What does it mean to be truly customer-led?
How do businesses transform their strategies, operational processes and even their corporate culture to be more geared towards their customers?
When looking at your own business, how do you measure up to customer-centric businesses in your industry? Where do you even begin on a journey to become customer-led?
These are just a few of many questions that have likely gone around your head when pondering the topics of Customer Salience and customer centricity. And these questions are not ones with easy answers. In fact, becoming any version of customer-centric, Customer Salient, or customer-led, has become one of the biggest challenges facing insight teams in recent times, and has only become more challenging due to the Customer Gap.
So, to make things a little easier, we’ve decided to dive deep into this topic, and bring some insights together to help insight experts gain their first foothold into customer-led transformation. More specifically, in this guide, we’ll explore:
- What exactly ‘Customer-Led Transformation’ is, and how to start
- How to get stakeholders on board with the new strategy and shift
- How customer-led transformation can help future-proof strategies
- What SMART objectives might be useful to get you started
- How to factor in AI responsibly
- How to communicate better with stakeholders
- What real-life examples of customer-led transformation look like
- The factors every business should aim to hit to become Customer Salient
What is Customer-Led Transformation?
This is the most pertinent question to answer first. And is best answered by our Business Development Officer, Muneera Belim in her recent blog; in essense, “customer-led transformation is the process of evolving products, services, strategies, and even organisational structures based on a deep and continuous understanding of customer needs. This is a fundamental element of wider Customer Salience strategies, and only achievable through the access to and use of market research and customer insights.”
Muneera explores this further to say that customer-led transformation involves:
- Embedding relevant insights into strategic decision-making processes
- Leveraging panels and communities to identify trends early
- Collaborating and co-creating with customers to develop meaningful solutions
- Transforming crucial feedback into action and innovation
“The distinction is important; this isn’t customer-informed or customer-influenced change. It is customer-led, where customers have a proactive role in shaping the direction of the business.”
However, before you can truly start forming customer-led strategies, it’s worth noting that transformation only comes after due diligence. Only once you’ve identified the current challenges to customer-led transformation and Customer Salience plaguing your business can you then plan to eradicate them.
Conducting a wide-ranging audit of the organisation at the present moment will take some time, but will allow insight experts to gain valuable insights into key areas such as: stakeholder engagement levels in customer research and insights; the current state of decision-making processes on all levels of the business; operational processes and policies that help or hinder the flow of information throughout a business, or that create painpoints in the customer experience; and the identification of any unfit technological structures in all teams.
From this point, there should be many glaring issues brought to light, and through the allocation of resources, budget, and personnel, it should become clearer which aspects to tackle first on the journey to customer-led transformation.
Shifting Stakeholder and Business Mindsets
Fixing the challenges hindering successful customer-led transformation is easier said than done, especially when businesses are already mostly successful and may not see the worth in changing the processes to try out a new strategy, when the current ones were yielding some results.
A common concern. If it’s not broken, why fix it? And herein lies the dilemma for insight teams - shifting the mindsets of stakeholders and businesses towards is one part of the process, but before that can begin, stakeholders must be convinced that this is the right move for them and for the company.
Pitching the business case for this particular endeavour will be a key element in the process. Do you start at the top and work down? Or start at the bottom and work up? For this particular business-wide strategy, insight teams will need sign-off from higher-ups in order to gain the right resourcing and budgets and time to implement any Customer Salience strategy. But for the application of shifting business mindsets once the strategy has been approved, a bottom-up approach might just work best.
When it comes to engaging stakeholders in new ideas and new insights, that has been a significant issue for insight teams across all industries for years now. Over the years, however, there have been advancements in engagement methodology, a few studies into stakeholder psychology, and a lot of networking opportunities where insight experts can share their successes and failures for others to learn from. From these new sources, we can start to piece together a way forward.
Stakeholder engagement strategies need to hold three parts: generating engagement, maintaining engagement, and managing engagement. Each of these will require different skills, and the latter two will require the most effort from insight teams and advocates. Once we have their attention and investment in the strategy, we can then work on shifting their mindsets towards Customer Salience and centricity using the same persuasive engagement techniques.
