Working on wellbeing: How Holland & Barrett focuses on what customers want

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When I sit down with Holland & Barrett’s director of customer experience and insight, Georgina White, she is 18 months into the role. In spring 2022, when she joined the health and wellness retail business from BT, the insight team had five members. As of November 2023, it had 23.
Set up to both guide core business performance and to drive the strategy and transformation of the business, the team is agile, covering research, market intelligence and customer analytics.

“We’re pretty young as a team – there’s a huge amount of transformation to be done in terms of capability, ” says White. This includes building a new market insight capability – something the business hasn’t had in the past – and establishing how to better leverage its own customer data, as well as bolstering customer experience, implementing how it measures and improves marketing effectiveness, and assessing what the company’s strategy means from a customer perspective.

On top of this, among White’s key areas ...