Andrew McMillan

Why organisations work with Andrew McMillan

• He ran customer experience for the John Lewis department store division across 26 UK shops, so he speaks from inside one of the most studied service cultures in British retail, not from a framework bought off a shelf.
• His central argument is operational, not motivational: customer experience is an output of employee engagement and leadership behaviour, and any programme that treats it as a frontline training problem will fail.
• He has tested the thesis outside retail, with Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS and NHS foundation trusts among the organisations he has advised through Engaging Service.
• He chaired Revo’s Customer Experience Committee for seven years, which gives him a sector-wide view of what separates shopping centres, high streets and service organisations that keep customers from those that do not.
• He is useful in the room with senior leaders because the conversation turns quickly to values, hiring, internal communication and manager behaviour, which is where service actually breaks.

Biography highlights

• 28 years with the John Lewis Partnership, culminating in responsibility for customer experience across the department store division and its 26 UK shops.
• Founder of Engaging Service, a consultancy on employee engagement, customer experience and the leadership that links the two.
• Chair of the Customer Experience Committee at Revo from 2010 to 2017, overseeing the growth of the ACE Awards to more than 100 shopping centre entrants.
• Judge and adviser for the Customer Focus Award at the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards from 2015.
• Advised named organisations including Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS, Rightmove, MoneySuperMarket and the Law Society.
• During his tenure, John Lewis department stores were recognised for customer experience by Which?, Verdict and Retail Week.

Biography

Service cultures that customers notice are not built on the shop floor. They are built in hiring decisions, in what managers are promoted for, in what the organisation tolerates on a difficult Tuesday. Andrew McMillan spent nearly three decades inside a business that understood this, and now spends his time explaining to other organisations why their service programmes are not working.

He joined the John Lewis Partnership as a management trainee at Brent Cross, led selling teams across several branches, headed a department at the Oxford Street flagship, and ran the department stores’ internal intelligence team before taking responsibility, from 2000, for customer experience across the entire department store division. That meant 26 shops and tens of thousands of customer-facing partners. During his tenure, the business was recognised for customer experience by Which?, Verdict and Retail Week.

In 2012 he founded Engaging Service and has since worked with more than 40 organisations, among them Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS, Rightmove, MoneySuperMarket, the Law Society and several NHS foundation trusts. The work is consistent across sectors: diagnose the gap between the experience leaders say they want and the culture they are actually running, and rebuild the link between the two.

He chaired Revo’s Customer Experience Committee from 2010 to 2017, growing its ACE Awards to over 100 shopping centre entrants, and has judged the Customer Focus Award at the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards since 2015. The through-line is practical: in an economy where product parity is the norm, the companies customers stay with are the ones whose people want to be there.

Key speaking topics

• Customer experience as an output of culture
• Employee engagement and service performance
• Leadership behaviour and organisational values
• Building and sustaining a service culture at scale
• Retail and shopping centre customer experience
• Purpose, values and frontline behaviour
• Translating the John Lewis Partnership model to other sectors

Ideal for

• CEOs, COOs and boards reviewing why customer experience investment is not producing the promised lift
• CHROs and heads of employee engagement connecting people strategy to commercial outcomes
• Customer experience, service and operations leaders in retail, financial services, hospitality, transport and healthcare
• Shopping centre and retail property leadership working on tenant mix, placemaking and visitor experience

Audience outcomes

• A sharper view of why customer experience programmes fail when they are run as training rather than as culture change
• Specific, named examples from inside John Lewis of how engagement, leadership behaviour and service performance reinforce each other
• Practical questions to take back to their own organisation about hiring, manager behaviour and internal communication
• A clearer sense of where service sits in the operating model, and which leadership decisions actually move the needle