Why now's the time to rethink the luxury customer experience

Peter Cross is one of the foremost authorities on customer behaviour. With fifteen years in luxury, eight years in charge of the customer experience at John Lewis and Waitrose and ten more as Mary Portas’ business partner, there are few who can match his unique blend of strategic and practical experience and venture so confidently into the mind of the 21st century customer. Cross is Vice President at the Institute of Customer Service, an ambassador for the Retail Trust and Pride Wide, a RETHINK Retail 2025 Top Retail Expert, and Leader in Residence at the University of Leeds. 

Despite the mindblowing sums which have been poured into technology across every sector, the customer is clear: customer service ain't what it used to be. 

In spite of a promise of seamless customer-centricity, data from the Institute of Customer Service, places customer satisfaction levels at a sluggish low. While many businesses can claim to have made life cheaper, faster and more convenient for customers, a significant number of customers feel that service is going in the wrong direction, citing frustrating machine learning enabled chatbots, obscure complaint handling processes, disengaged front line teams, and contact centres with endless menu options as their primary gripes. 

Data released last month confirms that over 50% of consumers now feel that service is now overly automated, painful, exhausting and going in the wrong direction. Should the automation of service continue, there is a tangible risk that future generations of customers may well grow up in a world where the only way to get any form of personal service is to pay for it. 

However, this could be good news for luxury. As customer satisfaction levels continue to slide across every other sector, the opportunity for luxury to step in and reimagine the service experience – surprising, innovating and creating new benchmarks – is as clear as day. 

Customer service itself is easy to oversimplify as being nice to people: easy to overlook in the battle for investment; easy to underestimate its impact on customers, business and society; and easy to brag about, but far less easy to deliver consistently. 

It's also easy to redefine as getting things faster and whilst it may be true to say that the customer fell head over heels in love with speed, the needs which drive us haven’t changed one jot. 

Luxury has never sought to meet our most basic human needs, but the promise of luxury, spoken or unspoken, has always been to satiate our higher needs. Our need for status, recognition, empowerment, belonging, personal growth and aspiration. Our need to elevate the everyday, optimise the special days, express our personalities and for someone we barely know, to anticipate the needs we’re not yet aware of.  

Luxury may be a sector more easily defined by its products and services, but it is also a sector where the greatest players know that everything which wraps around the product, will ultimately define how well our needs are met. 

The great luxury brands of the future will leverage the breathtaking power of AI to forecast, streamline, optimise and automate the relevant parts of their business, enabling the customer experience where it works. But they will put the same amount of focus and energy into people as they put into their processes.

They will obsess about understanding the world through the eyes of their customers and know that their daily mission is to eliminate any gaps between the customer expectation of their brand or service and their customers' lived experience. They will be aware that what they are selling isn't necessarily always the same as what the customer believes they are buying.

They will create their own magical service hallmarks – the small but distinctive signature moments which, when delivered consistently and convincingly, will make their service distinctive.

The great luxury brands of the future will know that customer service is a culture driven from the very top of the organisation, delivered by people who were born to serve others, who are social, curious, particular and proactive. A culture which empowers and enables its people so they feel complicit in delivering the customer outcomes the business hopes to see.

These businesses will set their cultural default to “yes, we’ll have a go at that” rather than “no, we can’t”. Because they know that the only test of the customer experience which really matters, is how their business responds on the rare occasion when something goes wrong. Ultimately, this being the acid test of a business claiming to be in the service of its customers.

My passion for service is such that I’ve spent the last 12 months interviewing leaders of brilliant customer focused businesses across all sectors for my new book, Start with the Customer. The book hopes to reframe your understanding of the modern customer, guide you through the forces shaping their behaviour, reveal the golden rules and cardinal sins of service and help build a world-class service culture, fit for whatever you’re selling and wherever you’re selling it.  

This is a book for anyone in the service of customers but those who hope to deliver the finest customer service in the future might want to take heed of its messages sooner rather than later. 

'Start with the Customer' by Peter Cross, a collaboration with Jo Causon, CEO at the Institute of Customer Service, dedicated to the work of the Retail Trust and with a foreword by Mary Portas, is available now at amazon.co.uk