For market research professionals, the facts make difficult reading. According to a Harvard Business Review article, only 11% of decisions affecting customers are backed by customer insight. So if the remaining 89% of decisions that affect the customer are made intuitively, it would explain why consumers are finding little real improvement in their overall experiences with UK companies.

KPMG Nunwood’s latest report, Ignite growth: connecting insight to action, shows that – despite many businesses focusing intensely on customer experience – there has been little improvement in customers’ perceptions of their experiences.

The report includes the UK’s overall Customer Experience Excellence (CEE) score, a weighted average metric, mapped against six pillars – personalisation, time and effort, resolution, integrity, expectations and empathy – that drive brand advocacy and loyalty. This rose from 7.08 (out of 10 ) in 2017 to 7.13 in the latest analysis.

Closer inspection of companies leading the way in this year’s rankings reveals one common characteristic improving successful customer experience – most are customer-insight driven. A majority of the decisions made by these higher-ranking businesses are grounded in deep customer insight – and, when intuition is required, it’s usually drawn from a real closeness to the customer.

In our most recent US report, Engineering a human touch into a digital future, a leading American financial services brand aptly described its insight process as ‘customer surround sound’. It demonstrated that an understanding of the customer’s psyche is accompanied by the 
constant drum beat of their changing needs and requirements.

Research into people’s lives isn’t enough, though; the brand’s staff must also live like a customer and experience what is really happening. As the saying goes, ‘to really understand me you have to walk a mile in my shoes’.

The leading US brand demonstrated that it is an environment of constant customer immersion for its staff, where customer understanding affects every dimension of the business. Leading organisations follow the golden rules for demonstrating and delivering empathy, including: investing time to listen to their customer; providing the right emotional response; and demonstrating that they care.

Turning our attention back to the latest UK analysis, financial services also ranked highly, with first direct, Metro Bank and John Lewis Finance securing three of the top five spots. Those performing well in the rankings demonstrated a keen focus on understanding their customer.

Indeed, as a chief executive of one of the leading financial services firms said: “It would be impossible to deliver a consistently high standard of customer service without insight. The world is moving at a pace never seen before. The things we think of today as certainties are only certain to be wrong – as innovations and attitudes change. We use insight to stay ahead of the curve. It runs through the business, from the people speaking to customers directly, to the teams analysing the data. It’s not just the senior leaders – it’s through everything and everyone.”

For insight to make a difference, not only does it have to lock on to where decisions are made, but it must then shape how those decisions are taken.

Decision-mapping and stakeholder-profiling are new tools in the insight professional’s toolbox. Those working in insight today must understand their stakeholders, and the parameters within which they operate, with the same zeal as they seek to understand the customer. It is no longer enough to provide dashboards and reports. These have a purpose, but delivering superior customer understanding across the organisation requires immersion, co-creation and involvement.

The start point, however, is decision-targeting, and stakeholder personas are a useful mechanism. These should include the following:

• Problems: the issues on their current agenda
• Priorities: the most pressing problems
• Participation: the decisions they take in combination with others
• Personality: how they best assimilate data (numbers, pictures, immersion)
• Decision span: the decisions they take on their own.

Making insight timely and relevant is half the battle; the other half is creating a demand for insight from the top.

There are different ways of making sure the customer’s voice is heard by leaders in the business. The CEO of another leading financial services firm in this year’s UK rankings hosts a customer ‘heartbeat’ meeting every Monday, in which senior executives from around the firm consider the customer feedback from the previous week. They discuss what is and isn’t working, and consider what they need to focus on in the coming week from a customer perspective.

This sort of approach creates a consistent and pervasive view that influences customer decision-making elsewhere in the organisation. The role of the insight team is to ensure that each function has the right information and insight to bring to such a meeting, allowing them to understand their stakeholders in detail.

For these organisations, insight is driven top-down, not insight-team-up. In effect, the insight team helps with an enterprise-wide, three-part process. It starts with the acquisition and integration of data, combining social, operational and primary data into frameworks, to distil insights rapidly. Prescriptive analytics and business understanding then focus activities to incite action, and, finally, the right culture and environment ensures insights guide activity and growth.

It is managing this process – spanning integration, action and growth – that has led to thousands of consumers ranking certain brands more highly in this year’s top 100 for customer experience. Strong performers commonly identify managing the wider insight process as a business-critical component. It is at the heart of these organisations, the lifeblood enabling them to truly drive organisational growth.

David Conway is director at KPMG Nunwood

This article was first published in Issue 24 of Impact.