Many businesses say they’re customer centric. The ones that truly are? They invite customers into the room—live, unfiltered and ready to shape change.
C Space has been going to a few conferences recently. While many shiny techniques evolve and trends come and go, we’ve noticed some key themes hold firm over time.
Shifting customer insight challenges: Data, ethics and impact in the AI Era
Evolving methods then end up addressing to greater or lesser degrees the age-old problems. (That’s not to say we aren’t going through a genuine industry transformation right now: we are, but bear with us). So:
- Quality data?
Yes, the industry’s dirty laundry, increasingly aired in public and now with AI-solutions for AI-problems. - Doing the right thing?
Topics such as cultural intelligence and sustainability are still appropriately in the conversation, but still a bit on the side stages, outside of dedicated conferences. - Impact?
Ah yes, impact. The handwringing of old about “getting a seat at the table” is now being somewhat repurposed by “AI-led transformations that cut time, cost and scale impact”. In many ways, good. “Qual at scale” is starting to do what strategic insight always intended to do: getting to senior stakeholders directly; impacting their decisions; satisfying board KPIs; offering ROI. Clearly this approach has a seat at the table going forward, especially in a low-cost, high-speed environment.
But that’s not the whole story, is it? It’s certainly not the whole value proposition of customer insight.
Storytelling and human insights: The missing piece in customer-centric culture
What felt a bit lacking this conference season was some of the good stuff around authentic human stories and what really engages people.
What really creates impact. In the minds of those across the organization, not just in the analytical brains and spreadsheets of the senior folk. What inspires!
That’s to say, a) good old-fashioned two-way conversations and b) related stories, and the inspiration that these always create when showcased right. Even more so when there’s a live, interested audience to listen in.
We’ve all heard the campfire stories. Conversations with real people just land differently—they spark connection, empathy and inspiration in a way robots never can. We can’t get enough of rambling on to each other (remember watercooler moments, anyone?). We love eavesdropping on chats between others. Especially when it’s a bit juicy, or when there’s someone really senior involved that you don’t hear in chatty mode that often. It actually gives us something to gossip about when our partners ask us, “How was work today?” That’s just how we roll, isn’t it?
The brilliant irony was that all the best AI / qual at scale-related presentations did just this, on stage, to us conference-goers. A rock-solid facilitator with a credible panel, ready to share their “real stories”. Within a stone’s throw of us (“look, it’s the CMO of AnyCo and she said what she really thinks!”)
But is the sector still bothering to offer this open goal of a mode of information transmission and inspiration to its clients, or its employees for building customer-first strategies?
Well, C Space is, and so is Bupa.
The C Space & Bupa partnership: Building a customer-centric culture
Bupa is on a journey to being the “world’s most customer-centric healthcare organization”. It recognized the value in getting customers in front of employees via a live panel discussion to create change and came to C Space for support.
To cut to the chase, this live panel work (jargon alert: “Customer Closeness”) is one of C Space’s areas of real specialism. We love recruiting, preparing, facilitating and unlocking all the depth and color of real people’s real stories, and getting a whole room full of client stakeholders, or even a whole business, to listen in live. And get inspired. We’ve got pretty good at it over the last 25 years.
Over the past 10 of those years, C Space and Bupa UK have had an unbroken partnership. C Space used all that latent knowledge, and a Bupa customer insight community as the basis to recruit and run multiple live panel sessions.
This included 3 x virtual panels on “The future of wellbeing”, “Non-customer views on private healthcare” and “Evolving digital healthcare”:
- Running end to end logistics, content and activation: driving pre-event comms, designing invites, recruiting target customers and non-customers and collating post-event feedback to close the loop, offering subject matter expertise and strategic feedback
- Facilitating the sessions using expert moderators with 15+ years’ experience to keep the conversations focused, while drawing out meaningful stories
- Using our proprietary research techniques from the C Space Way to unlock more color and depth from these conversations
- Averaging c.65 employee attendees per session
- Achieving 90% + positive feedback from attendees
- Gaining 90% + likelihood to attend a future panel from attendees
And, we even worked with Bupa to arrange their first ever live, face to face customer panel, in their head office in London. Four customers in the room on stage, and two beamed in from Australia, hosted by CEO Iñaki Ereño and facilitated by CSO Tara Lajumoke. Discussing their real-life experiences of Bupa, as customers:
- C Space again owned all logistics, recruitment, briefings of customers and senior management pre-event
- Enabling 100 Bupa employees to observe the live show, in the office
- Helping them understand real CX pain points and what improvements were needed
- Creating a real draw. “We’ve never had so many people at an event in the office before, even pre – Covid. It was a huge success and we couldn’t have asked for it to have gone any better.” (Janet Liddle, former Insights Manager, Bupa)
If you think that was brave of Bupa, perhaps even braver was running a live panel of their NPS detractors, which they also did with us, in front of a live audience. We handpicked customers from different walks of life—expats, business owners, cancer survivors, care home residents—to share their real stories. And live streamed it on their internal employee engagement platform, with 100+ attendees per session. Because they’re serious about making CX improvements.
It turns out, then, that businesses that are really focused on building a customer-centric culture can do something shocking: have a real conversation with customers. Live!
So, what is your business doing to be brave, and truly customer centric?
Are you up for setting aside time to talk to customers and hear their real stories, in front of your business? To be prepared to learn what they have to tell you to drive change? And inspire your employees to change what they do, not just what they know?
If you’re ready to build a truly customer-centric culture, we’ll help you design the conversations that change minds—and drive real impact. Let’s talk.
