The Zero Distance Awards identify and celebrate the work of organizations throughout the world in eliminating the distance between their employees, their operations, and their customers. 

Every year, the Business Ecosystem Alliance (BEA) acknowledges the groundbreaking work of ten organizations seeking to achieve Zero Distance.

As Brandwatch’s Director, Customer Insights, I’m delighted to announce that this year Brandwatch has been recognized with a Zero Distance award.

What does the idea of Zero Distance mean to Brandwatch?

For us, Zero Distance is about giving the customer a prime seat at the table for every decision we make. This means ensuring every staff member is equipped with up-to-date insights on who exactly our customers are and what problems they are trying to solve. We then ensure we have agile processes in place that enable us to take action to improve the customer experience based on these insights.

Ed Crook

Chief Strategy Officer

“Getting closer to our customers requires the efforts of all departments. While CS and CX teams play a critical role, it is everyone’s job to help us narrow the gap.”

What does Brandwatch do at a practical level to get closer to customers?

We have a Customer Centricity Steering Group made up of stakeholders from all departments of the business. This group helps to ensure insights are shared across departments and are integrated into the workflows of every team. We’ve created resources such as customer personas which help all staff understand, empathize with, and better serve our customers.

This group also helps align our company-wide initiatives so that there is cohesion across our organization to the benefit of our customers. We aim to synchronize initiatives so that customer touchpoints are utilized to add value to their journey and experience with us. 

Additionally, we look for innovative ways to involve our customers in our product development processes: 

  • We hold internal Q&As with a different customer each month to learn more about their day-to-day challenges and feedback
  • We ensure front-line staff are feeding customer comments directly into our product roadmap planning tool
  • And, of course, we use our own Brandwatch Consumer Research software to research customer needs and to spot trends.

How has my role played a part in this?

At Brandwatch we love data. But as we’ve grown, it’s been harder to maintain one source of truth for our customers. That’s where my role as Director, Customer Insights comes in, to ensure we have a strategy for not only actively listening to our customers, but also using all our customer insights in a coherent, joined up way across the business. 

I champion customer centricity in the business and make sure we’re asking “Why are we doing it this way?" and "How do we know this will benefit the customer?”.

What are your future plans to bridge the gap to customers?

We’re definitely not done evolving, but we’ve made some big steps forward in the past year in our journey to making our organization more empathetic and understanding of our customers. We will be continuing to improve our processes for capturing customer feedback as we, and our customers, grow.

We’re also excited to be expanding our customer Community in 2023, an online portal for users to engage and learn from one another. The Community platform will not only provide huge value for our customers in terms of peer-to-peer learning, but also strengthen our understanding of what our customers need and want from our products and services, creating a circle of value for the customer.