Interview with Dido Harding, TalkTalk Telecom

Dido Harding talks to The Marketing Society’s editor Elen Lewis about the importance of customers, being a jockey and her biggest influences.

You’ve talked passionately about the importance of working from the customer’s point of view. Tell us more about why the customer is so important.

At the end of the day, in any business, it is customers that pay our wages, and our shareholders dividends.  So I have always believed that if you start with trying to give customers what they want, and then work out how to make money from it after that you won’t go far wrong.  Customers might not be able to articulate what they want in the future – especially in technology led sectors – but they can always tell you what they like and don’t like about any ideas you have for their future.  Sometimes it’s hard to hear what customers have to say, either because you don’t really want to hear it, or because customers articulate their issues in the normal language that we find so hard to use in business!  But I have always found that if you take customer feedback genuinely at face value and try to address it honestly and straight forwardly then you will build a winning proposition – very easy to say, but mighty hard to actually do!