plan, and then action. On the balance of probability, yesterday's strategy is more than likely, over the medium term, to render your organisation, yesterday's news.
This "Brexit Special" newsletter is not all about Brexit: it's filled with ideas, innovations, and tips to inspire and help you to prepare:
To be ready to thrive in new and dramatically different circumstances;
To be ready to turn your back on mediocrity.
If you're ready, why not start by reading my proposal for a POSITIVE business plan - I guarantee it will help you to turn your back on mediocrity.
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7 Essential Steps to Making Customer Experience Your Competitive Advantage
As regular readers will know, according to leading information technology research and advisory company Gartner:
“By 2017, 89% of marketers expect customer experience to be their primary differentiator.”
I was pleased to be asked to share this information, and my "7 Essential Steps" to turn it to your competitive advantage, via the Academy for Chief  Executives (ACE) newsletter.
(I contend that the alternative is to let Customer experience be your competitive downfall!)
You can read the piece here >
The 7 Steps are based on my eBook Managing Customer Experience in the Networked Age - which is designed to be a step by step, practical guide to developing a world class Customer Experience in these turbulent times. Avoid those post-Brexit blues: read my eBook and use it to populate your POSITIVE business plan!
(If you need help, support, or just someone to talk to about all this, do contact me.)
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A Marriage Based on Trust - Or Made in Hell?
I was shocked, though not surprised, to read that the CEO of the National Trust for Scotland (NTS), Simon Skinner, has publicly mooted the idea that his organisation should merge with its public sector counterpart Historic Environment Scotland (HES).
According to Mr Skinner, “Over time, it is almost inevitable. The same space is being occupied and we need to look at that. 
“I think elements of it could come together. I don’t see why you wouldn’t. If you go to an industry analogy, you have back offices we both run, payroll systems, we have conservators, they have conservators.” (You can read more here >)
So why am I shocked?
After all, HES is no longer, strictly speaking, in the public sector: like its English equivalent, English Heritage, it became a charitable trust (in 2015). And the challenge for NTS has long been that its responsibilities encompass some 180,000 acres of wild land - including coastline and islands - which are difficult to derive income from, despite the estimated two million visitors to these areas every year.
And, as Mr Skinner says, there are obvious parallels in terms of not just heritage focus, but also processes and back office systems.
And, this is not a new idea: it was being talked about when I served on NTS' management board (1998-2004).
I'm surprised, in part, because this move by Simon Skinner might not be the best negotiating tactic: NTS, with all its financial challenges, approaches the more affluent HES, saying "wouldn't it be good for both of us if we got together?" - as this is a "Brexit special" I can't resist alluding to the length of time de Gaulle resisted the "Sick Man of Europe"'s entry to the Common Market!
The main reason I'm shocked, however, is this: in this proposition, and as far as I can see, in the NTS' recent strategy, there is insufficient evidence of innovation, creativity, or inspiration, in relation to its customers.
The reason NTS exists - what we called in my tenure its "consent to operate" - is to conserve, share, and explain Scotland's extraordinary heritage - for people. And whilst I'm well aware of the financial challenges it faces (I was jointly responsible for contending with them for six years), the struggle for the soul of NTS appears to be in doubt.
Strong words!
And yet, I'm deadly serious. When I joined NTS I was told, in my first week, by the then Director of Conservation, that "our customers are the buildings"! That's what I mean by a struggle for the soul of NTS. Six years later, all that had changed.
We had a Customer Experience strategy, positioned at the very heart of everything we did. 
Internally, it was reflected in training programmes, customer service champions, forums and KPIs; externally, in all forms of branding, marketing and communications - including a new website, magazine, and information for visitors. (If you explore NTS' "new" website you will be able to excavate some of the 2003 foundations, which is a heritage experience of sorts I suppose).
The key point is that the Customer Experience strategy was not a bolt-on to the organisation: it became a central organising vision of a contemporary, relevant, and above all exciting NTS - less a membership organisation, more a way of life.
As a result, commercial revenues tripled, visitor numbers started to increase after a ten-year decline, and the vital revenue funnel (visitors become members who in turn become donors, and so on) was well and truly revitalised. There was an excitement about the place (replacing the smell of burning martyr) - and that started to attract not only more visitors, but also the brightest talent.
