‘No one wants to hear the pandemic used as an excuse for poor service any more’

It is said that excellence is a habit we can form and that is something we saw in spades at the Olympics from the brilliant Team GB. Years of dedication paid off with 65 medals across 23 events, and many more personal bests and career highs to celebrate.

At AO, as we approach the run-in to peak trading and Black Friday – our biggest event of the year – the desire to achieve excellence is running strong in our team too. 

“We empower our people and trust them to make the right decisions and be brilliant for customers in the moments that matter”

With the vaccine rollout bringing us out of lockdown in the UK, colleagues across the retail industry will be well aware of increasing demand, increasing competition and increasing expectations from customers. No one wants to hear the pandemic being used as an excuse for poor service any more. 

Setting our sights on excellence at every stage of the customer journey is what sets us apart: from product information and inspiration when browsing and researching, to being there for customers when things go wrong.

Winning customers for life

British Cycling has for years benefited from a marginal gains approach – a determination to continually improve and find a better way, and we are no different. We constantly strive to offer the best convenience, ease, support and peace of mind in our market. We are always pleased to see that reflected in our customer ratings on Trustpilot, net promoter score (NPS) and repeat purchase rates.

Early on in the pandemic, our teams were dealing with Black Friday levels of demand every day with very little advance warning and while adjusting to new ways of working. 

I was struck by the team’s ability to live our values through this when we served 2 million new customers as well as our existing ones. For us, it is about principles over prescriptions: we empower our people and trust them to make the right decisions and be brilliant for customers in the moments that matter. 

“Achieving excellence for customers means striving in every part of the business”

We call this ‘treating customers like your gran’: if it was your gran who had this problem, how would you solve it for her? The fact that our NPS remains in the eighties is a testament to our people’s ability to answer that question brilliantly.

This commitment to customers underpins our strategy and growth ambitions – it drives our flywheel. We are constantly investing in and improving the customer journey, from browsing our website to making a purchase, right through to installation, after care and recycling old appliances. 

We want to drive recommendations and repeat purchases, and be the first choice for customers throughout their lifetimes – it is not just the grans we are thinking about. We are proud that our products and services are part of buying a first home, new laptops for kids starting secondary school or taking the plunge setting up a new business.

Put in the hard yards

We have a huge runway of opportunity ahead of us by repeating and scaling what we already do – getting that flywheel spinning faster and faster. We believe we can do that in the UK and Germany where we currently operate, as well as new territories over the coming years. 

But underpinning all of this is our commitment to delivering customer service the AO way. Achieving excellence for customers means striving in every part of the business. 

Muhammad Ali, an Olympic gold medal winner in 1960, said his fight was “won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights”.

The best retailers think that same way: the passion and humility to improve – and determination to put the hard yards in to make it happen. That, in our view, is what makes the difference between winning and losing with customers.