Welcome to our latest “60 Seconds with Ennis & Co” series, bringing quick-fire interviews with selected senior leaders from the automotive and mobility industry on a regular basis.
This month, we bring you our latest interview: Finding a new balance of skills, systems and people: perspectives from John Murphy, Managing Director, Pivotal – Subscription by Jaguar and Land Rover
How different are the skills needed to operate a subscription business compared with a retail or OEM operation?
At Pivotal, our relationship with subscription customers is much more direct and personal compared to sales and aftersales in the traditional sense. We build rich relationships with every customer which requires the ability to deal remotely with someone you may never see yet consistently deliver excellent service, underpinned by a seamless operational experience. Take the issue of speeding fines and parking tickets; it may sound trivial but managing these incidents for customers takes more time and resource than you would probably imagine. Delivering this level of service across every touchpoint at scale is a fine balance of relevant systems and skilled people, all motivated and empowered to deliver an outstanding experience.
What do you look for in people to deliver this service?
The key word here is service, and we recruit primarily for attitude, followed by skill. This is because we believe that skills can be learned but you can’t teach attitude. This has paid dividends in creating a cohesive team during a rapid growth phase (a fourfold increase in employees since last November). Everyone shares a ‘can-do’ mentality, we all collaborate well, are proud to work for the business and all want to deliver amazing results. Some of the skills we do look for are customer service experience, personal initiative, an ability to improve the organisation and solve problems. Ensuring we maintain this recruitment blueprint, has meant that we now have a fantastic team of people who have not only helped to make our business what it is today, but who are also fundamentally important in shaping our growth for the future.
Tell us about the type of people in Pivotal
We offer a luxury service, created via a combination of personal contact and online technology, delivered principally through an operational team of customer service and sales advisors, fleet supervisors and their support teams. In terms of their previous backgrounds, they come from areas such as vehicle rental and fleet businesses along with customer service, sales, and marketing experience from organisations as diverse as John Lewis, Groupon and Booking.com. By chance, rather than deliberate intent, we have more women than men and we have a rich mix of backgrounds from sectors including hospitality, insurance and automotive. After 18 months there are some things that we are still working out, but a key takeaway is that technology underpins the business model but must never get in the way of personal contact and access to the great people with the right attitude who make the difference to our customers.
Ennis & Co
As global executive search specialists we have experience working in mobility, motorsport, engineering, aftersales, finance, branding, environmental management, change management, solution management, strategy, operations, digital, technology, environment, IT, marketing, dealer development, sales and HR.
This is the Ennis & Co difference – and another reason why 85% of our clients are repeat customers.
To find out more about how Ennis & Co can help source the best senior talent for your organisations, please contact hello@ennisco.com
