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However, we paid not nearly enough attention to the execution of the service after the transaction had taken place. It seems like such a small thing, but it’s the difference between keeping and losing a customer.It turned out that the delivery firms that we were using were not maintaining or communicating the same quality that was represented within the company. When you’re using a delivery firm, you realise very quickly that they are representing you as part of the service. Things were being delivered late, or being lost in huge warehouses.

We realised we had to make people comfortable with buying on the internet. If we failed two or three times, not only did we lose the customer but it would damage our reputation.It was lucky that we hit on this early on We discovered it when we started to test the site. [We] became frustrated about not getting the things that we were ordering from the site. When it first happened, we thought to ourselves, “Give it a while”. But when we got what we considered a significant number of complaints out of a sufficiently high proportion of deliveries, we changed our list of carriers.Correcting this was going to take a significant investment, and at that point we brought in a lot of systems development. It came down to a clichéd conclusion: you can’t put a price on customer satisfaction; but more importantly, you can’t put a cost on customer dissatisfaction. The last thing we could afford was to have people spread bad news by word of mouth.

No matter how much you spend on content, if you can’t get the last bit right it’s lunacy.So in putting together a new list, we [chose] delivery companies prepared to go back two or three times. If you’re not in and you get something through your post-box to ask you to collect a parcel, it defies the logic of having the delivery in the first place. We had to be sure that the carrier had the same commitment as we did.We can now say conclusively that our commitment to service incorporates our commitment to delivery. It was definitely worth paying attention to that first mistake. As time has gone on, and customers have more options and there’s a greater degree of chance, the requirement to get the final mile right is more important than ever.. 1 Do you have a business philosophy?

1 Do you have a business philosophy?
There are three things you need ask at the end of every year to know if you are satisfied: Is it fun? Do I have more opportunities at the end of the year than at the beginning? Will the bank manager still lend me money? If the answer to all those is “yes” keep going.

If the answer to any one of them is “no” then stop and go do something else.2What was the first lesson you learned in business?To trust my own judgement and to never take the expert’s view. When I was about to leave the Foreign Office in 1964, I had two job offers: one was in the personnel department of ICI’s paint division and the other was to be a marketing executive at J Walter Thompson. All the experts told me I’d be safer at ICI, but instead I went into the world of marketing, which most people at the Foreign Office thought a little racy.3As chairman of Tarmac you insisted on meeting protesters even after having animal urine thrown over you at the 1995 annual general meeting. Why?If you’ve been brought up in the country, like me, or been to sea and had waves all over you, it would be crazy to worry about that sort of thing I always made a point of meeting protesters at Tarmac. We were the biggest builder of private housing in the country at one stage, so our annual general meeting was fertile ground for protesters No one is up a tree or down a tunnel for fun. Of course you get the flat earth brigade, but the majority are very serious and have justifiable reservations.

In almost every case if you listened carefully you learned a lot.4Which single task do you hate doing the most?Listening to accountants because they bore me rigid.5If you were not chairman of Whitbread and Kingfisher, which company would you most like to run?I would love to start an e-commerce business that would link up every single village post office in the country. It would enable people to do all their heavy shopping without having to leave the village. They could get prescriptions delivered to their back door without having to wait for buses that never arrive and without having to spend 10 per cent of their income getting to the nearest stores. When I get around to setting it up, I’ll call it Villagelife .6You’ve worked in both the public and private sectors.