Unlocking Growth Using Customer Insights & Voice of the Customer: A Guide for C-Suite Leaders
Listening to customers is one of the most impactful ways for companies to unlock value. In today’s highly competitive market, brands must go beyond traditional market research to truly understand their customers and anticipate their needs. It is essential to distinguish between general market research and deep consumer insights. The former gives you facts about the market, while the latter conveys deeper implications about how the brand is and could be engaging with its audience. Customer insights focus more deeply on understanding the behaviors, motivations, and needs of consumers to inform product assortment, customer experience, brand, and marketing strategies.
Listening to customers – It sounds so simple, but why is it so difficult to do well?
While listening to customers seems straightforward, the challenge lies in first effectively capturing, interpreting, and utilizing these insights to truly know your customer. Then, the second step is translating those insights into products, services, and/or experiences that create long-term emotional connections. This article walks through four key tips for capturing and creating value from customer insights. Furthermore, case studies are included of real-life impact when understanding the voice of the customer is done effectively.
Four “Must-Dos” to Succeed with Customer Insights
1. Focus on Customer-Centricity at the Top
Simply listening is necessary but not sufficient. Leaders who value and act on customer feedback and insights often outperform their competitors who merely go through the motions. They create value by aligning their strategies with customer needs. As Lew Frankfort, the legendary former CEO of Coach, emphasized, “focus on the consumer, what she’s telling us, and how she’s behaving.” These insights can inform valuable product, marketing, CX and UX testing roadmaps.
2. Capture the ROI in Customer Satisfaction
There is a proven link between customer satisfaction and financial performance. Companies that excel in delivering customer satisfaction have seen a correlation between NPS (Net Promoter Score) and customer lifetime value, and in turn financial returns. According to Bain & Company, NPS explains roughly 20-60% of variation in organic growth rates among competitors in most industries. On average, the NPS leader in an industry achieved 2X high growth compared to competitors. CFOs and CEOs who understand this equation capture the ROI by investing in and acting upon customer insights – Customer Insights are not just for CMOs and CXOs.
3. Weave Data into Insights, Insights into Storytelling
Each data point only provides a limited perspective. Brands can use a combination of intelligence (e.g. sales data, qualitative and quantitative insights, social listening, site analytics, and reviews) to arrive at strategic insights about their customers. Qualitative insights often unlock the mystery behind the hard numbers to create “aha moments” for your team. They can bind together disparate data points to create a cohesive, compelling story of what products will win in the marketplace. By translating these insights into a coherent narrative that internal and external stakeholders can get behind, leaders can drive strategic initiatives to transform their businesses. Ensure your entire executive team is steeped in Customer Insights – like watching the customer videos firsthand – in order to truly understand the customer story.
4. Translate Insights into Actionable Strategies
The real value of consumer insights lies in the “SO WHAT” behind the learnings. Interpreting and translating these insights into actionable strategies is crucial for achieving business objectives. This is why strategy and insights are such a powerful combination. Often, insights departments have valuable customer knowledge hidden away in marketing without a champion to translate their insights into meaningful implications.
Customer Insights in Action: Case Studies of Real-Life Impact
1. Brand Repositioning
The Challenge: A global beauty brand was seeing declining customer frequency among loyal customers and a slowing new customer acquisition rate. Despite strong brand health metrics like awareness, declines in consideration indicated declining relevance, especially among younger customers.
The Approach: We helped the brand conduct a quantitative survey with existing customers and non-customers, tying survey data to customer transactions to understand actual behavior based on brand perceptions. We identified key customer segments and calculated share of wallet by segment, supplemented by one-on-one interviews with Gen Z customers to understand the causes of declining relevance.
The Strategic Insights & SO WHAT: Loyal customers were spending less frequently due to recent price increases, especially for opening price point SKUs. At the same time, brand communications had lost their differentiating edge and felt the same as many other brands. Younger consumers found the brand irrelevant due to minimal social media presence, especially on TikTok. These insights led to a brand relaunch strategy focused on the core brand DNA, re-establishing social-first cultural relevance, and targeted pricing initiatives to re-attract price-sensitive customers. Early results indicated the repositioning resonated with customers.
2. New Product Development for B2B SaaS Product
The Challenge: A professional services client was launching a new software product targeted at finance professionals. They needed help prioritizing the product feature roadmap and developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) given limited resources.
