In today’s complex business environment, customer-centricity is no longer a competitive advantage, it’s a baseline expectation. That being said, many organisations still struggle to move from talking about being customer-focused to truly embedding the customer’s voice across every layer of decision-making. Rather than being confined to the marketing department, Customer Salience should be a company-wide commitment. It refers to the likelihood that customers, their needs, values and experiences, are actively considered whenever a business decision is made. It’s about ensuring customers are, top-of-mind, across all functions, from product development to operations, from strategy to service delivery.
I’ve often thought an effective way to promote this is by leveraging online focus groups as a dynamic, agile tool for capturing deep customer insight and embedding it into a company mindset.
Why Online Focus Groups Drive Customer Salience
Online focus groups are a powerful mechanism for organisations to listen, learn, and act on customer needs in real time. Unlike surveys or analytics dashboards, which may quantify behaviour, focus groups reveal the motivations, emotions, and expectations behind it.
There are multiple reasons as to why online focus groups are particularly well-suited for enhancing Customer Salience, including:
- Accessibility & Diversity: Reaching customers across demographics and lifestyles ensures more representative insight.
- Speed & Agility: Insights can be gathered and implemented quickly.
- Context & Emotion: Contextual insights that reflect how customers truly experience products and services.
Designing Focus Groups to Build Customer Salience
To truly shift Customer Salience from principle to practice, focus groups must be designed to do more than uncover opinions; they should inform decisions across the organisation.
1. Align Focus Groups with Business Decisions
Start with a clear sense of what decisions or changes are being considered. i.e. is a product line being redesigned? Is the customer service model being updated? Are internal values being redefined? Let customer insight shape those decisions from the outset. By intentionally tying focus group objectives to specific business priorities, insight becomes directly actionable ensuring it drives relevance rather than sitting unused in reports.
2. Involve Cross-Functional Stakeholders
Invite decision-makers from different departments throughout the research process to help shape the focus group questions, to attend the sessions in real-time to provide input and adapt the content and direction if needed, and then afterwards too to review the insights generated. This collaborative approach reframes customer insight as a shared organisational asset in the mind of all parties involved, not just the remit of marketing or UX teams as is the unfortunate prevalent mindset. Engaging diverse stakeholders from the outset ensures that insights gathered reflect the business needs from the view of multiple teams, and leads to wider insight activation and richer, more actionable outcomes.
By embedding a broad range of departmental voices in both the framing and analysis of focus group research, organisations foster a holistic understanding of customer priorities. This process accelerates the shift away from siloed decision-making, ensuring that customer salience is woven into the fabric of day-to-day operations, continuous improvement, and long-term strategy.
3. Ask Questions That Reveal Customer Priorities
Design the discussion guide to uncover what customers truly value, what frustrates them, what delights them, and what they wish companies understood better. This involves crafting questions that go beyond surface-level feedback and delve into specific, situational experiences that reveal motivations, pain points, and aspirations. Effective prompts should encourage participants to reflect on both positive and negative interactions, highlight unmet needs, and articulate their expectations in detail.
It is important to structure the guide so it flows logically—from broad explorations of expectations and needs, through to focused questions about experiences, and finally towards actionable ideas for improvement. Consider using open-ended queries, scenario-based discussions, and follow-up probes to draw out deeper insight. By approaching the discussion in this way, you equip stakeholders with a richer understanding of customer priorities and establish a foundation for translating qualitative feedback into informed business decisions.
For this, you will need some effective prompts, such as:
- ‘What’s most important to you when choosing a provider in this space?’
- ‘Can you describe a recent experience with [insert company/product] how did it make you feel?’
- ‘What’s the one thing you would change that would make your experience immediately better?’
These questions uncover not just sentiment, but actionable signals for improvement. The idea being to move past surface-level preferences and get to the underlying drivers of loyalty, satisfaction, and behaviour.
4. Translate Insight into Organisational Action
The value of insight lies in how it’s used. After the focus group, there are a few actions you can take to make sure the insights are used to maximum effect. Firstly, you can map key themes against current strategies and initiatives to demonstrate exactly where the insights can be applied - this works well with stakeholders who don't necessarily understand how far to apply and activate the insights generated.
Secondly, you can identify disconnects between what customers need and what the business currently prioritises. These disconnects might have become painpoints in the customer experience, or highlight opportunities to better align the business operations with those customer needs. Lastly, sharing findings through interactive formats, video clips/montages and themed summaries enhances stakeholder engagement in data and insights, which leads to them making more connections between the insights and the decisions they need to make, the problems they are currently solving and how it might help their colleagues too - enhancing engagement and sparking more conversation through storytelling and visual aids naturally leads to more insights activation.
All of this ensures insights are not just archived, but embedded into strategy, sparking meaningful dialogue and change across teams.
5. Create Feedback Loops
Lastly, ensure focus group findings are systematically fed into strategy meetings, planning cycles, and internal communications. Incorporate insights into management discussions, performance reviews, and project planning, so all teams regularly engage with current customer feedback.
This establishes an ongoing loop where customer perspectives are referenced at key moments, allowing insights to shape decisions and align priorities organisation-wide. Over time, this approach embeds customer voices into the organisational memory, turning insights into a lasting influence on culture and direction.
Using Focus Groups to Bolster Customer Salience
Customer Salience should be thought of as a business imperative. By making the customer present and visible at every level of decision-making, businesses not only deliver better products and experiences, but they also build deeper trust, loyalty, and long-term relevance.
Online focus groups offer a unique and personal way to bridge the gap between insight and action. They enable organisations to listen more deeply, think more empathetically, and act more decisively in ways that reflect the true needs of their customers.
