“That is the pivot point around which everything revolves,” said Christison. “We almost have a duty of care to remind somebody to come back for their eye test. […] That’s the mainstay of what we’re trying to do; and our communications are focused around that, because we as a marketing function are supporting our partners by driving footfall into our business, and [also] making sure that our customers are aware of the importance of that test.”
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Moderator Steffan Aquarone asked Christison what the key ingredients have been to Specsavers’ transformation, outside of technology.
“One of the key ingredients has been [that we’re] always about doing the right thing for the customer,” said Christison. “We want to make sure that our customers have the opportunity to make the right decisions about the products and services that we offer to them.
“We’ve been running for 35 years, and we do know our customers and the way that we operate really well,” she went on. “We just needed to use that [transformation] project to really surface them, and bring them to the fore.”
Early in 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning to take hold across the world, the CRM team received positive feedback about the transformation work they’d been carrying out, which had been expanded from the original market of the UK to other regions. The team began to look into how to accelerate and elevate the work they were doing, and determined that the best way was to create it as a “special project”.
“We gave the project a name, we even had a theme tune – and we extended the participation across a broader group,” said Christison. “We invited people from our regions, from technology, from data, from HR, from our legal team – [they] were all involved, as well as the participants from our CRM team.”
Beginning in August 2020, a greater structure was put around the project, with an initial six-month timeframe for achieving its goals. “We thought the pandemic was a little thing that might just pass us by,” Christison recalled. “But obviously, as we know, things continued way longer than that – and we had to change our direction in terms of what we were going to do.” The timeframe for the project was initially extended by another six months, then an additional year, and another year again after that. This wasn’t due to a lack of success, however, but rather because the company wanted to keep the project’s momentum going. “It feels like we don’t want to stop it – because people like being part of it,” said Christison. Becoming involved in the process of change has also helped Specsavers’ employees to feel much more comfortable with that change.