GROWTH STRATEGY & INNOVATION
Moving customer understanding from head to heart
How I helped a major connectivity provider turn customer insight into foundational improvements and bold ideas for building deeper brand affinity.
THE SITUATION
A major connectivity provider was trailing competitors on brand love—a gap with implications for critical business metrics including customer acquisition and retention.
The executive sponsor brought together senior leaders from across the organization to make brand love an enterprise-wide responsibility, rather than something owned by marketing alone.
The challenge was not a lack of customer data. Leaders knew the segments, satisfaction scores, pain points, and operational breakdowns.
What was missing was a deeper, more human understanding of who those customers were beyond their relationship with the company—as parents, partners, caregivers, workers, and people navigating complicated lives.
THE TASK
My team and I were brought in to design a day-long experience that would give senior leaders skin in the game: a visceral understanding that they were responsible for building brand love, and that doing so started with understanding customers more deeply.
The experience needed to move leaders:
From knowing customers → to feeling their lives
From improving touchpoints → to imagining a better relationship
From seeing barriers → to recognizing their role in removing them
The question we needed to answer was:
Who are these people when they're not customers, and what would it take for the organization to earn a meaningful place in their lives?
THE APPROACH
This work depended on a close partnership with the client. They held the deep knowledge of their customer segments, focus groups, market research, and pain points; our role was to help determine what would matter most in the room and translate that knowledge into an experience leaders could feel and act on.
As strategy lead, I set the direction for that translation—aligning our team and client stakeholders around the shifts we wanted leaders to make, then working together to determine the right content, level of detail, and experience to get them there.
See the person, not the customer segment
We developed rich customer portraits that integrated quantitative segment data with day-in-the-life narratives, personal priorities, routines, relationships, and sources of stress and concern. Rather than starting with what customers bought, we started with what they were trying to accomplish in their lives.
2.
Step into their world, literally
We transformed those portraits into three-dimensional “slices of life” that senior leaders could physically step into. Furniture, props, and audio made each world feel specific and real, shifting leaders’ understanding of customers from purely intellectual to emotional.
Realistic props were designed and produced with details that spoke to the things that each customer persona cared about most.
Each customer exhibit showcased a diffrent part of the home or office that leaders could step into.
Imagine what can create love
From inside these customer worlds, leaders worked in cross-functional groups to generate bold ideas. Freed from existing products and touchpoints, they considered how the brand could help people feel safer, more supported, more connected, or more in control of their lives.
Confront what’s eroding trust
Recognizing that bold perception-shifting ideas didn’t mean anything if the basics weren’t being delivered, we introduced realistic, data-informed scenarios showing the most common customer pain points across the experience. Senior leaders pin pointed moments in these scenarios that should never have happened, generating ideas on fixes.
Surface the barriers to change and their role in removing them
Finally, groups traced those experiences back to the systems producing them in the first place: policies, incentives, decisions, behaviors, and cross-functional dependencies. Together, they identified immediate actions as well as mindset and behavior shifts that would need to be true for the foundations of the customer experience to be secured.
THE OUTCOME
The experience created a shared, emotionally resonant understanding of customers across a group of senior leaders who typically approached the relationship from different parts of the organization.
Participants left with a broader view of what customers were trying to accomplish—not simply what they needed from a connectivity provider. They also surfaced the foundational breakdowns, cross-functional barriers, and leadership behaviors that had to change for a more trusted customer experience to become possible.
The executive sponsor and participating leaders praised the experience for its candor, seamless execution, and ability to generate a new level of alignment and energy in the room.
Most importantly, the workshop reframed brand love as something the entire enterprise had to earn:
Fix what creates frustration, build what creates trust, then imagine what could create love.