How TSB can empower their staff to help save the UK high street
The Living High Street is our plan to save the UK’s big retail brands with people-led change — transforming the role they play on the high street, and enabling their people to innovate and collaborate.
Part of that is reinventing a store format fit for the digital age. So we’ve taken TSB — a hallmark of high streets nationwide — and imagined a branch format that remains true to the brand’s heritage, but also meets modern customer needs and serves the local community.
TSB Business Hub
TSB already invests in local communities as core to the brand. And they’re already helping small businesses — helping them to find better finance, for example — but they could do more by utilising their branch network.
Welcome to the TSB Business Hub — helping anyone to start, grow and sustain a business.
In branches, weekly sessions host business mentors and specialist advice from topic experts. The Hub allows local businesses to group together to host investor presentations, giving them access to investment capital. And there’s a marketing studio, allowing businesses of any size to utilise freelance creatives and digital tools essential for customer communications.
More and more people are self-employed or employed in SMEs — startups like Tide, Simply Business and Squeaky show that this is a market with unique needs that can be better served by service designed for them. There are dozens of accelerators out there seeking to create the next unicorn, but little investment in businesses with more modest ambitions and local roots.
It’d help TSB to build long-lasting SMEs in the local area. It’d make better use of their branches and premiumise their advice. And it’d help local businesses to thrive at a time when they are most under threat.
The Living High Street isn’t real… yet. It’s our plan that could save big retail brands from a slow and painful decline. It’s grounded in driving the metrics that retailers care about — footfall, basket size and first party data. And it’s all do-able today with off the shelf SaaS (software as a service). But what it does require is a transformation of how retailers think about themselves, how they organise themselves, and how they manage their people.
Please share The Living High Street within your organisation and beyond in the hope that incoming CEO Debbie Crosbie hears about it. Of course we’d love to be part of making this happen — but more than that, we want to see it happen.
If you want to design a new future for your business and empower your teams to build the products to make it happen, then we can help. Get in touch at Jenny.burns@fluxx.uk.com.
Jenny Burns is an Executive Partner at Fluxx Ltd. She has worked with big companies like Barclays, 02, British Gas and RSA.
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