We all know that solid data is your best friend when it comes to sound decision-making, but did you know that only 12% of organizations base almost all of their decisions on real-time data? Even more worryingly, nearly three-quarters lack a centralized source of data across the customer journey that’s available to the whole company.

Silvia Frucci and Jaimie Corby are here to help us change all that. They joined the Customer Marketing Summit, hosted by our sister community, Product Marketing Alliance, to share their knowledge on centralizing customer intelligence and dive deep into Castor’s customer experience framework.

We’ve distilled their insights into an article for you below. Read on to find out how you too can leverage data that will drive your whole company forward.

About the speakers

Silvia Frucci and Jaimie Corby are two leading lights at Castor. Silvia has a wealth of experience in sales, pricing, and product management in the electronics and IT industries. She joined the healthcare trends industry five years ago and has been Castor’s Senior Product Marketing Manager since 2020.

Jaimie is a CX/CI specialist with a background in enterprise solutions and change management. More recently, she’s led a range of UX-focused projects for digital strategic products in consultancies. She’s been with Castor for four years and is currently their Customer Insights Lead.

How do you know that you know your customer?

Before we get into the weeds, let us tell you a little about Castor and illustrate why it was so vital for us to centralize our customer intelligence.

Castor is a scale-up SaaS provider offering tools for clinical trials. We’re a product-led tech-first company – that means that all of our budget and efforts are focused on product innovation for our customers.

In July 2021 we received series B funding, and this injection has put us on a completely different scale of growth. In the last six months, our employee count has risen drastically. When Silvia joined the company in 2020, she was employee number 79. Today there are 163 of us, and we’re set to reach 200 employees by the end of the year.

As you can imagine, our customer base has grown and diversified dramatically along with our company. So we kept asking ourselves the question: how do we know that we know our customers?

We needed data to give us peace of mind that we were nailing the verticals and sub-segments we were targeting. We had to make sure that we were tracking trends and transmitting data in the right way internally so that it could be transformed into actionable insights that align with our company vision. With this goal in mind, we put together a new CX framework.

Understanding CX maturity

Before we started establishing our CX framework, we wanted to understand holistically across the company the building blocks it would be made up of.

Key focus areas for:

  • Assessing CX maturity,
  • Identifying blockers,
  • Address improvement areas.

Ensuring a scalable, future proof CX program.

Alt: Triangle graph with four parts. Top point with technology, left point with employees, right point with operations, and the middle with vision and strategy.


We started by zooming in on our vision and strategy, which was pretty straightforward: at Castor, it’s always been very important for us to have customers at the center of how we make decisions.

Some of the other building blocks were less easy to get a clear snapshot of – the number of employees has changed quite significantly of late, technologies are constantly evolving and emerging, and our operations have had to develop rapidly to keep up with these changes.

Looking at the industry trends, we were in a similar place to most companies. Very few are using real-time data to make decisions or have centralized knowledge management practices that make this information accessible for all teams. And only a few have an overarching strategy in place that allows everyone to tie themselves to a clear vision for their CX work.

But first, understanding CX maturity

12% - Best-in-class: Nearly all decisions using real-time data, and the majority have mature knowledge management practices with an accessible source of truth available. Almost all have a formal strategy

35% - Optimized: Most decisions using real-time data have at least consolidated their knowledge management practices across their organization if not developed a single source of truth. Almost half of these enterprises have a formal strategy.

28% - Consolidated: Some of the decisions using real-time data, and have brought some consolidation to their knowledge management practices - either at the departmental level or organization wide. But not to the point of having a single source of truth. Almost none of these enterprises have a formal strategy.

10% - Fragmented: Only make a few of the decisions using real-time data and have knowledge management practices that are scattered or siloed across their different CX stakeholders. No clear strategy in place.

The evolution at Castor

In the beginning, we had a lot of unknowns. As a startup, we had a monopoly over our customer base – academic hospitals – here in the Netherlands. When we were growing and branching out, we had a lot of questions about what features and products we actually needed to focus on to best serve the industry. That meant a lot of short bursts of research, answering one question and then moving on rapidly to the next one.

Alt: two graphs. One titled quick decisions with knowledge on the left axis, and t for time on the bottom. The line is a non-linear, jagged line, rising and lowering quickly. The second is titled cumulative, journey braces decisions. This graph has the same labeled axis but the line is a smooth s-bend curve.

This worked really well when we were a small team. As we move forward, however, it’s becoming more and more important to have an accumulative, centralized, scalable, journey-based knowledge system. We want people from across the company to be able to contribute and extract information about our customers from one central bank.

Our approach to developing a CX framework

Alt: Image shows the five steps of the CX framework, align, develop, engage, uncover, and influence.

Our CX framework is made up of five steps:

  • Align - Understand the scope of work inline with business objectives.
  • Develop - Develop the first version of your framework.
  • Engage - Rallying champions across the business.
  • Uncover - Analyze data sources to reveal relevant trends.
  • Influence - Tailor your message and actionable insights to your stakeholder pool.

