From top table to many tables

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Danny Russell is worried. Non-executive director at insight agency FlexMR, and a former senior insight professional at companies including Telefónica, Sky and British Airways, he believes that the link between brand and customer in organisations has weakened over recent years, a trend exacerbated by the change in working practices precipitated by the Covid lockdowns. However, he insists, this is an opportunity, not a threat, for insight professionals – provided they embrace a new way of working.

Citing surveys from the likes of the Institute of Customer Service and KPMG Nunwood, which show customer satisfaction levels have stagnated over the past decade, Russell says: “I really do think we have lost sight of the customer in our thought processes, and forgotten the need to put the customer absolutely at the heart of everything we do.”

There is a gap between rhetoric and practice, he notes. While chief marketing officers (CMOs) want their organisations to be customer-centric, research from Forrester, in 2022, found that nearly half of all decisions are made on gut feel, with no data or insight informing them whatsoever.

With the Brexit fallout, international wars and an energy crisis to contend with – to name just a few – companies have a lot on their plate, as Russell admits. But perhaps the biggest challenge, he believes, is the effect that hybrid working has had on decision-making. “You tend to miss out on those serendipitous ‘corridor conversations’ and impromptu meetings, which are valuable opportunities to nudge projects forward,” he observes.

“Not only are companies taking much longer to make decisions, but insight professionals may be unintentionally sidelined.”

That has to change. “If the insight industry is to achieve the nirvana of ‘insight-driven decision-making’, we need to ensure that the customer is at the front of everyone’s mind – even if we’re not in the same room,” says Russell. “The way to achieve this ‘customer salience’ is to forget our historic quest for ‘a seat at the table’ and look instead for ‘a seat at many tables’.”

FlexMR has designed its ‘4C model of customer salience’ (challenge, create, connect and collaborate) to help insight professionals to do this. It involves challenging their existing patterns of thinking, devising targeted strategies for different groups of stakeholders, connecting decision-makers directly with customers, and fostering collaboration with and among stakeholders, around the focal point of customers. The goal is to culturally embed customers at the heart of decision-making.

While it’s important to influence all stakeholders, the CMO is clearly a critical target, given that two-thirds of insight teams report to them. The IPA’s Bellwether Report reflects eight consecutive quarters of decline in market research budgets. “I talk to a lot of CMOs, and they genuinely want to improve the customer experience, but lots of ‘stuff’ gets in their way,” says Russell. “The 4C model is a way of reducing some of those barriers.”

Hannah Fisher, marketing director at Saga Cruises, part of Saga Group plc, is exactly the kind of stakeholder that insight professionals need to influence – but she needs no persuading.

“We are a customer-centric organisation through and through,” says Fisher. “We use all the levers FlexMR talks about, probably without even realising it; it’s just how we operate.”

A central insight team for Saga Group runs the ‘experienced voices’ (EV) panel, comprising several thousand customers. The panel provides first-hand insights to all divisions and departments in the company, and, in Saga Cruises, these insights shape everything from itineraries and destinations to cabin prices. Fisher and her team use the panel to test advertising campaigns, craft media strategy and develop propositions, and are currently using it to inform a major strategic initiative on customer life-cycle planning.

The marketing team also uses its NPS ‘voice of customer’ programme to connect decision-makers in the business directly with customer issues – almost in real time. Fisher explains: “At the end of every cruise, all customers complete a survey on every aspect of their experience. When we aggregate those scores, we can see, ship by ship, what issues there are, and we feed that information back to the relevant teams so they can drive improvement immediately.”

She continues: “Everything we do in marketing is generated from true insight: we are constantly listening to customers and improving what we offer them, based on their distinct needs. The more we can engage with them and embed them in what we do, the more satisfied they are, and the more likely they are to repeat purchase and recommend us to others. It’s a virtuous circle.”

Russell believes insight teams could be more proactive in fostering ‘trusted partnerships’ with their different stakeholders – not least CMOs. After all, he points out: “Insight is one of the very few departments that permeate across the organisation, and we are therefore ideally placed to join everything up to enhance the final customer experience.”

And the prize is there for the taking. Customer-centric companies are, on average, 60 per cent more profitable than those that aren’t, according to research by Deloitte & Touche in 2014.

Judging by Russell’s conversations with CMOs, insight could well be pushing at an open door.

● Hannah Fisher and Danny Russell will be speaking at the Customer Salience Summit, exploring how insight teams can deliver long-term value and create cultures of customer-centric decision-making, on 3 October at RSA House, London. For tickets go to Eventbrite.co.uk and search ‘salience’.