Summer Insight Series: The Real Work Starts After Go-Live

Five Lessons I've Learned from Working Alongside Some of the UK's Leading Retailers and Global Brands

By Molly Peake, Head of Customer Success & Partnerships, AUDIENCES 

One of the privileges of working in Customer Success is having a perspective that few people get to see. By the time a customer reaches my team, the platform has been selected, contracts have been signed and the foundations are already in place. Together with the customer, we've already identified the key business objectives, priority activation channels, initial use cases and the commercial outcomes we're aiming to achieve.

As implementation gets underway, our focus shifts to turning that strategy into a detailed activation plan and preparing for launch. From the outside, it can feel like the work is done. In reality, it's only just beginning, and this is where it gets exciting.

This is the point where strategy becomes execution, audiences move from whiteboards into live campaigns and organisations begin discovering what's actually possible with their customer intelligence. Over the last few years, I've had the opportunity to work alongside data providers, retailers, travel brands, healthcare organisations and publishers, each at different stages of their customer intelligence journey. Every organisation has its own priorities and ways of working, but looking across those experiences, I've noticed something interesting.

The brands that achieve the strongest commercial outcomes rarely have the biggest teams or the most complex technology stacks. Instead, they share a mindset. They treat customer intelligence as something that evolves continuously, not something that's implemented once. 

Working across multiple organisations also gives me the opportunity to spot patterns that individual businesses rarely have the chance to see themselves.  Looking back, there are five lessons that consistently stand out.

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1. The best customer intelligence programmes begin with one business problem

One of the first questions I hear is often: Which audience should we build first?

It's a logical question, but I've learned that the most successful programmes actually start somewhere else. They start with a business objective. Perhaps the goal is to improve return on advertising spend, but often it is objective orientated, such as driving customer loyalty or supporting a retail media strategy. Once that objective is clear, building audiences becomes significantly easier because every decision is guided by a commercial outcome rather than a technical process.

The most successful customers I've worked with don't begin by asking what the platform can do. They begin by asking what the business needs to achieve. We work with the marketing teams to set these objectives up so we can build out audiences based on objectives.

2. The most successful marketing teams never stop building

One of the biggest shifts I've seen over recent years has been giving marketers greater ownership of audience creation. Rather than relying on lengthy technical processes, today's marketing teams increasingly expect to build, refine and evolve audiences themselves through intuitive tools that allow them to respond quickly to changing campaign priorities.

What's interesting is that the organisations achieving the greatest success rarely spend months trying to create the "perfect" audience. Some begin with just a handful of audience segments, others grow to hundreds across multiple brands, business units and campaign objectives. There isn't a right number. What matters is creating a culture where experimentation is encouraged and learning becomes part of everyday marketing. The strongest customer intelligence programmes are never static.

3. Activation is where customer intelligence starts creating value

Building audiences is an important milestone. It's just not where the value is realised. The next conversation is usually far more interesting - Where should we activate these audiences? For some organisations, that starts with Meta or Google. Others begin with TikTok, Connected TV, retail media networks, or publishers. What's fascinated me is how quickly those conversations shift.

Customers often begin with a single activation channel, but once they start seeing measurable results, confidence grows. New teams become interested. Different use cases emerge. Additional channels become part of the conversation. The most successful customer intelligence programmes don't try to do everything at once, they prove value, build confidence and expand from there.

4. Some of the best ideas don't come from technology, they come from other customers

One aspect of Customer Success that rarely gets talked about is the role of community. Every customer approaches customer intelligence differently, and while their strategies and data remain entirely confidential, the lessons they've learned often have enormous value for others facing similar challenges.

That's why one of my favourite parts of the role is bringing customers together. Sometimes it's introducing two organisations tackling similar business challenges. Sometimes it's sharing examples of how another team approached audience governance, campaign measurement or organisational change.

Those conversations are never about copying someone else's strategy, they're about accelerating learning. I've lost count of the number of times a peer-to-peer discussion has unlocked an idea, answered a difficult question or given a customer the confidence to try something new. Technology enables progress but communities accelerate it.

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5. Success should always be measured by business outcomes

One of the most rewarding parts of my role comes much later in the customer journey. It's helping customers tell the story of what they've achieved. This year, we've supported customers whose work has been recognised through award programmes including the Campaign Tech Awards and the **Performance Marketing Awards, celebrating campaigns that delivered measurable improvements through the intelligent use of first-party customer data.

Preparing those award entries has reinforced an important lesson. Judges rarely focus on the technology, they want to understand the commercial impact.

• Did marketing become more efficient?
• Did customer acquisition improve?
• Did return on ad spend increase?
• Did teams work differently?

Those are exactly the same questions organisations should be asking themselves internally. Behind every successful submission are months of collaboration between marketing, data and technology teams, resulting in measurable outcomes such as more than 30% reductions in customer acquisition costs, over 20% improvements in return on ad spend and the successful deployment of hundreds of audience segments across multiple business units.

Those numbers are impressive but what matters most is what they represent. Better business decisions, more confident marketers and stronger collaboration. And organisations using customer intelligence to create genuine competitive advantage.

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The Real Work Starts After Go-Live

If there's one lesson I've learned from working alongside leading brands, it's that implementation is never the finish line.  It's the point where organisations begin asking bigger questions.

• What other audiences could we create?
• Which channels should we activate next?
• How else could we unlock value from the customer intelligence we already have?
• Could another business unit benefit from this approach?

Those conversations are always my favourite because they signal a shift in mindset. The platform is no longer viewed as a project, it's becoming an ongoing business capability. The organisations achieving the strongest long-term results aren't necessarily the ones that moved fastest, they're the ones that kept experimenting and asking, what's next? For me, that's what Customer Success has always been about. Not helping customers use a platform, helping them build the confidence to keep discovering what's possible.

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About the author

Molly Peake  is Head of Customer Success & Partnerships at AUDIENCES, where she partners with brands across retail, travel, healthcare and publishing to help them turn customer intelligence into measurable business outcomes. From onboarding and activation through to optimisation, industry recognition and long-term growth, Molly works closely with customers to help them unlock greater value from their first-party data and continuously evolve their customer intelligence strategies.

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