Rory Sutherland

Got it exactly.

And I think, you know, I think that will ultimately you'll have to have the human as the last port of call on that.

Also, your call center is the only way you can find out the problems that people can't solve anywhere else.

Do you see what I mean?

So there was a very smart person I met at Microsoft who, when they took over some fairly niche Microsoft product, they put the call center in the middle of the development team.

I mean, I would argue that the call center of British Airways should be on the same floor as the boardroom because it's where you find out where you're going wrong with your existing customers who are the most important people.

But I want to go back to... You said, by the way, exactly the same thing Dan Davis did, which is one huge advantage of being a customer value company, not a shareholder value company, is...

is that customers live in the real world, and therefore you are actually rooted in reality, whereas shareholders, by the way, not shareholders, but the shareholders are principally interested in justifying their own existence to their investors, and therefore they're dealing with a highly artificial construct in terms of defining the value of a customer.

The shareholder value movement is totally incoherent because over what time frame, which shareholder, what are you optimizing for?

It's completely incoherent nonsense, which is very, very friendly to stock market analysts who want a ready supply of quarterly data so they can bullshit their way out of things.

How valuable it is to people with pensions is a completely separate matter.

Because one of the things it does is it prevents companies from innovating effectively, and it prevents them from investing properly in customer relationships.

They were going blah, blah, blah, average call time, blah, blah, blah, average wait time.

And it was the standard kind of call center metrics about effectively how quickly can we get these people off the phone?

I mean, it's a bit more sophisticated than that.

You know, I'm sure there's some measure of satisfaction, but it was kind of evaluating the call center on an operational efficiency standpoint.

And Dyson basically said, stop right now.

You've got this all wrong.

The way we should look at this is we should treat it as an honor if one of our customers chooses to get in touch with us, and we should therefore respond to them accordingly.

As if we're flattered by the contact, not as if we're bothered by the interruption.