Revolutionising Customer Centricity: Transforming Business Relationships
By Helen Wada with Hamish Taylor
In this insightful episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Hamish Taylor, who has an award winning record of driving innovation and change in a number of very different environments. Hamish's career journey is a testament to his focus on customer centricity as a basis for Transformation, Great Service and Innovation.
Hamish: “When you move into service industries, all of a sudden you find that people and behaviour are actually part of your product. You have to learn a completely different set of skills that is more about influencing people creating connected relationships.”
Hamish's career, spanning senior commercial roles at Procter & Gamble, British Airways before becoming CEO of Eurostar, and then Sainsbury's Bank, highlights his prowess in innovating with a customer-centric mindset. Each opportunity allowed him to bring a fresh perspective, promoting new ideas, growth and customer satisfaction.
The Importance of Understanding others
We discussed the importance of how we interact with others as the basis for personal and business success.
Hamish: “We are social animals and don’t live and work in isolation. How we engage with others is actually the key to our own personal success - and therefore the ability to understand the other person’s world is what allows us to interact.”
The conversation explored how this is relevant regardless of who the other person is, it might be a customer of your business, but equally it might be your boss, a team member or a colleague from another department.
Hamish: “Your value is not how great you are but the benefit you bring to others.”
We explored what this means in practice and how setting up conversations is really important. I shared an exercise that I use drawing on my coaching experience which is a simple check in.
Helen: “How are you arriving?”
The importance of getting people to talk about what is going on in their lives helps to get things out in the open, leave certain things at the door so that you can focus accordingly. Everyone benefits in the long run.
Understand the Customer Mental Journey
At the heart of customer-centricity is understanding the other person’s world. This goes far beyond what they want to do, as Hamish explained.
Hamish: “You have to understand the customer’s mental journey and that means a lot of things, where do they make their decisions, where do they decide if they like you or not - they don’t make those decisions in their shoes, it's in their head.”
Listen to the full podcast to explore how Hamish used this approach throughout his career to understand how customers were feeling, not just what they needed to do.
Creating Innovative Solutions through Customer Insights
From consumer markets to complex service environments, Hamish utilised customer insights to drive innovation and develop products that genuinely addressed consumer desires and problems. Creating insights requires you to fully understand the landscape that your customer is operating in - as well as tapping into their emotions.
What are they trying to achieve?
How can they get there?
How do they feel?
We talked about the importance of creating trust from the outset in order to have rich and sometimes challenging conversations:
Hamish: Whoever you are talking to and working with, they have to be able to look at you in the eyeball and say “we will trust you so that whatever insight you are able to create for us, we are able to have a robust and challenging conversation.”
The No-Agenda Meeting
We explored what can get in the way of uncovering what is really important in a conversation. I always encourage people that I work with to think about the agenda in advance and testing this before a meeting. However, Hamish and I also discussed that sometimes a series of bullets or questions actually can get in the way of truly listening.
Sometimes you need to just go into a conversation with a blank sheet of paper and focus on listening.
Hamish: “Sometimes this gives you a better picture of where they are coming from.”
In coaching we have to fully-focus on the person in front of us, the same is true here, you have to train yourself to focus on the moment, the flow of conversation and follow the interest of those you are talking with. As Hamish says, it’s not easy and is a skill that can be developed.
Hamish: “Look to separate selling and persuading from listening. The listening is a task in is own right and if you let one encroach the other you stop listening.
Business is Personal
In order to create insights you have to get deeper than surface-level conversation. We cover the importance of tapping into the feelings of others and some techniques for enquiring just a little bit more. We talk about moving gently towards how people are feeling - and that sometimes it can feel a little uncomfortable going there - but if done in the right way, is a natural and important stage of building connection in a business environment.
Hamish: “You start off by talking about the business, what success looks like to them, key challenges, then move on to talk about pressures around us and then into what it means for them, their aspirations and how do they feel about things, for their team, their business… and it goes from there.”
This very much aligns with the approach that I take in coaching. Very often those in leadership roles (and Hamish shared this from his own perspective) are quite lonely and they value having someone to talk to and bounce ideas around with.
Knowing Yourself is the Starting Point for Success
We started by talking of the importance of understanding others to create personal and business success but concluded with a conversation around the importance of authenticity, knowing who you are and not trying to be someone you are not.
Hamish: “If you don’t understand your own strengths, your own weaknesses, you are not going to be able to build a team around you that is going to be totally effective.”
We discussed the importance of mapping out who you really are, your values, your strengths especially when you are trying to build relationships.
Hamish: “If you don’t come across as yourself then you will never build up that rapport and that trust and that engagement that allows the other person to relax.”
Sometimes we have to make hard decisions, if we look inside and find that who you are doesn’t fit with where you are at the moment, then maybe you are in the wrong place, rather than pretend to be something you are not.
Set Ambitious Goals to Create the Change
To get people to think differently can often require you to set big audacious goals that make others think and experiment out of their comfort zones. It’s not an easy thing to do because we are generally comfortable in home territory.
As Hamish shared, the ambition piece is important - not just the communication but how you are making it easy for others to feel supported in stepping out of their comfort zone, look at the world beyond where they are now and asking the right questions to think differently.
Final Reflections: Driving Business Success through Customer Centricity
Hamish's experiences underscore the profound impact of adopting a customer-first mentality in driving organisational success. His narrative illuminates the intertwined roles of leadership, connection and thinking differently to enrich customer experiences and elevate business and personal success.
For an in-depth exploration of our conversation, listen to the full episode of HumanWise with Hamish Taylor. Discover actionable insights into fostering a customer-centric culture that drives excellence.
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