The Approach: We conducted in-depth customer interviews with technology decision-makers and day-to-day users to understand current workflows, identify critical features for the MVP, and gather insights on marketing the product effectively.
The Strategic Insights & SO WHAT: The summary dashboard and executive readout features were key value-adds, and cross-team collaboration capabilities were highly valued. The client was able to prioritize the most valued features for the MVP, and the marketing team fine-tuned the product value proposition as a “productivity driver for the finance team.” The product was successfully launched with customer-informed features and messaging.
3. Customer Acquisition and Retention
The Challenge: A DTC footwear brand experiencing tremendous sales growth wanted to understand its core customers and their purchase triggers and motivations to inform future product development, loyalty-driving initiatives, and brand messaging.
The Approach: We conducted in-home ethnographies with the brand’s best and prospective customers, exploring their wardrobes and key wearing occasions. While looking at their closets, we discussed their favorite outfits and footwear, including how our client’s brand fit into their key wearing occasions, how the shoes made her feel, and when/why she might consider another pair.
The Strategic Insights & SO WHAT: The best customers valued the brand for its perfect juxtaposition of comfort and statement-making style. However, most were unaware of the brand’s mission of empowering women. They desired more versatile and seasonal styles like sneakers and booties from the brand. They also felt like recent collections were missing “the wow factor.” The client has since developed a broader range of footwear based on the customer feedback we gathered. They have ensured that their signature statement-worthy styles remain key in each collection. At the same time, they’ve put their brand mission front and center by collaborating with well-known female leaders. Sales have skyrocketed, and the client has been widely recognized as a purpose-driven brand Propelled by tight alignment with the preferences and priorities of its customer.
Novel Ways to Gather Customer Insights with Gen AI
Traditional insights tools like ethnographies, focus groups, and surveys are tried and true. Gen AI changes the game for customer insights. Combining traditional methods with novel insights tools and Gen AI, we can scale the impact by uncovering deeper insights at scale at previously inconceivable price points. Gen AI allows us to synthesize both qualitative and quantitative results quickly and focus on crafting the narrative for stakeholders – and driving to implications.
Gen AI also allows small and mid-market companies to use cutting edge tools that were previously inaccessible even to large enterprises. It enables social listening andmining web browsing data at scale, deriving sentiments from customer service interactions, and even creating digital twins of customer personas to simulate and predict customer behavior. The traditional and modern methodologies reinforce each other. For example, feeding quant and qual research into an AI model will help build more robust customer personas. Working with an experienced customer insights and strategy team like mine will help your brand realize untapped growth potential by listening to, interpreting, and acting on the spoken and unspoken input that your customers are sharing. This enhances the product development timeline tremendously – allow companies to concept, develop, test, and launch products in weeks vs. months.
Summary Takeaways
By focusing on these Customer Insights principles, C-Suite leaders can unlock growth and stay ahead in a competitive market:
1. Customer-Centricity at the Top: Leadership commitment to customer insights drives superior brand performance.
2. Capture the ROI of Customer Satisfaction: Customer satisfaction is directly linked to financial success.
3. Data and Insight Driven Storytelling: Combining various data sources reveals deep strategic insights and a narrative to drive strategic initiatives internally and externally
4. Translate Insights into Actionable Strategies: Translating insights into actions is key to achieving business goals.
5. Leverage Modern Insights Tools: Leveraging Gen AI and emerging methodologies can significantly enhance the depth and speed of insights while also lowering costs. This allows brands to identify and respond to customer needs more quickly.
Meet the Author
Lilly Liu Minkove is a Strategy, Customer Insights, and Voice of the Customer (VoC) expert with over 20 years of experience in retail, luxury, beauty, and innovation. As a McKinsey-trained consultant and retail/luxury brand operator who founded ArtLogica Group, a boutique strategy and insights consultancy, she helps customer-obsessed brands resolve growth challenges and develop strategic roadmaps grounded in customer insights. Lilly blends analytical rigor and the nuances of customer behavior to deliver strategies that drive brand engagement and deliver business growth. With a global perspective from driving value for brands in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, her clients include The Body Shop, Kohl’s, CVS, Spanx, Birdies, Nine West, Caleres, Big 4 consulting firms and PE-backed portfolio companies. Lilly holds an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, and a BS in Finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She resides in Washington DC with her husband and three children and serves on the board of the DC Public Library Foundation.
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