Read Online The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson - Free Book Online Page A

Virgin Hotels, won me over the instant he told me that his vision for our hotels was one of ‘exclusivity for all’. While the big legacy hotel chains might be classified as ‘reliably boring’ and some of the more established ‘lifestyle’ hotel brands take a slightly holier-than-thou/red-rope view on the world, our hotels will bridge the gap between the two. We’ll be neither ‘ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen’ nor ‘too cool for school’. Instead we’ll be fun, slightly cheeky and irreverent, and everyone, whether a guest or an associate, should feel better for the experience. We have done an equal amount of work in ensuring both groups feel treasured and we know that creating raving fans in our guests will only happen if we can achieve the same level of engagement from our own people.
    What’s happening at Virgin Hotels is just an extension of the tried and true belief in trusting your own consumer-based instincts. This is, of course, considered a very pragmatic investment strategy – if as a consumer you really like using a particular product and purchase it over other choices every time, then presumably lots of others do the same, so it may be a stock worth acquiring. The ultimate example of such consumer behaviour is the tale of American entrepreneur Victor Kiam, who made a fortune from his company Remington Products. As the story goes, his wife bought him a Remington electric razor and, as he famously said in their advertising campaigns, ‘I liked the product so much, I bought the company.’
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    So the simple fact is that any business leader worthy of their paycheque should, at every possible opportunity, be playing the role of a consumer of their own company’s goods and services. It has never been the Virgin way to put too much credence in the findings of third-party customer satisfaction ratings when so much more can be gleaned from testing your own product first-hand at every possible opportunity.
    Despite living in an online age, when things go amiss consumers should be able to talk to someone – a real someone, not an electronic avatar. So when you’re playing customer, one of the first things to do is to try and locate a phone number to call on your website that will enable you to get through to a real human being. If you can find the number – most organisations foolishly bury a contact number in some deep dark corner of the website after ‘Contact Us’ has led you nowhere except back to the webpage you started on – try calling it and count how many recorded options, pre-screens and hand-offs you are forced through before you (perhaps) get to a real person. Once you get to that human voice, have a reasonable problem ready, one that they should be able to fix, and see how well they do and how pleasantly they go about it. If they do it really well you might want to consider identifying yourself at the end of the call and praising their efforts. If they get it hopelessly wrong you are better off taking the story to their supervisor so the failing can become a training subject.
    Or for some real fun – play-act the part of a dissatisfied customer and try and call yourself just to see what happens. Do you get an incredulous, ‘No, I can’t possibly put you through to Mr Smith’s office.’ Or, if you are put through (don’t worry, you aren’t there to take your own call), how much grief are you subjected to in order to get there? Are you (the irate customer) deflected to someone who can genuinely take an interest and help you with your problem or are you just headed off at the pass?
    I tried pulling this stunt myself once but it didn’t work out too well. I am so pathetically bad at imitating someone else’s voice that Penni, my trusty assistant for many years, sat there and let me make a complete fool of myself with some trumped-up complaint before saying, ‘Well, thank you so much for sharing all that with me, sir. Let me see if Mr Branson is