Conversation with… Charlotte Hall, MD of audiology at Specsavers UK & Ireland
Here we speak with Charlotte Hall, the recently appointed MD of audiology at Specsavers UK & Ireland, to learn about her career journey from supermarket retail to healthcare, and how she’s helping lead the charge in raising awareness of hearing care services at one of the UK’s most recognised high street brands.
Can you start by telling us about your career journey and how you got into retail?
I’ve been in retail since I left university. I started on the graduate trading programme at Asda. I studied History and Politics at university, worked briefly for my local MP, and quickly realised that politics wasn’t for me.
So, I looked at graduate programmes and thought, “Well, I understand supermarkets -maybe I can do that.” I was fortunate to be offered places at both Tesco and Asda, and I chose Asda because the role was in Yorkshire. My partner, now my husband, said he’d prefer to live in Yorkshire than London, and that’s how we ended up there.
Never Miss a Retail Update!I spent about 14 years between Asda and the Co-op before joining Specsavers around four and a half years ago. It’s been fantastic. Specsavers is a business with a real sense of purpose – changing lives through better sight and hearing. After working in food retail, where margins and market share dominate, it’s incredibly rewarding to be part of a business that truly improves people’s quality of life.
And now you have a new role at Specsavers. Can you tell us more about it?
I’m the managing director of audiology for the UK and Ireland. My primary responsibility is ensuring the health and growth of our audiology business.
Specsavers operates on a joint venture model, so our stores are locally owned and run by retailers and clinicians. My role is to make sure we’re offering the best possible proposition to help our partners run successful businesses locally. It’s been a great experience stepping from the supplier side, which I was part of before, into a more customer-facing part of the business.
Specsavers is a fantastic company which also has a presence in many other countries. For anyone who works here, there’s a real sense of possibility for you to grow and develop.
Specsavers is well known for optical services, but the business is now working to build the same level of awareness around audiology.
Yes. We’ve been working with our partners to promote what we call “total care”- providing both optical and hearing services, along with domiciliary care. In the UK, we’re in a unique position to be a one-stop shop for people’s primary healthcare needs.
Even though we’ve been offering audiology services for over 20 years, our research shows that only one in three people know that they can come to Specsavers for hearing care. The name “Specsavers” anchors us in optics, but we’re on a mission to change that perception.
We recently launched a campaign in which we temporarily rebranded as “Specsandhearingsavers,” which is a bit tongue-in-cheek but serves an important purpose. On average, it takes people seven years from recognising they have hearing loss to doing something about it. That’s not just a Specsavers issue – it’s an industry-wide one. So, our campaign is designed to raise awareness in a fun, memorable way.
Your advertising campaigns are fantastic, full of humour and are a real talking point.
We’re lucky to have our in-house creative agency based in Guernsey. The brand and advertising are really embedded into the DNA of our business. With the recent campaign, we wanted to create something light-hearted that also gets people thinking.
It’s not just about knowing Specsavers does hearing care but also prompting people to finally take that first step toward getting help. If our campaign can serve as that nudge, we’ll consider it a success.
Can you tell us about Specsavers’ long-term vision?
Our chief executive John Perkins often talks about The Infinite Game where the author Simon Sinek applies game theory to explore how great businesses achieve long-lasting success. He believes it’s our duty to protect and grow Specsavers for the long-term.
There are big ambitions – especially in audiology. We’re aiming to grow our business at scale because there’s so much more we can do to help people. Our co-founder Dame Mary Perkins has ensured that everything we do puts the customer first. We ask ourselves “Is this fair? Does this provide value? How will it make the customer feel.” When you focus on people, you can’t go far wrong.
Our store teams are fantastic. We’ve run global campaigns around being “locally owned and run”, because our store partners live and work in their communities. They genuinely care. That’s where the magic comes from.
But we’re also a humble business. We don’t like to shout about what we do – it would take away from the sincerity. Our partners do things because it’s the right thing to do, not for applause. If we stay true to our values and keep listening to our customers and partners, we’ll continue to grow in the right way – making a real difference to people’s lives every day.
