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    Crowning the Customer: How To Become Customer-Driven
    Crowning the Customer: How To Become Customer-Driven
    Crowning the Customer: How To Become Customer-Driven
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    Crowning the Customer: How To Become Customer-Driven

    By Sen. Feargal Quinn

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    About this ebook

    How to become Customer Driven
    Customer service is the competitive business battleground of the twenty-first century. This book, by an internationally acclaimed entrepreneur, is a hands-on guide for people who run businesses or work in them, written in simple jargon-free style. He explains:

    - The 'Boomerang Principle' (bringing the customer back)
    - How to get the feel of the market place
    - How to listen effectively to the customer
    - Customer panels
    - Why you should increase the number of complaints
    - How to introduce fun and surprise into business.An essential handbook for managers, company directors, employees and students.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe O'Brien Press
    Release dateSep 14, 2012
    ISBN9781847174505
    Crowning the Customer: How To Become Customer-Driven
    Author

    Sen. Feargal Quinn

    Feargal Quinn founded Superquinn, the Irish supermarket group, in 1960 and was its Managing Director for many years during which it built an international reputation for excellence in customer service. His bestselling book Crowning the Customer (O’Brien Press) is used by multi-national companies as the essential customer care manual. It has been translated into several languages. Feargal Quinn was a board member of a number of international retailing organisations, and received two honorary doctorates. In 1993 he was elected to the Irish Senate as an independent member, where he served until 2016, introducing many innovative bills. He was also chairman of An Post, modernising Ireland's postal network. Feargal's television series "Feargal Quinn's Retail Therapy" saw seen many small business turned around in recessionary times. Feargal Quinn died on 24 April 2019.

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      Book preview

      Crowning the Customer - Sen. Feargal Quinn

      Feargal Quinn and his company

      Feargal Quinn was born in Dublin. He was educated at Newbridge College and at University College, Dublin, where he graduated in commerce.

      Food retailing is in Feargal Quinn’s family background. Quinn’s of Newry was a long-established name in County Down. Feargal’s father, Eamonn Quinn, operated a successful chain of grocery stores called Payantake in the 1940s. He later went into the tourism business, setting up the Red Island Holiday Camp in Skerries (County Dublin), where as a teenager Feargal got his first experience in business.

      In 1960, having become convinced from travels in Europe that grocery retailing was on the brink of a revolution, Feargal Quinn determined to be among the leaders of that revolution in Ireland and to put his distinctive stamp on it.

      He opened his first shop in Dundalk in November of that year, a small premises of less than 200 square metres and with a total staff of eight.

      Today, Superquinn employs 4,000 people and has a sales area of 40,000 square metres. It operates 21 shops and owns 8 shopping centres. Following investment by Select Retail Holdings Ltd. in 2005, Feargal Quinn remains associated with the company in a non-executive capacity as president.

      From the beginning Feargal Quinn’s approach was driven by a search for excellence, and a single-minded determination that his company would be the best at whatever it decided to do. Early on he decided that his shops would specialise in fresh food, and this is still the group’s speciality.

      Superquinn, as the original Quinn’s Supermarket soon became, quickly built itself a reputation for innovation. It pioneered in Ireland the idea of in-store bakeries and sausage making, where customers could see the freshness of the products as they were produced before their own eyes.

      Another part of Feargal Quinn’s retailing philosophy that soon emerged was his emphasis on customer service, founded on a determination to keep close to the customer and to build an organisation that would always try to see things from the customer’s point of view.

      To remind his shop managers that their real job is on the shop floor, he always tells his architect to give them a small, dingy office. People who work at Superquinn’s central support office have sometimes found that their desk has disappeared while they have been on holiday, as a gentle encouragement to them to get out more on the shop floor.

      Feargal Quinn’s preference was to hold meetings when walking around his shopfloors, a preference that sometimes surprised people used to more conventional business encounters. He distributed tie-pins to colleagues with the inscription YCDBSOYA, which is said to stand for You can’t do business sitting on your … armchair. As he demonstrates in this book, he is committed to the notion that business should be fun.

      Such aspects of his approach to business, though they often catch the popular imagination, are in fact deeply serious in intent. Top of his priority list is the need to stay close to the customer, and he feels that this is a lesson that everyone in business can learn.

      One of the ways he did this himself was through regular stints in each of his shops packing bags for customers, and weekly customer panels at which he listened to groups of volunteer Superquinn shoppers tell him how they think the group could serve them better.

      Out of such encounters with customers have come many of the innovations for which Superquinn is renowned. A customer at Superquinn is offered a range of services that is unrivalled not only in Ireland but virtually anywhere in the world.

      These include playhouses for customers’ small children, an umbrella service on wet days, carry-out service to the customers’ cars and many others. Superquinn pioneered the concept of loyalty cards in Europe, a practice that has now become virtually universal in retailing.

