Customer information is most valuable when it lets the business revise its decisions. Why does it usually arrive too late?
Executive Summary
Customer-centric decision-making depends as much on timing as on the quality of the insight. Stakeholders ask the CX and Insights teams for a customer perspective, but this often comes only after budgets, technology, and launch dates are finalized. In other words, when it is too late or too expensive to change.
This timing might explain why Qualtrics found that only 17% of CX practitioners can prove the monetary value of their work. This article explains how PepsiCo and Amazon involve customers earlier in the process. It presents the five steps of my Decision Partnership Shift for insights, which keep decisions open to change, and comes from my talk at the SOCAP International event in Chicago.
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The question that arrives too late
While planning my SOCAP talk, I kept returning to a single question that has haunted me for years! Why do CX leaders have to prove their commercial value, and how can they do it?
Decision-makers usually bring CX leaders into critical decisions only after they’ve made the key choices. Talk to people in Consumer Insights, Marketing, or Innovation, and you’ll hear the same frustration. We’ve agreed on the pricing architecture. Decision-makers choose the technology, make the efficiency target part of the business case, and only then ask, “What do customers think?”
By that stage, the honest answer may be unwelcome, and there’s usually very little room left to act on it anyway. In fact, timing matters as much as the quality of insight in customer-focused decisions. Even brilliant research loses impact if it arrives late. A timely read of the consumer can reshape an entire project.
Research that arrives after the answer
Anyone who has worked in innovation knows how quickly a project builds momentum. Someone spots an opportunity and early numbers look encouraging. The idea fits the strategy, and a senior stakeholder takes a liking to it, so technical work starts, you pencil in budgets, and a launch window appears on the calendar. Each step is sensible, and yet each one raises the organisation’s emotional and financial stake in the answer.
So when consumer research finally flags a weakness, the conversation shifts. Six months earlier, the team might have asked if the problem was worth solving and questioned whether the proposition solved it. Now the question has quietly become how to make the chosen answer work. Optimisation is fine, but the issue remains whether people still want to hear that something bigger must change.
I’ve watched companies become remarkably inventive when evidence challenges something they already want to do. They will say, “we failed to explain the concept clearly,” or “we produced a weak stimulus and used a sample that skewed the wrong way.” Or sometimes they suggest that we just need to “educate” the consumer.
Any of those can be true sometimes. They’re convenient explanations when a business loves its idea. Researchers tick the research box, but the research hasn’t had a real chance to change the decision. And that’s a real issue.
Why CX struggles to show its value
CX teams face the same timing problem as MRX, but often more harshly.
Picture a company that wants to cut customer service costs. The company chooses the platform. The team adds automation assumptions to the financial case, revises staffing plans, and approves the savings. Decision-makers ask CX to ensure the experience remains excellent. Someone else has already made the commercial decision elsewhere.
That goes a long way to explaining a figure from Qualtrics. Its CX Catalyst report says that only 17% of CX practitioners can prove the monetary value of their programmes.
Better metrics would certainly help teams. And I’d argue that measuring the commercial impact is easier when you actually helped make the decision. Recording satisfaction after another team’s operating decision goes live can complicate linking it to revenue. It also increases perceived value gaps.
I find the familiar call to bring the customer voice into the room far too vague. This vagueness fails to guide customer-centric decision-making. After all, you need to decide which room, at what point in the discussion, and what is still open to change? Customer evidence should determine which investment receives approval. And that customer evidence matters far more than the data we present after the money has already been committed.
Find the decision before you share the insight
I would also argue that most businesses collect far more customer data than they can use. It spans surveys, complaints, reviews, social listening, behavioural data, qualitative studies, and now also AI tools that summarise it all. And yet Insights and CX teams regularly tell me that their findings struggle to reach the people making commercial decisions. Another dashboard, report, or presentation won’t fix the problem either, because the information and the decisions run on completely different timetables.
Suppose your research shows growing frustration with a particular pack format. Interesting, certainly, but still fairly abstract. Now suppose you learn that Packaging will lock in next year’s format in six weeks. Supply is costing line modifications, and the brand team is drafting a renovation brief. The same finding has suddenly become far more valuable. A live decision and a short window mean evidence can still affect it.
That changes the job. Instead of presenting results and hoping to spark interest, the insight owner should clearly define the goals. They must grasp what those teams aim to achieve and show how consumer evidence shifts their trade-offs. A difficult pack might mean more complaints and fewer repeat purchases. Depending on who is making the decision, it could dent the premium positioning or cause a headache for a key retailer. Customer evidence gains influence only when it helps another function decide on its goal. And in order to do so, it must also be shared in that function’s language. (We all have our own departmental terms and acronyms after all)
What earlier learning looks like at PepsiCo
A recent CPG example caught my eye because it tackles the timing problem head-on. PepsiCo’s case study on its Good Warrior platform describes an innovation process that began without a predetermined product or manufacturing answer. The team first studied the category to identify human needs, moments of demand, and occasions worth improving, and only then explored technical solutions.
