Lord Bilimoria recently gave an interview with Customer Focus magazine, the quarterly publication from the Institute of Customer Service, where he stressed the importance of good customer service in any industry and explained how the partnerships he formed at the outset of the business were crucial to the continued success of Cobra.
Where Service is No Small Beer
For many people, it’s probably difficult to remember a time when their local Indian restaurant didn’t sell Cobra, the smooth, much less fizzy lager that in just a blink of eye in beer terms (just twenty-five years), has become one of the must-drink brands with curry. But for its founder Karan (now Lord) Bilimoria, it’s precisely the memory of what was there before that ensures this very service-driven entrepreneur refuses to take any success for granted.
‘The origins of Cobra are well known now,’ says the son of the General Officer Commanding-In-Chief of the Central Indian Army, who first had the idea for a different sort of beer after studying at Cambridge University in the 1980s. He found what was on offer at curry house, too gassy and bloating. ‘The lager made eating unpleasant. I liked ales, but they were too far the other way – heavy and sweet,’ he recalls.
‘That’s when the idea for a less carbonated lager came about.’ The concept, he argues was resolutely his own dissatisfaction as a customer, and nine months later, in 1989, the first container-load from India arrived in the UK, with Bilimoria himself touting it to local restaurants on his push bike.
But while we can say ‘and the rest is history,’ the Cobra story is much more nuanced than this, and again, it’s service that has played a key part. ‘I was very confident that my own sense of taste was what customers would want, but the first batch was too sweet, too heavy and it wasn’t just me saying this,’ says Bilimoria. ‘Right from the start I was asking for feedback from customers and my first buyers, and it was because of this that I went through five iterations before I finally felt we’d got it right. The acid test was whether we got re-orders, and when 99% came back for more, we knew we had a good product on our hands.’
Even the name came from feedback. ‘Originally we called the beer Panther,” Bilimoria reveals, ‘But it just didn’t seem to resonate with people. Cobra was the second option, but it seemed to be what stuck with people.’
Clever tricks to make the beer stand out (including being sold in giant 660ml bottles,) all helped see Cobra achieve massive sales growth of around 40% per year between 1989-2008, but near collapse at the end of 2008 (after building up expansion debts it was unable to service) saw the business go into, and then out of liquidation, so that it could be re-bought by Bilimoria with American brewing giant, Molson Coors.
It was a period, he says, that reinforced in him already strong values that to succeed, the customers are who he is really working for. ‘The experience taught me a great deal, and it means that even today we don’t take success for granted,’ he says. ‘We still have sales teams permanently on the road, educating restaurants about our beers, our new products (like Cobra Premium, King Cobra, and Cobra Zero), and even how to ensure the consumer receives our product in perfect condition.’
A feature of selling via restaurants, is that the product (and therefore the service associated with it), has a middle-man, so even details like refrigerating Cobra at the right temperature (it has to be eight degrees- Celsius, says Bilimoria), matter. ‘Sometimes Cobra is stored with all the other soft drinks in a restaurant, which tend to be chilled much cooler,’ he says. ‘This means the taste of Cobra won’t be perfect. It’s these sorts of messages that we have to continually educate our sellers about, and even how to pour it correctly, so that it has the correct head.”
Today Bilimoria uses net promoter scores, which he says are ‘excellent for the sector’, to turn these service standards into measurable metrics. But for him though, this is simply an evolution in using feedback that dates back to when Cobra first launched. At that time Bilimoria personally manned stands at the BBC Good Food show to ask consumers how the beer tasted.
In fact it was his biggest so-called gamble – bringing brewing of the beer to the UK – that was based entirely doom-mongering protestations of the importers – who all said moving production to Britain would be a disaster.
‘At this point [1996] our Indian suppliers couldn’t keep up with demand, and all sorts of distribution delays and quality issues were stacking up,’ he remembers. ‘I had to do something, so I very deliberately slipped in new questions to our customers, which asked what was important to them – whether it was the smooth taste, less gas, or where the beer came from. We jumbled the questions up so that we couldn’t be seen to influence the result, but every time we looked at the results, the place of manufacturer came last in importance.’ Bilimoria adds:
‘This was the very clear message I needed that customers didn’t rate location as a deal-breaker. Based on this, we switched. Consumers will give you the answer. There is logic there. We were upfront about it, and looking back on it, if I hadn’t placed my faith in the customer, I wouldn’t be talking to you now.’
That ‘faith’, as he puts it, is why he says he has no problems reporting on service metrics, and why he thinks other businesses should have no issue with them either. “There’s not a single report we file with the Booker Group (the UK’s largest cash and carry operator, and of which he is a director,) that doesn’t carry our service metrics,’ he says.
In his other role as cross-bencher in the House of Lords, Lord Bilimoria believes a lot more ‘could and should be done by government,’ to really publicise how improving service and being open about it can dramatically grow GDP. ‘This government is at least listening to business more,’ he concedes, ‘but more could be done to promote how all factors in customer service create a growing and healthy economy,” he says. ‘Service is a key part of growth, but I don’t think the government talks about it enough.’
But despite supporting customer reporting, a step Lord Bilimoria won’t take is enforcing, or pushing companies to publicise forward-planning targets for service – a criticism of service reporting is that it only has an eye on the past. ‘Those that run companies should always set themselves targets for service for continual improvement and growth purposes,’ he says.
‘Companies must always be somewhat discontented with their service, because that way they’ll never get complacent about it,’ he adds. ‘But I’m not sure they should be forced to publish their targets. I’d much rather companies just be more talkative about service in general.
Bilimoria feels he’s been fortunate that government hasn’t, in his mind, pursued legislation that has forced service to take a back seat. ‘Today, whatever business we’re in, it’s a race; we have to always improve on what we do. The more time you spend with your customers, the better.’
Part of the job of his sales team is simply to meet buyers face-to-face, but also remind them about Cobra. ‘We realise that running a restaurant is a tough job, and that sometimes managers don’t re-order because they’re sorting out food deliveries, linen, cutlery, marketing, bookkeeping, and all the other things associated with running a business,’ he says. ‘That’s why, if we notice they haven’t re-ordered, we’ll call them and sort it out for them. Our job is to think about what our customers and their customers need, almost before they do.’
Perhaps what helps this is the fact that despite the more corporate Molson Coors ownership, Bilimoria is still very much the man behind the brand, and it’s his leadership that carries weight. ‘I’m the founder, and it’s important I’m the champion for the brand still,’ he says, aware that he remains the personification of Cobra. A recent advertising campaign included a suave fictional ‘Meet the Boss’ – who some people have remarked as possibly being the younger Bilimoria. But personal credibility is even more important now, as Cobra is sold in supermarkets and pubs as well as from curry houses. ‘It’s the integrity and behaviour of the brand that really matters,’ he continues. ‘We have our own charitable foundation too, that has given to more than 170 charities. Nowadays this is a part of what good business is all about.’
Today, the business couldn’t be healthier. Three months after the ‘Meet the Boss’ campaign first aired in 2014, off-trade sales (supermarkets and off-licences) grew by 23% and there was a 77% growth in bars too.
‘Nowadays, I’m always highly aware of good service, and I still think America has this almost as an art-form,’ says Bilimoria. ‘What I’m pleased about with us is that while we like metrics, we’re not slaves to them. You can have all the metrics in the world, but I still don’t think it’s a substitute for going out there, and talking to customers for real – as all our sales teams continue to do.’
It might well be 25 years since Bilimoria was manually taking customer feedback on stands at a food show, but clearly, the importance and significance of this process has not been diluted.