      A notable feature of Feargal Quinn’s shops in comparison with most other supermarkets is the number of people they employ. Feargal Quinn has always believed that customers want a high level of personal service, and a kind of service that can be provided only by human beings, not machines. He has proved that investment in people pays off in terms of increased business which pays for the additional staffing costs.

      It is perhaps this aspect of Superquinn above all others that has attracted most attention internationally – the fact that a high-service supermarket operation can be provided without charging higher prices. Elsewhere around the world, the received wisdom has been that a high level of service is something the customer has to pay for in higher prices, but in Ireland this has always been impossible because the grocery trade is so competitive.

      The notion that customer service is the competitive battleground of the new millennium is gaining acceptance throughout the retailing world, and Feargal Quinn is in constant demand as a speaker on this theme at international gatherings of retailers. Through his efforts, Ireland is coming to be regarded internationally as a cradle of retailing innovation.

      Apart from his involvement with Superquinn, Feargal Quinn has made many other contributions to Irish life. For a decade he was chairman of the Irish postal service, leading its transition from a government department to a semi-state commercial body. Since 1993 he has been an independent member of the Senate, the upper house of the Irish parliament. He chaired a steering committee that oversaw the introduction of the Leaving Certificate Applied, a landmark development in Irish education. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Dublin and by the National Council for Educational Awards and received a papal knighthood in 1994.

      On the international scene, Feargal Quinn is past chairman of CIES – the Food Business Forum. He is also a board member of the Food Marketing Institute (USA), and a Fellow of the Institute of Grocery Distribution (UK).

      He and his wife Denise have five children and live in Dublin.

      How a small (165cm) grocer got to write a book

      W

      HEN SUPERQUINN WAS

      a smaller company, I not only interviewed every applicant for a job but made sure that I spent a great deal of time with each new member of our team during their first few weeks. This was as much to make them feel at home in their work as it was to train them.

      In this way it was easy to see that each new person learned very quickly things I believed to be important, and where the priorities lay in our small company.

      But as the company grew, I found that among the duties I had to delegate to others was that of training. And in doing so I had to find a way of explaining to our trainers the theory behind the way we had been running our business since the first shop opened in 1960.

      When I finally got around to putting my thoughts to paper, my personal assistant Anne O Broin suggested to me that the same message could be of interest to a wider audience. And that is how the idea of this book was born.

      If the book can help people outside our company, I will be delighted. But I am afraid that in describing our way of doing things, I will inevitably give the impression that I am taking all the credit for the ideas and the successes.

      Nothing could be further from the truth. The successes of Superquinn are due to a great team of several thousand enthusiastic merchants – many of whom never thought of themselves as that, but joined the retail trade almost by accident and became entranced by the magic of the marketplace.

      I dedicate this book to them, but not only to them. I dedicate it as well to another, much bigger group of people who are equally responsible for Superquinn’s success in the marketplace and its reputation in the world of retailing.

      You’ve guessed it: that second group of people is our customers. Thank you all for making it possible. And thank you for making it fun.

      CHAPTER 1

      This book is about how, not why

      I

      F I HAD SET OUT TO WRITE

      this book twenty years, or even ten years ago, my starting point would have been very different.

      Then I would have had to focus it on the reasons why I think every business should be customer driven. It may be hard to believe now but only a short time ago that idea was off-the-wall.

      Every business had customers. Every business took them into account to some extent. But very, very few were genuinely customer-driven.

      By customer-driven I mean a company where all the key decisions are based on an over-riding wish to serve the customer better. A company where everyone in it sees serving the customer as their only business.

      That’s the principle on which I started my supermarket business in 1960.

      I didn’t do so because I believed in it as a theory. I did it because it came naturally to me, and because my first business experiences as a teenager convinced me of it.

      Once the company was up and running, I learnt two things very quickly.

      First, that the customer-driven approach pays off.

      For us in Superquinn, it gave a strong competitive advantage right from the start – and still does today, thirty years later. That competitive advantage allowed us not alone to survive in a cut-throat business, but eventually to become the market-leader in the region where we operate.

      From the beginning, our customer-driven approach marked us out as pioneers in our field. It created a national reputation for us as innovators, in spite of the fact that we were then only a very small local operation.

      Second, I also found that the customer-driven approach that came naturally to me was incredibly rare. I say incredibly because I found it hard to believe that people could so often ignore something that was at the root of their profitability.

      In those days, none of our competitors shared our approach – despite the fact that retailing, of all businesses, offers the easiest ways to get close to the customer.

      Needless to say, I shed few tears about the opportunities our competitors were missing. But what did concern me was this. I saw the same lack of customer drive in many of the manufacturers that supplied us.

      Even the sophisticated manufacturers – the ones who certainly saw themselves as marketing organisations – often lacked the feel for the customer that I believe is the

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