Retailers are racing to invest heavily in customer data, analytics, loyalty programs, AI, and marketing technologyi, yet most continue to struggle to convert those investments into measurable business outcomes without a wider connection to organisational change.
Globally, large retailers hire dunnhumby to conduct comprehensive assessments of their customer base and value model: their loyalty programme mechanics, customer data capabilities, technology ecosystem, operating model, and organisational processes. The original objective is often to evaluate customer and loyalty capabilities but, increasingly, what emerges during discovery is a broader lesson about business transformation itself.
Most retailers have clear pain points and see opportunities to address technology gaps, lack of data, and loyalty strategy optimisations. However, it has become clear across market contexts that correcting these gaps in isolation would often not make a meaningful impact on the business; the new initiatives would not be adopted or shared across key internal teams (such as loyalty, merchandising, marketing and finance) without an organisational change activation backed by the retailer’s top executives.
Data doesn't create change. Decisions do.
Retailers invest significantly in customer data and do not suffer from a lack of insight or available martech tools, yet, a recent Gartner survey of CMOs reported that over 67% of martech software features remain unused after launch, i.e. organisations capture less than one-third of the value expected from digitalisation efforts, often due to siloed ways of working and fragmented decision-making.ii
dunnhumby field experience, as well as broad market trends identified by McKinseyiii, underscore this striking observation: retailers struggle to embed customer loyalty insight into the governance processes, decision frameworks, and cross-functional routines that drive business performance.
This dissonance is increasingly common. Retailers often reference the sophistication of their technology stack or the volume of available data to prove their customer maturity, but these are simply inputs that enable successful customer outcomes. In reality, a stronger indication of customer maturity is how consistently customer insight influences business decisions and creates measurable value.
Whether the decision concerns promotions, pricing, assortment, media investment, or loyalty strategy, customer insight must become part of the operating rhythm of the business.
The stakes are significant. dunnhumby researchiv finds that retailers leading in personalisation outperform competitors on customer loyalty, share of wallet, visit frequency, and emotional connection. Top personalisation performers achieve a 41% higher share of wallet and a 14% increase in strongly emotionally connected customers compared with laggards.v
Transformation happens between functions
Stakeholder interviews from recent dunnhumby client engagements reveal an encouraging reality: leaders across marketing, merchandising, loyalty, analytics, digital, operations, and executive leadership are usually all aligned around the importance of becoming more customer-centric.
The challenge is not vision. The challenge is coordination: aligning siloed teams with disparate working styles to a common language and a clear step-by-step action plan to make the vision achievable.
High-quality work is happening within individual teams, but opportunities are often lost as decisions cross organisational boundaries.
Technology isn't the constraint
Many retailers initially view these challenges through a technology lens and look to vendors to solve for a missing capability. Yet dunnhumby assessments often uncover a different reality.
At the point of planning for or implementing new technology, are the teams asking the right questions? For example, before asking what new technology is needed, organisations should ask:
Are they extracting maximum value from the capabilities they already possess?
Will the new technology fix critical flaws and unlock growth, or will it suffer from the same limitations hindering the existing value chain?
What operational limitations might doom this initiative from the start (such as fragmented ownership, competing priorities, inconsistent governance, or unclear accountability for customer outcomes)?
In many cases, the excitement of another platform implementation overshadows the practical challenge of creating improved ways of working within the organisation.
Why customer expertise is becoming a transformation capability
Perhaps the most valuable insight from the recent dunnhumby loyalty & personalisation client engagement is that customer strategy and business transformation are increasingly inseparable. Customer understanding is no longer just a growth capability, it is a transformation capability.
dunnhumby's Retailer Preference Indexvi has consistently shown that retailers with stronger customer value propositions outperform competitors on long-term growth. In fact, retailers in the highest-performing quartile grow approximately three times faster over the long term than retailers in the lowest quartile.
The implication is profound: understanding your customer creates value not only by improving customer experiences, but also by revealing where organisational behaviors are helping, or preventing, that value from being realised.
The real work of transformation
Most retailers already know where they want to go.
They want stronger loyalty. Better personalisation. More effective use of AI and agentic capabilities. Greater monetisation of customer insights. Faster growth.
Defining this future state is straightforward; the challenge is adjusting the habits, routines, and decision-making processes that define the current state and act as hidden barriers to success.
Technology, data and strategy all matter, but lasting transformation happens when people collaborate differently, make decisions differently, and place customer understanding at the center of how the organisation operates.
That may be the most important lesson from dunnhumby’s recent client engagements.
Customer insight is not simply a tool for growth, it is one of the most powerful catalysts for business transformation a retailer can build.
What should retail leaders do next?
For executives pursuing growth through loyalty, personalisation, agentic AI, or customer data, five questions should anchor your early planning through to execution:
Are customer insights influencing your most important decisions, or simply informing reports?
Do your merchandising, marketing, digital, operations, and finance teams share common customer-focused objectives and are these objectives measurable?
Where does decision-making break down between functions, even when individual teams are performing well?
Are you fully utilising the customer and technology capabilities you already have before investing in new ones?
What organisational habits would need to change for customer-centricity to become part of everyday decision-making? Who in your business must own this change?
Among market-leading retailers, loyalty is now repositioned from a cost centre to a growth engine. Not simply due to technology investment or access to largescale customer data, but by aligning teams of people and changing behaviour to prioritise customer insight-led decisions.
Want to find out more about how working with dunnhumby could turn customer insight into growth, loyalty and lasting competitive advantage?
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