Building the Commercial Case for Customer Intelligence
UMG's D2C merchandise stores measured success by drop revenue. A release would land, sales would spike, and that number closed the conversation. What happened to customers in between - how they navigated the store, why they abandoned, what frustrated them enough to leave one-star reviews on Trustpilot - wasn't tracked, wasn't owned, and wasn't being effectively addressed. The evidence that something was wrong was publicly visible. The internal infrastructure to act on it didn't exist.
This was a long-established organisation with deep functional silos. Marketing owned acquisition. CRM owned retention. Customer Service owned complaints. Analytics owned transaction data. The eCommerce team owned the store business. Tech owned the store infrastructure. None of these functions had a shared picture of the customer journey, a common set of metrics, or an agreed view of where experience was breaking down and opportunities were being missed.
Product Research and Insights was a new function making the case for its own existence inside that structure. Before any customer problem could be fixed, the more fundamental problem of fragmented ownership had to be named and addressed, and a cross-functional collaborative culture seeded.
The starting point was data that already existed: Shopify sales, Zendesk records, CRM, marketing analytics, on-site feedback, and the Trustpilot ratings themselves. None of it had been synthesised. I mapped every source against the full purchase journey, from first encounter to post-purchase resolution, identifying where each function's data began and ended, and crucially, what fell between.
That mapping was also a political act. It made the gaps visible in a way that no single function could dispute, because every function had contributed to it. It created the shared object the organisation had never had.
The harder work was facilitation. Getting Marketing, CRM, Analytics, Customer Service, eCommerce, and Tech into collective agreement on what to measure and why meant navigating six sets of priorities, six ownership stakes, and a shared organisational instinct to protect existing data fiefdoms. The Trustpilot ratings provided external pressure. The journey map provided common ground.
The process produced a shared KPI framework with agreed metrics at each stage of the customer journey and named ownership across functions. For the first time, the organisation had a collective picture of the customer that all of them had contributed to and signed off on.
That consensus was the deliverable. The journey map was how it was reached. It was also the investment case: funding was secured for both analytics tooling and headcount.
No dashboard replaces committed leadership that actively incentivises cross-functional collaboration. The seed was planted. In a siloed culture, that is not the end of the work. It is the beginning.
