The future of CX research: context and closeness in a demanding world

The Harris Poll UK, a Stagwell Company is a Business Reporter client

Exceptional customer experience doesn’t happen by chance. It’s engineered from a deep foundation of continuous customer understanding. In a marketplace defined by rapid change and rising expectations, businesses can no longer afford to assume they can anticipate customer needs. The smartest organisations are turning CX research into a strategic asset – and here’s how they’re doing it.

Executive teams need to reframe market research as a foundational driver of successful CX – fuelling agility, loyalty and sustainable growth. At the heart of this transformation is a simple but powerful truth: context matters. And in a demanding world, the brands that thrive will be those that remain genuinely close to their audiences – not just through dashboards and KPIs, but through dynamic, two-way dialogue.

Elevating CX tracking with targeted, agile research to move from ’what’ to ’what next’

In fast-moving markets, where customer expectations can shift overnight as a result of economic volatility, technological disruption or cultural change, organisations need more than trendlines to drive strategy.

This is where custom research studies, conducted alongside your CX tracker, become indispensable. This creates a dynamic, closed-loop system where performance signals spark exploration and contextual findings enrich future tracking. This built-in agility allows you to respond quickly to reputational risk, a regulatory change or an emerging customer trend – without losing sight of the bigger picture.

There’s a strong competitive advantage when the same researcher partner oversees all research elements. This allows for non-siloed, connected insights which are discovered faster and cheaper – and guarantees that nothing is missed.

The Harris Poll UK, A Stagwell Company, is currently working with a multi-channel retailer and has embedded custom, context-rich research into its CX tracking programme.

In doing so, they have been able to do three key things: first, truly understand what customers are thinking when they provide a score for “quality.” Second, size how many pain points might be remedied with an additional sales consultancy step in the purchase journey; and third, maximise conversion rates for online add-ons through making changes to the digital purchase experience.

This integrated approach delivers a holistic, agile view of the customer experience which empowers the business to stay ahead of change with clear, actionable solutions.

Bring society into the boardroom with Consumer Polling alongside your CX scorecards

The most forward-thinking CX leaders understand that staying close to people means looking into the broader societal context that shapes customer expectations. It’s not just about knowing what your customers thought last month – it’s about understanding how public attitudes, cultural dynamics and shifting priorities are shaping how your target audience feel and behave right now.

Consumer polling alongside your CX scorecards becomes a strategic asset when it captures real-time sentiment from both customers and the wider public. Unlike static surveys, it brings societal context into the boardroom including the trends, anxieties and expectations that shape brand perception. Frequent polling helps businesses stay aligned with what truly matters, especially in disruptive times. Whether it’s economic uncertainty, political instability or evolving views on sustainability, this type of research helps executive teams interpret the emotional and cultural backdrop of customer decisions.

Retailers have benefited from The Harris Poll UK’s consumer polling. They gained timely insights into public sentiment around fashion purchases amid the cost-of-living crisis and the growing appeal of pre-loved clothing. The research bridged the gap between CX insights and societal context, equipping brands with an understanding of shifting priorities and ways their CX should evolve to compete where consumers are spending less.

Crucially, when this polling is embedded within the same agency-led CX ecosystem that manages your tracking and customer experience strategy, the value multiplies. The result is a more joined-up, contextual understanding of the customer landscape, where next steps are informed by both lived experience and societal mood. Knowing what people truly care about shapes decisions that resonate both commercially and culturally.

Uncover and understand meaningful CX Signals with expert-guided Community dialogue

Digital insight communities represent a fundamental transformation in how brands connect with their audiences. These always-on platforms foster an ongoing, living dialogue with consumers – enabling co-creation, concept testing and the exploration of complex issues over time. Unlike traditional surveys that capture snapshots, insight communities generate rich, evolving engagement with highly invested and intelligently profiled participants.

The true power of these communities is unlocked when they are managed concurrently with a CX programme by a single team of multi-methodology experts. A team with deep sector knowledge and an ear finely tuned to the broader UK population, beyond your existing customer base, ensures insights from the community are not isolated but fully integrated into your CX strategy. This then provides a holistic, contextualised view of customer experiences and wider consumer attitudes.

A prominent UK financial services company partnered with The Harris Poll UK, A Stagwell Company, to leverage its multi-methodology expertise, sector knowledge and broad perspective to co-create impactful customer experiences before, and during, the launch of new proposition features. The always-on, rapid feedback targeted cohorts in the Insight Community. This quickly uncovered early pain points and highlighted whether the new features successfully remedied previous issues.

This approach allowed the brand to not only refine processes and messaging, but its full launch strategy. It optimised the complete customer experience ahead of the enhanced proposition being scaled to a larger customer base.

Final word: from insight to impact

The future of CX research isn’t just about gathering more, better or faster data – AI is already advancing that front and will continue to do so. It’s about building stronger relationships through empathy, relevance and action. In a fragmented and demanding world, customers gravitate toward brands that make them feel heard, respected and understood.

That means building on dashboards and trackers. It means investing in agile methods, consumer context and deeper dialogues that help teams move with clarity and confidence. When done right, CX research doesn’t just inform strategy – it becomes the strategy. Because in the end, the brands that listen closest – and act fastest – are the ones customers will choose.

The Harris Poll UK is a leading market research company that provides some of the UK’s best-loved brands with game-changing insights through CX, insight communities, custom research and consumer polling. We use a combination of our proprietary software alongside advisory services to deliver data insights via flexible service models.

Visit our website, theharrispoll.co.uk, to find out more.