For the past 3 weeks, I’ve been enjoying Inside John Lewis, the 3-part documentary on BBC2 that looks behind the scenes at one of our most iconic retailers.
Last night’s final episode was notable for two reasons: firstly, it focused almost entirely on the internet. Secondly, it wasn’t twee. In the first two episodes, we saw a very old-fashioned business trying to be nice in a cut-throat world. The Retail Week editor, Tim Danaher, compared it to Grace Bros and that’s how it came across, which is slightly disingenuous because JLP is a very successful business.
But last night was a treat for anyone interested in e-commerce. It started on a sombre note, with the decision to shut their local call centres. Amazingly, until this year, there was a call centre in every John Lewis store. To cut costs, they’re reducing this to two centralised centres, which meant that 1000 local call centre staff faced job uncertainty.
As the voiceover was quick to point out, if personal service is John Lewis’s holy grail then shutting local call centres is surely a risk. But the programme went on to give several examples of how John Lewis is using excellent service to compete.
One example was the Dixons ad campaign (below). We saw Andy Street, the John Lewis CEO, and the Head of PR discuss the ad and decide not to take legal action but to hit back with campaign that focused on quality of product and service. Andy Street admitted that the John Lewis mantra of ’never knowingly undersold’ doesn’t work online so they have to promote the value of the John Lewis 5 year guarantee and their 28 days return policy as a differentiator.
We then saw two ‘silver surfers’ – John Lewis customers straight from central casting – looking at kitchens on the John Lewis website. They talked enthusiastically about how shopping online is good when you get old because it “cuts down on the effort of going to the shops” but then they agreed that you only get the feel good factor in a store.
And so we saw the full might of John Lewis’s multi-channel service in action – search on the website, into store for a cup of tea and a bun and a look at the worktops in the kitchen department, then having someone from John Lewis come out to help fit it. Admittedly this was for a £40,000 kitchen but in another example we saw a pregnant mum enthusing about being able to give the buggies a test-run in-store and then doing everything else online with the call centre to back it up.
And that in a nutshell is John Lewis’s strategy. Andy Street said that they were going to focus on two things to help them translate the John Lewis service USP to the multi-channel world: firstly the last mile, where John Lewis has the capability to offer best in class delivery services, and secondly in expertise through their call centres and online technology – I was only just getting over the fact he had used the term ‘last mile’ when he threw in ‘podcast’.
It was also great to see the web team in action – they’re aiming to be the first £1bn online retailer and last year’s big project was to ramp up the fashion offering. Robin Terrell and Louise Salt explained the scale of the project: increasing clothing inventory from 20,000 items on the website to a whopping 101,000. And although we didn’t hear anything that insightful, it’s not every day you see a TV programme featuring a demo of an image zoom.
The cameras even went up to Manchester to watch the photography being shot. They seemed astounded that it took 20 minutes to position a jumper so that the image on the website was right – the team explained that it had to be right or the returns rate increased. With such attention to detail, I cheered for Louise when she beat her targets by £200,000, taking £950,000 in the first week.
Right at the end of the show, Andy Street talked about how their business was going to be “dominated by the online piece” in future and this needed a change in mindset. He sees their role as helping to ‘edit’ product choice for the customer and being able to recommend the right item. After the previous episodes, this was a bit like seeing an infirm relative suddenly jump up and start break dancing at a wedding. But although John Lewis clearly has its work cut out, the programme suggested that they ‘get’ the internet at all levels of the business, which isn’t bad for an 80-year old department store.
