Building Customer-Centricity: The Key to Driving Growth

In today’s competitive market, companies aspire to be ‘data-driven’, but in reality, only 29% succeed, according to Forrester¹. It’s little surprise, then, that the 2025 UK Customer Satisfaction Index² has improved by just 0.3 points from last year and remains as low as it was a decade ago. In spite of huge investments in research and insights to understand the customer, that customer is not being heard.

It is not enough to find out what customers want. Companies must act on that to drive customer-centricity. And the cornerstone of that action is to communicate the customer perspective powerfully - to bring customers to life and place them at the heart of organizational decision-making.

Last year, I had the privilege of presenting at the Customer Salience Summit (CSS), hosted by FlexMR in the UK. My talk, ‘Beyond Storytelling: What Your Insights Department Can Learn from Hollywood’, focused on the challenge of bringing the voice of the customer to life in compelling ways – including learnings from Hollywood on how to enable insight teams to get attention and create engaging communications.

The one-day hybrid event, attended by over 200 clients, served as a powerful platform and reminder to explore the critical role of insights in shaping customer-centric strategies.

The summit also showcased experts from Confused.com, British Gas, Saga, and others, all rallying behind one key takeaway: actionable customer insight is key to driving meaningful, successful organizational growth.

Why Should We Care About Customer Salience?

Customer salience means keeping the customer at the core of all business decisions. While insights provide valuable data, their true power lies in how they are used. Indeed, an insight that is not used is like a song that is not sung.

As an industry we expend vast amounts of money and energy on getting data, gathering, listening, checking, organizing and cleaning it. But we spend much less time on both developing insights from that data and on communicating them to the rest of our organization.

Well-communicated insights can: 

• Align teams across departments. 
• Create a customer-centric culture. 
• Ensure that customer needs and preferences shape our strategies and drive innovation.   

The Takeaway: A Springboard Into Action

To truly harness the potential of customer salience, businesses must prioritise the integration of insights into their decision-making processes. And that means we need to up our communication game; to win the hearts and minds of our colleagues and bring the customer to vivid and visceral life every day.

References

1 https://www.forrester.com/blogs/16-03-09-think_you_want_to_be_data_driven_insight_is_the_new_data/

2 https://www.instituteofcustomerservice.com/research-insight/ukcsi/