Dido plans to fix TalkTalk customer services

By This Is Money
Updated: 05:24 EDT, 7 February 2011

TalkTalk has just won the Daily Mail's wooden spoon for worst customer service in Britain. Its chief Dido Harding was interviewed by Ben Laurence.

Dido Harding: Apologetic for the headaches customers have suffered and wants to improve matters

There is something slightly troubling about Dido Harding.

She describes herself as 'super-ambitious and ridiculously hard-working'. In her own words, she is 'super-competitive - I would be competitive over a game of tiddlywinks - and I have always tended to push myself to do something I wasn't sure I could do... I like to set myself what appear to be impossible challenges'.

Scary? Yes, a little bit - a 43-year-old woman who seems to have achieved every target she has set for herself.

Every single one? Well, a decade ago, she decided she wanted to run a big company: now, she is chief executive of phone and broadband outfit TalkTalk.

She decided she wanted to be able to ride around the Grand National course at Aintree. She achieved that, too.

And she declared that she would like to own a dog. Ah! An ambition that Harding has yet to fulfil! So far, at least, she has no dog.

Children? Yes - two daughters, five-year-old Emma and Becca, who is three. Each weekend, she and husband John Penrose, under-secretary at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, head down to his constituency in Weston-super-Mare.

Their children doze in the car while they are whisked to and from the West Country on the weekly commute. But no dog.

Says Harding: 'Strange, isn't it? It is generally deemed acceptable to shuttle children and adults between London and Somerset every week, but the considered view is that it would be very cruel to do the same with a dog.'

In truth, it's hard to imagine Dido Harding would have much time to spend with a dog.

To put it at its very mildest, she has her hands full trying to sort out TalkTalk. it is a business that scarcely existed five years ago but has grown Topsy-like and now has 4.25m customers to whom it supplies telephone and broadband services.

It bought Tele2 and Onetel, already established in the business of providing cheap phone calls. TalkTalk launched free broadband. It bought the British broadband customer base of AOL and Tiscali. At a stroke, the Tiscali deal alone brought TalkTalk an extra 1.1m customers.

Then, having been nurtured under the wing of Carphone Warehouse, it become a stand-alone company the spring of last year.

So yes, there has been growth aplenty. But even Harding admits it has brought problems.

'We have described buying Tiscali as being like a snake that has eaten a goat. We are busy digesting an enormously complicated business.

'The journey has been worth it, but there are some customers who have had a pretty rotten experience on the way through.'

Rotten indeed. Last month, TalkTalk achieved the dubious distinction of receiving the Daily Mail's wooden spoon as Britain's worst organisation for customer service. Readers complained of rude, insensitive staff, calls not being returned and emails unanswered.

Some TalkTalk customers were even pestered by debt collectors - after bills had been settled or contracts cancelled.

Dido Harding is apologetic for the headaches customers have suffered and says she wants to improve matters - although only last week, the company announced more than 500 redundancies.

'But if TalkTalk hadn't done it, someone else would have bought AOL; someone else would have introduced free broadband; someone else would have bought Tiscali,' she says.

'And it is probably true that whoever had bought Tiscali would have faced those problems,' she says. 'It is a painful transition from the growth-is-everything entrepreneurial business to being measured by a more balanced scorecard.'

Now, having been put in charge of a business that has grown with phenomenal speed, Harding has to ensure that it actually works. Her background isn't in telecoms. Her most recent job was running Sainsbury's convenience stores operation.

But in 2009, she was asked to meet up with Carphone Warehouse's chairman Charles Dunstone. He was looking for someone to take the helm at TalkTalk. 'After a couple of phone calls, I agreed to meet Charles for a drink,' she says. 'I said I knew nothing about telecoms, so why would he want me? Charles said that was precisely why he wanted me.'

After all, she has spent her years at Sainsbury's - as well as at Tesco before that - 're-engineering' an established business machine, trying to tweak its detailed workings to make it work more efficiently. In her phrase, it is about 'the polishing of processes.'

So Charles Dunstone and Harding went on what she describes as 'a series of dates' to see if they were likely to get along. The relationship was clearly going to be crucial. After all, TalkTalk was Dunstone's brainchild.

He had spearheaded its phenomenal growth and even after the business was spun out of Carphone Warehouse, he was to remain chairman and dominant shareholder.

When Harding discussed the TalkTalk job with friends, they thought she risked taking on a poisoned chalice. 'Friends said I must be mad,' Harding recalls. 'You had a chief executive stepping up to become chairman and he still owns 30% of the company. The big piece of due diligence was to work out whether I was going to get on with Charles.'

They did get on. And she agreed to make the move to TalkTalk, succeeding Dunstone as chief executive a year ago. For Harding, it was a further ambition achieved.

The curiosity is that as a teenager, she hadn't intended to go into business. 'When I was at Oxford, I was a Thatcher child; I was fascinated by politics and I spent three years being obnoxious in the Oxford Union.

'But I was an utterly hopeless politician and I worked out that I would be much better suited to making money and running businesses than the compromise that is politics.'

And what did she find when she took over at TalkTalk? 'I inherited something that has got growing pains from the speed at which it has grown - but that's not the same as saying that it has grown too quickly.'

Now, the breakneck speed of expansion seen under Dunstone's direction is slowing.

Harding has put the focus firmly on completing the integration of businesses already brought under the company's wing.

The emphasis is to be on tidying up the operation: for example, the company currently has more than 20 different call centres in four different time zones.

And, in mid-2011, TalkTalk - working with BT and others - will launch YouView, an internet-based interactive television service that will allow viewers to catch up on programmes they have missed, pause and rewind.

Says Harding: 'The internet is a cheaper form of distribution than satellite or digging up roads to lay cable. So if you have Freeview, the idea of being able to go forwards and backwards is revolutionary, and it is considerably cheaper to deliver.'

Isn't getting the grips with the technical details of such an enterprise just a wee bit scary for someone who has spent most of the past decade running supermarkets? For Harding, apparently not.

And in any case, as she cheerily admits: 'I enjoy being slightly scared.'