Customer Loyalty Index & Member First

Customer Loyalty Index

I’m delighted to announce that our Customer Loyalty Index (CLI) has seen a year on year increase, a trend making 2018 our best year to date. CLI is a way of measuring whether our customers will promote our businesses and services to their colleagues with people being asked face to face or by phone to rate us on a scale of 1 to 10. The Society’s index has increased from 67 in 2012 to 83 last year, an increase of 15 points in the last 6 years. This reflects the hard work, dedication and commitment of all colleagues in the Society over that 6 year period. So I want to thank everyone who has contributed to this impressive continual level of improvement in our customer service.

Member First Programme

I wrote in my last blog about the importance of putting Members at the heart of everything we do at the Society. The Board have set me a challenge, to ensure that in the next five years the majority of our trade is with our Members. Therefore I set out a vision to the Executive of our relationship with Members which was “to be trusted by our Members, to make their lives less complicated and more rewarding in their day to day lives.”

 

To increase Member trade and loyalty we must first improve our financial performance. That is why I have set the Executive the target of reaching a £20m annual profit, excluding Energy, by the end of 2020.  To drive this process we will be introducing a new and exciting two-year programme called Member First.

 

 

Member First will involve reviewing all our non-customer facing functions to ensure that Members are central to everything we do from our offices, to our field management and support teams. The Programme will cover the physical buildings and working environment, the policies, processes and ways of working of everyone in the Society not directly involved in sales.

 

The Programme will have five key areas:  organisational process and design, efficiency improvement, brand and member experience, total reward strategy for all colleagues, new business and service innovation. It is in line with all our Guiding Principles – whether ensuring a focus on doing less, better, making decisions for the greater good of the organisation, providing clarity or ensuring that Members are at the heart of the Society.

The Programme will be led by John Street who has extensive experience in this area having successfully led the Customer First programme in Food and supported the Client First programme in Funeral.  Member First will operate in a similar way and will be launched on April 2nd at the Leadership Day and on April 3rd at the Manager’s Conference. I’ll be reporting on it again in more detail then.

 

Congratulations

I want to add my congratulations to our childcare group who have become the first childcare provider to achieve a 100% Millie’s Mark accreditation across all our 44 nurseries, a significant achievement. Millie’s Mark shows that all our childcare colleagues are going above and beyond the minimum requirements in keeping children safe and yesterday there was a celebratory photocall at our Little Pioneers St Edwards Nursery in Birmingham, attended by the National Day Nurseries Association and Millie’s Trust.

 

Colleagues

I want to welcome Karen Wright who has joined the Society as Interim Chief HR Officer. She will work alongside Pete Westall on key HR projects whilst we complete the recruitment of the permanent role. 

 

Foodbanks

Finally, I want to say how proud I am that as a Society we have now donated an incredible 100,000 items to food banks this year, enough to help feed 2,500 families living in poverty in the UK for three days. Behind the headline statistics is the simple fact that our colleagues, Members and customers care passionately about those less fortunate than ourselves and it is thanks to their amazing generosity that we can make a real difference to the local communities who we serve.

 

 

That's all for this week, if you would like to join in on the conversation, don't hesitate to comment below and let me know your thoughts!