Blog post
September 30, 2019

The 3 pillars for every winning customer-obsessed strategy

With customers being the cog of an organisation’s success, having a customer-obsessed outlook can provide your organisation with a competitive advantage.

Learn how to have a winning customer-obsessed strategy.

In this blog, we outline what it means to be customer-obsessed, it’s importance and 3 tips to get you started on the customer-obsessed journey.

What does it mean to be customer-obsessed?

Customer obsession means constantly listening to your customers and then continuously testing, enhancing and personalising the customer experience.

It’s an outside-in approach that enables your organisation to utilise data-driven insights. It also provides opportunities to increase your customer lifetime value as their needs and pain points are better understood. All these factors enhance the opportunity to provide quality and meaningful experiences.

Observing through the customer lens is key to succeed in today’s competitive landscape. As an organisation, prioritising customers at all stages of their purchasing journey is pivotal in retaining their loyalty. Improving the overall customer experience such as incorporating new technologies into your ecosystem can lead to your customers promoting your organisation for you.

Are you a customer-centric or a customer-obsessed organisation?

First things first, let’s understand the difference between a customer-centric organisation and a customer-obsessed one. Customer-centric organisations often focus on customer acquisition and experiment with methods to make acquisition faster, cheaper, and more effective. Customer-obsessed organisations focus more on customer retention, increasing satisfaction and loyalty with the objective to increase customer lifetime value.

According to Gartner, customer-centric organisations often act reactively when customers reach out to the company with needs or pain points. Comparatively, customer-obsessed organisations act proactively to prevent customers from experiencing pain points or gaps in their experience.

Without developing the right strategy, processes, and data insights to adequately serve target audiences, there is a risk of falling behind your competitors, and potentially creating campaigns that are inefficient. This could have a negative impact on your marketing ROI.

3 pillars for every winning customer-obsessed strategy

1. Get to know your customers through data

Collecting data about your customer is not enough on it’s own. Captured data must include relevant information such as their demographics, buying habits and activity status. This allows effective analysis and insights to provide suitable (and improved) business decisions to be made.

As an organisation, take the time to listen to your customers, invest in people, tools and programs to collect feedback and translate it into meaningful insights. Understanding customer experiences from various touch points can help empower your organisation to provide a better experience and promote customer loyalty.

2. Understand the customer journey

To be customer obsessed, a seamless customer experience is imperative. To achieve this, the customer journey should be understood as it can provide a full view of how your organisation interacts with your customers as well as provide insight into how your brand is perceived.  Having alignment across various departments of your organisation i.e sales, marketing etc. enables the customer journey to be mapped out correctly and ensures the customer experience is positive.

3. Anticipating customer needs

Using the customer data that has already been collected, you can drill down further and use this data as a way to predict and anticipate your customer’s buying habits for future interactions with them. Additionally, having insight into their preferred communication channel can be valuable to grab their attention on new products or services that may become available.

Ensure to use collected data effectively. Collected data can give awareness into customer trends and provide an indication into additional services that could be beneficial for their success (as well as yours). 

Customers are open to trying new things, allowing the freedom to trial, experiment and arrange more impactful engagements. Anticipating your customer’s needs is the formula for building and strengthening customer relationships.

As today’s customers are more empowered than ever, it means organisations servicing these customers must be equally empowered. If your organisation is properly aligned with your customers, you not only understand what the customer is doing but also the why.  

Knowing your customers means understanding what’s going on in their world and proactively help them navigate the media environment. 

If you would like to learn more about gathering media data and insights or anything media intelligence related, get in touch with us today.

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Every stakeholder relationship is different, and managing them effectively takes more than a one-size-fits-all approach.

From campaign planning to long-term engagement, having the right tools and strategy in place can make the difference between missed connections and meaningful impact.

This guide covers:

  • Identifying and understanding your key stakeholders
  • Mapping and modelling for influence and engagement
  • Equipping your team to maintain and grow strategic relationships

Get your copy now

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Blog
The fundamentals of stakeholder strategy

A practical guide to tailored stakeholder management, offering strategies and tools to identify, map, and nurture relationships.

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At our Taking Back Trust panel, speakers didn’t just agree that public confidence in media, institutions and messaging is shifting. They challenged long-held assumptions about how trust is earned in the first place.

Some framed the current moment as a genuine “trust crisis”. Others saw something more layered, a redefinition of who and what audiences choose to believe. As Monica Attard OAM pointed out, trust in journalism today is shaped by whether audiences feel respected. Not spun, not lied to, not taken for a ride. When news feels ideologically loaded or out of step with what people know to be true, trust quickly erodes.

The panel made it clear that trust isn’t built through repetition. It’s forged through clarity, transparency and context. Two pillars stood out: accessibility and personal relevance. Trust is no longer just about the messenger. It’s about whether the message feels honest, and whether it meets people where they are.

Transparency isn’t optional. 

The rise of polarised news and fragmented information ecosystems hasn’t just affected the public. It has reshaped how media outlets themselves think about trust. As John McDuling of Capital Brief noted, earning trust today requires more than getting the story right. It demands openness about how the story was made.

That means being transparent about where information comes from, clearly attributing sources, and acknowledging mistakes. “Correcting errors is a strength, not a weakness,” he said. Vague or thinly sourced reporting, once more easily accepted, no longer cuts through. Trust is now built through precision, accountability, and the willingness to show your work.

The medium is shifting. So is the audience.

