Value employees for the sake of your customers

THERE is no doubt that Simon Murdoch knows a thing or two aboutstart-ups and the internet. As a co-founder of amazon.co.uk and aserial entrepreneur specialising in internet businesses, he is asgood a person as anybody to ask about what sort of business works inthis area.

"I like businesses that are very customer-centric," he says. Ashe notes, the internet has come a long way since the days when hestarted Bookpages as a UK equivalent of the then fledglingAmazon.com back in 1996. Murdoch spent two years with amazon.co.uk(as Bookpages became), and he witnessed a transformation from tinystart-up to a business with millions of pounds in sales, andhundreds of staff.

But he recalls that Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, instilled instaff the principle that whatever the company did, it had to be"completely customer-centric".

Murdoch has since moved on. For the past decade, he has been aserial entrepreneur and business angel investor specialising ininternet-related businesses.

Last month, he joined Octopus Ventures and through his role assenior investment partner has become chairman of GetLenses.co.uk,which claims to be the country's leading online supplier of contactlenses.

He says he was drawn to the business because it "provides a goodservice".

He added: "But as we got bigger, we noticed something else. Wefound that our customers valued us for something else. They valuedus because we treated them like customers, not like patients."

This makes sense. But how can a company make the idea of customerservice a reality? Particularly when it is, by definition, neverface-to-face with customers.

One potential answer comes in a book with a title that suggestsit has got little to offer in this regard. Employees First,Customers Second (Harvard Business Press, Pounds 17.99) mightchallenge the received view about the route to success in business,but author Vineet Nayar believes this is too simplistic. He said:"In any service business the true value is created in the interfacebetween the customer and the employee.

"So, by putting employees first, you can bring about fundamentalchange in the way a company creates and delivers unique value forits customers."

Nayar argues when a company puts employees first, the customeractually does ultimately come first and gains the greatest benefit.