GPE has embarked on an exciting market-leading strategy to become ‘Customer First’ and increase retention of their customers, within the highly competitive London property market.

To ensure the strategy's success, GPE required everyone in the business to embrace a customer-first mindset and deliver a service that puts the customer at the heart of everything they do.

The solution

Supporting GPE throughout this exciting journey, we worked on a series of projects designed to progressively embed a ‘Customer First’ approach into the culture of the company.

When we started, a quick audit of the culture revealed different areas of GPE were at different stages along the journey. With that in mind, our first step was to bring everyone up to speed; ensuring everyone at GPE had the same level of understanding about what having ‘Customer First’ approach was and why it was important. We did this through a series of workshops designed to help employees put themselves in the customer's shoes and embrace a ‘Customer First’ mindset.

Once all teams were aligned in sharing a base level of understanding around what being ‘Customer First’ means, we then worked with GPE to define what great service looked like for them; developing a unique Service Proposition and Service Standards to bring this to life and guide a consistent GPE delivery of service.

The service proposition and standards were then embedded through another series of workshops with all employees at GPE, where each team explored how the service standards ‘showed up’ in their teams and assessed how well their team was currently delivering against them in their everyday.

During the session, all teams were asked to collectively agree to 5 commitments, things they would do to better deliver the service standards. These were then tracked throughout the year via an interactive ‘leader board’ to ensure progress.

Our work helped GPE to embed a strong Customer First approach and deliver a leading Net Promoter Score - With GPE delivering an NPS of +30.2 (significantly ahead of the office industry average of +6.9).

It also helped to support strong customer retention and rent collection rates - with GPE retaining 83% of customers across its portfolio in the last 12 months, helping to securing in excess of 99% of all rents within seven working days.

Carrie Heiss, Director of HR – on how vital our work was for engaging employees around the new service standards - “All colleagues took part in Customer First Workshops earlier in the year where we discussed GPE’s service standards and made ‘team commitments’ to action these in our everyday activities. We even kept track of these commitments with a ‘Leader Board’ throughout the year. This fun and friendly competition between teams has helped to ensure that our collective commitments to customers are being actioned.”