Much of the discussion circled back to how audiences are evolving. Younger generations aren’t just consuming news differently, they’re questioning the idea of shared truth altogether. There’s a growing scepticism toward objectivity as a fixed standard. Instead, content that reflects personal experiences and values tends to resonate more.

This shift is most visible on platforms like TikTok and Reddit, which panellists noted as primary news sources for many younger users. People now engage with information on their own terms, often picking up snippets in their feed before diving deeper through Google searches or podcasts. According to Dr Lisa Portolan, this more autonomous style of consumption is changing how trust is formed, and how communication needs to adapt.

She highlighted a broader transformation in the nature of trust itself. For most of human history, trust was built locally. Institutional trust, in government, media, or politics, only became dominant in the last few centuries. Now, technology is redistributing that trust again. People are more likely to believe a peer or content creator than a traditional source. That shift, Portolan said, represents both a degradation of institutional trust and a redefinition of what trust looks like in a decentralised environment.

From a communications perspective, it also means navigating synthetic and AI-driven research with care. When organisations don’t fully understand their audiences, there’s a risk of being misled by artificial signals. The solution, as the panel noted, lies in truly knowing your audience, not just where they are, but how they decide who and what to trust.

AI is already changing the game

If there was one issue that united the panel, it was the urgency around artificial intelligence.

The conversation went beyond newsroom tools or job losses. The focus was trust. Panellists raised concerns about bias in training data, a lack of transparency from AI providers, and the risk of narrowing information loops shaped by commercial deals.

Monica Attard spoke about the dangers of closed systems, where the same sources are surfaced repeatedly, and the need to keep human values at the centre. Relying on technology alone, she said, won’t solve trust issues.

The panel returned to attribution as a key differentiator. As John McDuling noted, one way to stand apart from AI-generated content is to clearly link to original sources, especially those outside commercial LLM training sets. He wasn’t convinced AI would help build trust, at least not yet. These tools always give an answer, even when it’s wrong.

He compared the emerging response to an organic food movement. “You can trust this was generated by humans.” In a more artificial information environment, that may become the most important signal of all.

What’s next

There’s no silver bullet. But across the board, the panel pointed to consistency, transparency, and nuance as essential tools, even when messages are uncomfortable or contested.

Sometimes trust isn’t about getting everything right. It’s about showing up, being clear about your limits, and staying open to scrutiny.

Ngaire Crawford challenged common assumptions about media literacy, pointing out that the problem isn’t confined to young people. In fact, older audiences are often more vulnerable to misinformation because they struggle to navigate the digital information environments around them. The challenge, she said, is not just media literacy, but informational literacy, knowing how to critically assess and access trustworthy content.

From a communications perspective, that calls for vigilance. People want to feel in control of the information they consume. They want to research for themselves, but often can’t find what they need. That gap creates space for misinformation to thrive, and it raises new questions about how information will be surfaced by AI.

The answer? Over-communicate. Provide written sources, supporting detail, and longer-form content where possible. It’s not just about the message or the sound bite. It’s about making sure people have access to the information they need to come to their own conclusions.

Missed the panel?

Watch Taking back trust on demand. 

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Blog
The fragile currency of trust: what the panel unpacked

At our Taking Back Trust panel, speakers didn’t just agree that public confidence in media, institutions and messaging is shifting. They challenged long-held assumptions about how trust is earned in the first place. Some framed the current moment as a genuine “trust crisis”. Others saw something more layered, a redefinition of who and what audiences […]

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Across the communications landscape, teams are being asked to do more with less, while staying aligned, responsive and compliant in the face of complex and often shifting stakeholder demands. In that environment, how we track, report and manage our relationships really matters.

In too many organisations, relationship management is still built around tools designed for customer sales. CRM systems, built for structured pipelines and linear user journeys, have long been the default for managing contact databases. They work well for sales and customer service functions. But for communications professionals managing journalists, political offices, internal leaders and external advocates, these tools often fall short.

Stakeholder relationships don’t follow a straight line. They change depending on context, shaped by policy shifts, public sentiment, media narratives or crisis response. A stakeholder may be supportive one week and critical the next. They often hold more than one role, and their influence doesn’t fit neatly into a funnel or metric.

Managing these relationships requires more than contact management. It requires context. The ability to see not just who you spoke to, but why, and what happened next. Communications teams need shared visibility across issues and departments. As reporting expectations grow, that information must be searchable, secure and aligned with wider organisational goals.

What’s often missing is infrastructure. Without the right systems, strategic relationship management becomes fragmented or reactive. Sometimes it becomes invisible altogether.

This is where Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) enters the conversation. Not as a new acronym, but as a different way of thinking about influence.

At Isentia, we’ve seen how a purpose-built SRM platform can help communications teams navigate complexity more confidently. Ours offers a secure, centralised space to log and track every interaction, whether it’s a media enquiry, a ministerial meeting, or a community update, and link it to your team’s broader communications activity.

The aim isn’t to automate relationships. It’s to make them easier to manage, measure and maintain. It’s about creating internal coordination before the external message goes out.

Because in today’s communications environment, stakeholder engagement is not just a support function. It is a strategic capability.

Interested in how other teams are managing their stakeholder relationships? Get in touch at nbt@isentia.com or submit an enquiry.

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Blog
SRM vs CRM: which is right for PR & Comms teams?

Across the communications landscape, teams are being asked to do more with less, while staying aligned, responsive and compliant in the face of complex and often shifting stakeholder demands. In that environment, how we track, report and manage our relationships really matters. In too many organisations, relationship management is still built around tools designed for […]

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