Future-proofing Business Endeavours
One way of engaging stakeholders in the new strategy, or shifting their mindsets towards customer-led transformation, is to appeal to their need for success. Convincing stakeholders to take up, not just a customer-centric approach to decision-making, but a Customer Salient approach, to make more successful decisions daily will be a significant persuasive tool in your arsenal.
Future-proofing business strategies means making decisions with sustainability in mind; will this decision and this strategy allow for the business to operate sustainably, in a way that capitalises on currrent opportunities and mitigates risk? Will this decision and strategy align with customer needs and create a sustained influx of both new and returning customers? Will this decision and strategy create new opportunities for growth or easy operational movement in the future?
And future-proofing strategies can only happen when stakeholders have access to the right customer insights to guide those decisions - this alone is a pretty persuasive argument in favour for Customer Salience and customer-led transformation, but sometimes stakeholders can be notoriously hard to convince.
As FlexMR’s Client Support Specialist, Russell Elliot, mentions in his blog, “without customers your business doesn’t have a future for you to predict, so ensuring that customers are put at the heart of your business is an absolute must.” Sometimes putting it this simply is the best way to spark action.
So, how can stakeholders predict the unpredictable and react better to rapidly changing consumer behaviours? Through market research. Market research and insight communities play a vital role in this particular element by generating the much-needed customer insights on which stakeholders can base their decisions. FlexMR’s Head of Sales, Maria Twigge, advises in her blog on research investment, to “ensure your insight works hard for the business, and spots developing trends… and ensure that you are looking for insights beyond the immediate competitive set.”
Creating a dedicated market research and insight function in the business, not just for specific research projects, but for the purpose of connecting stakeholders to customers on a regular basis will be the key to engaging stakeholders, understanding consumer decision-making processes, future-proofing business decisions and permeating a working level of Customer Salience throughout the organisation.
Practical Measures: Setting Objectives
Artificial intelligence has become one of those staple technologies that is hard to avoid. In market research especially, it has become such a selling point for both business stakeholders and research teams that many new tools have flooded the marketplace and promised the holy grail of market research and business objectives: to save time, money and resources on every research project.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean AI should take over every single part of the market research process, but it does mean that we have opportunities to employ it wisely. And this is exactly the same in every single other part of the stakeholder business too - just because the new AI tools promise holy grail of business objectives, doesn’t mean it should be trusted with all processes all the time.
Dr Matthew Farmer, FlexMR’s Insight Manager, recently wrote about how to make good use of artificial intelligence integrations, while also paying attention to your customers to ensure it only aids in providing positive customer experiences. Matthew said, “Fundamentally, many consumers value and seek out human interaction. Whether it’s speaking to a real person when resolving an issue, feeling heard in feedback channels, or receiving empathetic service during a complex transaction, human touchpoints remain essential. AI tools, when deployed indiscriminately, risk stripping these away… A blanket rollout of AI that disregards customer preferences or concerns risks eroding trust and driving disengagement.”
To counter this particular, very significant, risk, Matthew explores how insight teams can help stakeholders connect to customers and understand where to place AI programmes in more effective places: “The first step is for insights professionals to undertake original research with their own customers. This is not about general sentiment towards AI in society; it is about how your customers feel about AI integration with your company, in specific contexts of customer engagement with your company. What do your customers fear? What do your customers value? Where do customers welcome automation, and where do they want to speak to a human? And why does that demarcation of contexts of AI versus human interaction matter to customers?”
Matthew finishes his blog with a promise, that “Companies that listen to their customers, understand their concerns, and embed customer-led insights at the heart of AI strategy decision-making will not only avoid missteps like those seen at Spotify and Coca-Cola, but they will set themselves apart in a crowded market by delivering experiences that resonate and build loyalty.”
The Impact of Digital Visual Insight Communication
In Oscar Chaplin’s recent FlexMR blog, he mentions that “the most significant barrier to a customer-led transformation is often the climax of the insights process: communication.” He notes that even the most profound, fascinating and actionable insights are useless if they fail to capture the attention and spark the action of stakeholders. Communicating with stakeholders effectively is one of the cornerstones of success for any Customer Salience strategy, so understanding how to engage stakeholders at each step of the way is vital.