And now? Via a new business plan, NTS has been decentralised, with 65 job losses, and HQ functions devolved to six regional groupings of built heritage properties. I just hope that there is a coherent, compelling and consistent, Customer Experience vision at the heart of NTS.
If there is, then any merger negotiations should rest, not on the rationalisation of payroll systems (and, er... payroll), but on the fundamental issue of merging two cultures. As former IBM CEO Louis Gerstner put it, “Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game".
Unless NTS gets its culture right, it risks being diluted or diminished by HES' much more clear-cut, mission and brand (both internal and external). And for a proud charity (Scotland's largest), celebrating its 85th anniversary in 2017, that would be a tragedy.
If you'd like to read more, here is my longer description of the way we changed NTS for the better in 1998-2004 - and the universally adaptable blueprint it was based upon.
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Porsche Makes Cars (and Walt Disney)
Okay I apologise for the terrible joke! 
If you've read the article above,, and the related blog post, you'll know why I'm pleased to learn that Porsche has hired the Disney Institute to help it improve its Dealership Experience in North America.
Called "Excite", the programme will reach over 5,000 employees, and, as well as training, create "Customer Experience Managers" in each store - vital for a sustainable difference to be made (and culture shift achieved). If the programme is a success it will be rolled out globally.
New Porsche North America CEO Klaus Zellmer puts it memorably:
"We need to stand on two legs. We have one very strong leg: product. But standing on one leg is not good enough for us. So the second leg for me is the issue of customer experience.”
My time at the Disney Institute was truly a life-changing experience, and I've been sharing Disney philosophy and ideas in organisations of all shapes and sizes, ever since.
It makes you think though...
If Porsche - a global brand, synonymous with luxury and quality - feels the need to up its game, then what about the rest of us?
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POSITIVE Leadership: Hire "Veterans"
A recent conversation with one of the leaders of a growing events business revealed that it has adopted a strategy to recruit "senior" people into the business - potentially, people with more experience than the b usiness leaders themselves.
I shared with him that, whilst at NTS (see previous item), I recruited several people, to key roles, who were considerably older than me - and often a fair bit wiser too. In this way, we were able to develop the business far more quickly and robustly: these were operators who were unphased by organisational change, and who had the professional credibility to inspire trust and deal with issues as they arose.
They didn't get blown off course by "events" and they took a load of pressure off my shoulders.
And, they were top professionals, with nothing left to prove, and who were excited to take on a more nuanced challenge.
This week I came across this fascinating short article by Hatty Jackson: The Business Case for Hiring A Veteran >
As part of your Brexit resilience plan, I'd recommend you consider hiring veterans too.
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Stat of the Month
This is the second of my new series: in each edition of this newsletter I'm going to attempt to blow your mind with a statistic: each one designed to convince you that Customer Experience should be your primary differentiator in 2017!
This one is right on the Brexit theme too - and it made me very agitated to read it.
Pret à Manger HR chief Andrea Wareham told the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee recently that only "one in 50 people that apply to our company to work is British." The rest are immigrants.
Andrea Wareham's submission continued along the lines that 65% of Pret employees are non-British EU nationals, and that without these foreign workers the company could not survive.
Pret has great people policies - one of the reasons its Customer Experience is so consistently good. Yet it does not believe that its proposition can be strong enough to attract a higher proportion of UK nationals to work in its stores.
I'd suggest that there's a deeper issue here: the way employers engage with employees and potential employees for so-called "soft-skills" roles is one of the biggest areas of opportunity. I've just contributed a comment piece on this subject to Travel GBi magazine - it's called Employee engagement: the only game in town and you can read it here >
Employee engagement is just one of the many issues - and opportunities - Brexit has thrown into sharp relief. It's time to act!
If you'd like to explore how Customer Experience orchestration could work for your organisation, let's arrange a telephone or Skype call: Contact Me >
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ABOUT STEPHEN SPENCER
'Customer Experience isn’t simply the quality and arrangement of assets. It’s their orchestration'.
I help organisations orchestrate their assets so that everyone and everything plays to their full potential.
Please click on the image to find out more.
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