What interests me most is the role of prototypes. PepsiCo says rapid samples and prototypes became “decision tools” that let teams see, taste, and compare options together, and that testing concepts against its criteria exposed trade-offs early.
Consumer learning happened while the proposition, product, packaging, and commercial model were still taking shape, so information could genuinely change the outcome. It’s the company’s own account of its process, of course, so it should be read as such. But as an example of customer-centric decision-making, the sequence is still worth studying because entrenched stage-gate processes make it hard to do exactly that.
Amazon asks the hard questions first
Amazon makes the same point from a very different business. Its Working Backwards process, described by former executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr in an excerpt published by Amazon, starts by defining the customer experience. Teams write a press release and an FAQ before building anything. The authors say the goal is to shift from a company perspective to a customer perspective. (Now that’s music to my ears!) If the product isn’t meaningfully better than what already exists, they write, it “isn’t worth building”.
I’m not suggesting CPG teams write mock press releases for every pack renovation. Amazon’s economics and culture are its own, and borrowing another firm’s rituals without understanding them usually adds paperwork rather than insight.
What does travel is the order of events: the awkward customer questions get asked while the idea can still be dropped or reshaped. That matters even more now that AI lets teams generate concepts and prototypes faster than ever, because a business can now commit to the wrong answer faster too.
What you gain by earlier customer-centric decision-making
The first advantage is cost. Changing a concept on paper costs a fraction of changing a production line, a pack or a service platform once it’s been bought, so customer insight is cheapest to act on before anything is committed.
The second is credibility for CX and Insights. When your work shapes which option gets chosen, it’s far easier to link to revenue and margin, and that 17% figure from Qualtrics starts to look less inevitable.
The third advantage is better trade-offs. The business may still choose the cheaper or more profitable answer, but it does so knowing who will be affected and what the choice means for the brand promise.
The fourth is speed. Bringing the customer in early can feel like an extra step, yet it usually saves the far longer delay of rework, relaunches and damage control, once a decision finally meets real customers.
Put the customer inside decisions you already make
Of course, I would be the first to admit that there’s an obvious risk in all of this.
Most companies already suffer from too many sign-offs and stage gates, and a mandatory CX approval on every decision would turn customer centricity into exactly the bureaucracy it’s meant to overcome. For me, customer-centric decision-making means adding customer consequences to the commercial conversation already happening. For example:
- When Supply simplifies a portfolio, the team should determine whether an apparently marginal SKU matters to a particular consumer group or occasion.
- When Finance weighs a price rise, perceived value deserves a place next to elasticity and margin.
- When a service operation automates, stakeholders should ask where customers happily accept self-service and where losing a human voice changes the experience.
The business may still choose the cheaper or more profitable option. After all, customer centricity has never meant saying yes to every preference, but the business makes better choices when the trade-off is visible.
Mid-level managers are well placed to make this happen, as I wrote in my last article, because so many of these choices never reach an executive committee. For example, an insights manager can ask which decision a study is meant to inform and when that decision will really be made. And a brand manager can bring consumer understanding in before a renovation brief gets locked in.
The Decision Partnership Shift
In my SOCAP talk, See it, Say it, Shape it, I shared a five-step process for customer-centric decision-making that I call the Decision Partnership Shift. It grew out of years of watching capable CX and Insights teams present excellent findings that never traveled far enough into the business to change anything. It goes like this:
- Find the decision: what is the business actually about to choose, and when?
- Understand the shared outcome: what the people making that choice are trying to achieve and how it overlaps with what customers need.
- Translate the customer evidence into their language: whether that’s margin, volume, risk or retailer relationships.
- Build the relationship early: start long before you need a favour, so you’re invited in while options are still open.
- Make the resulting action easy to take: a recommendation that creates extra work for another team will usually lose to one that doesn’t.
None of the five steps asks anyone to produce more research. They focus on where and when research lands, and a timely insight from a modest study outweighs a costly one. The “Shape it” part of my talk only works if you arrive while there’s still something to shape.
Where QC2™ helps
QC2™ brings company priorities, customer and consumer understanding, the brand and the delivery processes into the same discussion, so none of them gets optimised in isolation. A financially attractive option can look very different once you consider the brand promise. And strong consumer demand means little if the process can’t deliver reliably. None of those perspectives should win automatically, as the value comes from deciding with all four on the table.
So before you commission the next study or add another metric to the CX dashboard, start with one question: “Which decision are we trying to improve, and when does it really start to take shape?”
It’s rarely the final approval meeting, because by then opinions, budgets and political support have usually settled long before anyone sits down to sign.
The free QC2™ Business Assessment shows how far your business practises customer-centric decision-making: whether customer understanding genuinely influences your company priorities, brand decisions and processes, or arrives after the interesting choices have already been made.
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