Speaking at the conference yesterday (Tuesday 7^th October), Paul Hudson, chief executive at FlexMR, said that brands and market researchers were often too focused on customer behaviour and decision making at the expense of helping to get the view of the customer closer to major decisions within the business.

“To be truly customer-centric requires more than just customer understanding,” said Hudson. “It requires us to connect decision makers to customers in a way that is just not happening today.

“On its own, a great insight doesn’t change the business; it is how that is socialised across the organisation that will dictate your success.”

There is a gap between businesses’ perception of the value of customer centricity to their brand and the role it actually plays in the organisation, Hudson added, saying that data from Deloitte said that while 73% of senior executives believe that customer centricity is key to their success, only 14% of those same executives agreed that it is actually at the heart of the brand. Hudson said that 12% of customers agreed that brands are displaying the hallmarks of customer centricity.

Hudson said that this issue meant a renewed focus on decision-making processes in businesses was required, citing data from Forrester Research in 2022 that showed 48% of business decisions use data in their decisions, adding: “The other 52%, I can only assume, are ideas, hunches and personal assumptions; that means one in two decisions take no note of the customer. That’s the beginning of our problem.”

He went on to say: “If we understand the customer but decisions don’t have the customer in it, the problem is we don’t understand how decisions are getting made. We understand how consumers make decisions; we don’t understand how businesses make decisions. We understand what happens at the point of purchase; what we don’t understand is what happens at the point of decision.

“My contention is to stop being obsessed with the customer, let’s obsess about the decision internal to the organisation as well. We need to redress that balance; we need to understand how that gap gets bridged. Customer understanding does not lead to influencing decisions.”

Also speaking at the conference, Jane Frost, chief executive at MRS, said that the insight industry needed to take ownership of AI and the data that drives decisions within organisations.

“The insights sector missed a real trick on GDPR – we could have owned customer privacy. We didn’t,” Frost said.

“We ought to be owning the quality issues that go into AI. The fact that nobody knows what the data is that is going in, and nobody knows what is coming out. Smoke and mirrors is what you are being sold.

“We need to be developing the language on our data and insight that people will believe.”

Yuliia Krupenko, ex-marketing lead at pet insurance firm Waggel, said in her session at the conference that while most businesses start out basing all of their decisions on customer behaviour, “at some point the customer takes a back seat”.

She said it was vital to connect leaders to how customers actually think, behave and interact with their products and services, rather than simply provide data on the customer experience.

“Leaders tend to drift from customers faster than everyone else, as they start to see company results only through dashboards, customer behaviours only through dashboards, and so dashboards become everything,” Krupenko said.