I worked at LOCOG (London Organising Committee for the Olympic & Paralympic Games) for over three years as the Head of Spectator/Customer Experience. It taught me a myriad of life lessons (including never stand next to a female Olympic boxer if you don’t want to assess your appalling levels of personal fitness). There were obvious lessons in mega event planning, strategy and programme management, but it was those less obvious lessons that stick with me today:
It’s ok to be the person singing from a different hymn sheet…
….although it’s not always that much fun.
No previous Olympics’ had had a team focused solely on the customer. I know…. seems unbelievable, but true. The 2008 Beijing Games, whilst a massive, shiny, behemoth of a Games did not have anyone associated to customer design. Here I was in 2009, a team of one* in charge of planning the Spectator Experience, with no budget and very little remit. Pushing water up hill doesn’t quite describe it. Being described as the person who consistently asked annoying questions and had unrealistic demands makes you super popular, I can tell you. Questions such as ‘ how do we make sure customer service is fun on London Underground’ made me loads of friends. Not.
* By 2012 we had grown to a team of 45 plus a wonderful team of volunteers. That proves we either gained a fair amount of traction around planning for customers, or they just decided to surround me with a bunch of people to prevent me from asking any more annoying questions.
Doing it for the first time means you get to basically make it up….
…and that is fun! So here’s the secret to how we planned to deliver 11 million people the most memorable experience of their life (other than maybe getting married or having a baby…obviously): my Mother actually designed the London 2012 Games.
All other departments at an Olympics are given a tome-like guide (and scary-ass schedule) to follow. A sacred Olympic ‘how-to’ set of documents, projects and timelines. I had nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. So we totally made up what we were doing, mostly as and when we realised something had to be done.
Hmmmm…..we’ll need to design the experience, so lets create a Spectator Vision. First time the Olympics have had one of those. Ok, let’s segment 11 million ticket holders into some groupings to help us plan;…segments, not had those before! Let’s pull apart the venues and look at it from a customer perspective (that went down like a bucket of cold sick with…well, just about everybody). Each day we came in and tackled the next thing, not knowing particularly what we were doing, but with an absolute focus on the people who would be ‘using’ the Games.
I figured if I kept planning with my Mum in mind (and the grief I would get if she had a crappy Games) then I couldn’t go too badly wrong…she was my focus. Ensuring she could understand the information, the system processes, cope with the walks from the tube and standing in queues, and afford to buy some food and a piece of Olympic merchandise. In essence the London 2012 Games was inadvertently designed by my 70 year old mother.
When you are shown the mascot for the first time, just smile and nod
I learnt to love the little one-eyed buggers, especially once I understood the back story. The fact is, no mascot, in the history of small people standing in furry outfits with oversized heads, should ever require a back story.
Perhaps the British Bulldog style mascot would have been better. A fluffy bulldog with legs long enough to actually walk around a venue/chase down Usain Bolt.
The Devil is in the detail
This is a whole other blog, but in essence the risks to London being a success was always hidden in the detail — because the big ticket items like terrorism and transport failure were being dealt with by large numbers of very clever people.
Therefore the risk to our Games was going to be hidden in something a lot less obvious. And trust me when I say 11 million people will find that little risk and expose it (mostly all over Twitter). So dig into the detail and de-risk. When we asked the advice of Sir Jony Ive about building plans for the customer, his one piece of advice was ‘find their problems and solve them’. So that’s what we did. First review of our plans exposed over 7,000 potential risks to the Spectator. That was one of my longer ‘To Do’ lists.
Never accept the answer ‘it will be fine’
If my husband says I look ‘fine’ when I’ve got dressed up for a night out, I know I look like a bag of shit. The same goes for the person who tells you ‘it will be fine’, especially if the question is something like ‘will people have to queue for more than 30 minutes to get into the venue?’. ‘It will be fine’ is shorthand for ‘I don’t actually know the answer’, or ‘I’m totally winging this thing’, or ‘I’m praying I don’t get called out’. Or worse still ‘I don’t actually care about Spectators’. That’s the moment to start digging for that devil hiding in the detail. The little bugger is there just waiting to come out.
Practice reacting to the crisis
There were many brilliant and talented people who worked on the Games. Some of the best were those who taught us to plan for the stuff we didn’t know would happen. It turns some of the biggest voices go very quiet when faced with the crisis directly in front of you. The times when things did go slightly left-field during the Games were probably my most favourite. Problem? We had practiced how to solve it, even if we didn’t know the thing we were going to be solving.
Londoners are buggers*
Despite endless plans, a coherent, timed and designed communication plan to our ticket holders, designed to manipulate the behaviour of the customer.…Londoners will do their very best to bugger it up for you.
Three weeks prior to Games, after a year of highly designed communications across a multiple of channels, I sat in a research lab listening to a group of Londoners tell me that whilst, yes, they had read our emails, and yes, they had read their Guide (back to back) and yes, had looked at the online transport journey planner, no, they would not give it two hours to travel and no, they had no plans to arrive early at the venues to get through the security and the crowds.
The moment where you realise the last three years are about to go down the swanney because a bunch of Londoners don’t like being told what to do, and they will use the Jubilee Line (despite you repeatedly telling them not to), and they will turn up 30 minutes before the sport, and no they won’t listen to your polite advice. Cue the only emergency text we ever sent to all our Spectators.
Read your information. Follow our advice or you WILL miss your sport.
Cheers London 2012 xx
*I am a Londoner.
100% Recycled polyester uniforms are deeply sweaty
Especially if you are 8 months pregnant, and it’s in the middle of a heat wave. Deep joy. Deep sweat. They do however miraculously dry after being washed in a sink (at the end of a 20 hour shift).
People will complain about literally anything
The temporary toilets weren’t facing in the right direction. There were sheep in the opening ceremony. There weren’t any pigs in the opening ceremony. The Hockey pitch was blue. Why can’t we seed the clouds to stop it raining over the Olympic Park? You name it…we saw, heard it and attempted to formulate polite replies to it.
I did struggle with the complaint I received that our customer service was ‘too American’, by which I think they meant ‘too personal and engaging’?
Sometimes the UK needs to be bold
Yup, so we did bulldoze half of East London, and yes it cost quite a bit. But every penny was worth it. Stratford regenerated — tick. Increase in people participating in sport — tick. Increase in people attending sports events — tick. Increase in volunteering — tick. World-class venues still being used every single day — tick. Increase in employment, tourism, housing, transport — tick tick tick tickety-tick. Don’t bother having the discussion with me about whether it was worth it. You will not win.
When we are bold as a nation we can prove the ‘Great’ in Great Britain. London 2012 was one such example.
Heather McGill is the Director and Founder of Experience360. Experience360 now helps host cities to organise mega-events in both the Entertainment and Sports industries.