Oscar Chaplin, FlexMR’s Senior Research Executive, explores the different communication tools and tactics that insight professionals can employ to communicate with stakeholders, tailored to their audience and objectives:
Data Storytelling
This moves beyond simply presenting charts. It involves translating data points into a compelling narrative that provides context, highlights critical developments, and guides the audience towards a specific conclusion. An annotated chart that walks a stakeholder through a trend is far more persuasive than a raw data table.
Visual Customer Journey Maps
These are indispensable for building cross-functional empathy. By graphically depicting every touchpoint, action, and emotion a customer experiences, these maps provide a shared organisational view of pain points and opportunities for improvement.
Strategic Infographics
For communicating key findings to time-constrained executives, infographics are excellent. They condense extensive research into a single, visually appealing, and easily digestible format, perfect for summaries, internal updates, and making key statistics memorable.
Interactive Dashboards
Interactive dashboards make data and insights more accessible and allow stakeholders to explore data themselves. By providing access to real-time data and trends, dashboards allow teams to answer their own questions and potentially monitor the impact of their decisions, fostering a culture of data-informed accountability.
Real-Life Customer-Led Transformation
As with all things practical, it’s sometimes best to see some examples in action to get a better idea of where we should aim. For something as pivotal as customer-led transformation and as unique as Customer Salience, examples are almost required for insight experts to understand the full scope of what they are able to achieve with their own business when seeking to become Customer Salient. Luckily, there are at least three great examples for us to look to in this case:
Specsavers
Specsavers, a leading British brand, carefully balances commercial success with its healthcare roots. This balance is reflected across its marketing and business strategies, ensuring consistent communication with patient-customers. Central to this is Specsavers’ customer insight panel, which informs daily decisions and shapes impactful campaigns.
Their glaucoma awareness initiative was developed using survey feedback, blending emotional resonance with clinical accuracy. Similarly, the 2023 contact lens campaign—based on research revealing fears about contact lenses—led to a 22.9% increase in sign-ups and earned a Marketing Week Award. These campaigns showcase how customer insight drives both public health messaging and commercial growth.
Lowell
Lowell, one of the UK’s largest credit management companies, supports around 25% of the population, often engaging with customers during sensitive financial situations. To foster trust and improve outcomes, Lowell uses customer insights to shape communications and enhance experiences.
Their goal is to create sustainable repayment plans while reducing the stigma around debt. Through a dedicated customer panel and a mix of research methods, Lowell builds open dialogue and empathy, helping customers feel heard and respected. These insights have also helped identify service pain points, enabling the company to improve its processes and reduce stress during debt repayment.
Octopus Energy
Octopus Energy places customer understanding at the heart of its strategy, using market research and direct engagement to shape innovation, service, and communication. The company prides itself on transparency and builds customer care into every part of its operations. CEO Greg Jackson and CMO Rebecca Debb-Simkin emphasise a hands-on, obsessive approach to staying connected with customers, often engaging with them personally. This dedication has helped Octopus grow from zero to the largest market share in the UK energy sector.
The Customer Centricity and Salience Checklist
Creating a culture of customer-led transformation isn’t going to be easy. Affecting such deep change on a wide scale is going to require time, effort and a lot of planning, and will impact areas of the organisation you might not anticipate needing to take into account. This is why we have put together a Customer-Centric Culture Checklist for insight teams globally to use as a base for their operations, so they stand the best chance at covering all required areas.
This checklist can also be used as a way to measure and remeasure your progress, as this is crucial to the lasting and sustainable success of any strategy. In using this list, it might be that you don’t quite know whether or not to check off an item on this particular list - perhaps there are some customer-first values embedded into the company mission, but not enough to influence the culture towards customer centricity; or you are currently in the process of acquiring the use of a dedicated insights platform, but there is no research able to be done on it yet. In this case, it’s always best to leave the checkbox blank. Opportunities for improvement are just as valuable as any revealing of opportunities missed. Only tick the check box if you are certain there is no more work you are able to do to a criterion.
Alongside this checkilist, there are other resources you could use to bolster your customer-led transformation. The Customer Salience Toolkit holds an in-depth strategic guide to the 4C Framework of Customer Salience, a decision-making audit template, visual templates for stakeholder communications, and more to aid in your Customer Salience journey.
