How a disruptor in the telco sector harnessed deep customer empathy to power rapid innovation
The client is a trailblazing UK mobile network defined by its community-centric ethos. A disruptor in the telco sector, it’s known for its excellent customer service, loyalty rewards and referral bonuses.
The brand wanted to embed customer voice into every decision made in the business. As a fast‑growing, community‑led mobile network, they recognised that staying close to customer needs was essential to maintaining their disruptive edge; they wanted an agile, always‑on way to gather understand changing needs and expectations, gain feedback and test new ideas.
Moving beyond snapshots to continuous customer understanding
Operating in a highly commoditised and competitive sector, the client needed a way to differentiate through customer experience rather than price alone. As a virtual network, direct day-to-day contact with end users was limited, increasing the risk that decisions might be shaped by assumptions, surface-level feedback or retrospective data rather than the real needs of their young customer base.
While teams across the business valued customer insight, ad hoc insight approaches meant that learnings sat in silos at times. The client also felt that one-off projects alone would not allow them to keep pace with rapidly changing customer expectations: they provided useful snapshots but not the longitudinal understanding of shifts required to guide innovation around service and proposition.
The brand already had active online customer forums and wanted to expand this customer voice focused approach to their insight, providing a place for ongoing, focused discussions on the issues that were of strategic focus for the brand, which would also allow them to service insight needs quickly and cost-effectively.
Placing the customer at the heart of decision-making
Together we launched an always-on Insight Community designed to embed customer voice into everyday decision making.
The Community is a shared asset for the organisation: it enables teams across Customer, UX, Product and Innovation to access customers quickly and confidently, in order to explore ideas and test propositions. The research roadmap is made up of both self-serve pieces and larger strategic initiatives where we act as the insight partner.
Acting as their customer closeness partner, we’ve create a flexible programme of conversational and co-creative customer closeness events, using our Your Customer Spotlight approach.
Great, user-first storytelling is key to carrying customer voice through the organisation. Promo films crafted by our Creative Studio drive internal interest and uptake in customer closeness sessions, as well as socialising the insights around the organisation. A rich programme mobile ethnography tasks and user-generated videos bring customer experience to life and make the related insights feel more ‘real’ for senior stakeholders, bridging the gap between sharing insight and driving customer-led decision-making in meetings.
Rapid innovation powered by deep customer empathy
The Insight Community has become a customer closeness transformer, powering up real-world understanding of customer needs. By creating an ongoing dialogue with customers, the Community provides an always-accessible, but also longitudinal, view of behaviours, expectations and pain points. This enables the business to spot change early, track growing shifts in the market and respond with confidence: testing, learning and iterating ideas rapidly, and reducing risk around innovation and proposition development. Propositions and comms are being tested and launched to market faster than ever, in what is already a fast-moving category; projects can now be turned around in less than a week, with results delivered via dashboards, placing key data directly in stakeholders’ hands.
The client’s internal customer empathy score has lifted by 25%, and measures show a marked uptick in awareness and understanding of key customer segments, that goes beyond surface-level knowledge to nuanced understanding of customer needs. This has been particularly evidenced in development; bringing technical teams closer to real customer experience, especially for customers with additional needs, has led to light-bulb moments of clarity and to immediate ‘quick wins’ for both client and customers.
Launch an Insight Community to transform customer closeness
Discover how an Insight Community can inform rapid innovation powered by deep customer empathy.