In other words, it starts with understanding the scope of the work and highlighting its objectives. Next, you develop your minimum viable product (MVP), engage your data champion, analyze the data, and finally, you communicate actionable insights to your stakeholders.

Simple, right? Let’s take a closer look.

Step one: Align

The first stage is Align. At this stage, you want to define the objectives of your CX framework. This involves first assessing a few things:

  1. Company direction and growth pace
  2. Customer segmentation
  3. Revenue trends
  4. Departments’ readiness and buy-in potential
  5. Internal stakeholder goals

What this meant for Castor:

Main factors that have influenced our align process:

  • Change of clinical landscape during the pandemic,
  • Pace of innovation and company growth,
  • Emerging markets (e.g. DTx).

Three aspects of our business that we want to influences:

  • GTM and strategy,
  • Product roadmap,
  • Customer advocacy.

Let’s zoom in on a couple of these areas.

When you’re looking at customer segmentation, you want to understand both your current customer base and those who will join it in the future. Always keep in mind where you want to be in six to eight months.

Department readiness and buy-in potential is another really important aspect because you want to build alliances with all of your other teams and make your CX work relevant for everyone.

This ties in neatly with the final area of focus: internal stakeholder goals. You want to align your goals with the other key players’ to be sure that your new framework benefits the whole company.

One of the biggest challenges we faced as we decided on our framework’s objectives was the scope. When you put together a new framework, you always aim for the stars, but you need to be realistic about what you can deliver and focus on the areas where you can really make a difference.

After we assessed these internal factors, we looked outward at other areas of influence. The first was the clinical landscape, which had changed massively due to the pandemic. This had a huge impact on growth and innovation, both internally and externally, which was the second thing we had to take into consideration. And then there were the new emerging markets that we weren’t going after at the time but we’re actually a good fit for.

Finally, we defined the three main things we want to deliver to our business with our CX framework. We want to influence the go-to-market strategy and the product roadmap, and we want to build a customer advocacy program.

Step two: Develop

The next step in our process is the develop stage. This is about making it happen.

In this stage, you want to map all of your data sources and ask yourself a few questions:

  • How meaningful is the overall impact of these initiatives?
  • What data do you need to make this happen?
  • Where is that data stored?
  • How often is the data collected?
  • What’s the quality of the data?
  • How will you organize the data analysis?
  • Who is your final audience, i.e. your stakeholders?

What this meant for Castor:

Our key findings:

  • Data siloed and unstructured,
  • Data gaps: buying behavior and product/service utilization,
  • There are regulatory hurdles when collecting data in our domain,
  • Risk of data losses as a result of introducing new tools and technologies,
  • Need a data resource plan.

Here’s a visual of how we mapped all of this information across the customer journey:

Alt: Graph showing the customer journey sectioned into suspect, prospect, customer, and user. These are then broken down into touchpoints, and CX information sources. Suspect includes sales targeting, MArketing KPI, and SME interviews. Prospect includes pipeline analysis and RFP review, Customer includes feature request, and CSAT. User has WIn interview, usability testing, and NPS.

At the top, you have your customer timeline, broken down into four different stages of the customer journey.

In the first stage, when the customer is a suspect or unknown, most of the data is collected by marketing and sales as part of their positioning and segmentation work. The main touchpoint is digital marketing content. We can get data on this group by looking at marketing KPIs, industry reports, SME interviews, and proactive sales targeting.

Then the suspect enters the pipeline and becomes a prospect. And at this stage, we have different touchpoints: we have sales cadence, we have demos, and we have nurturing streams, still led by marketing. In terms of data, we have pipeline analysis and RFP reviews, and our CI team does interviews at the sign-off stage.

When the prospect signs the contract and becomes an actual customer, all the work is in the hands of CS. The touchpoints here are onboarding and the work around feature requests. The customer satisfaction score is the main data point that will come from this stage.

Finally, after the customer has been with us for more than a month, we start to work on support and the upsell, which are again led by the CS team. At this stage, we can gather NPS and data on user journeys. It’s also here that the CI and UX team collect data through post-implementation interviews, win interviews, usability testing, and customer effort scoring.

These are the main data sources that we plotted for our MVP. As we scale the project, we’ll add many others, but this is what it looks like right now.

A common challenge at this stage, as we found, is incomplete and missing data. Compliance and regulatory hurdles can also slow you down. If you’re in finance or healthcare, there are a lot of rules and regulations that you need to respect. We found out some of our data was bound by regulatory and compliance guidelines, so we weren’t able to use it as we had intended.

We also found that our data was very siloed and unstructured. As the company grew, more data-collection tools had been added to our portfolio, so there was a lot of dispersion of information. That meant we needed to update our resource plan.

Step three: Engage

The next step, moving out of develop, is engage, which can be broken down into five key tasks:

  1. Mapping your key stakeholders and understanding their roles, responsibilities, and needs as well as the data they’re using to drive their decisions
  2. Working with these teams to establish who are going to be your data champions
  3. Looking into what you need from each stakeholder and how often you’ll have that engagement
  4. Establishing communication channels
  5. Assessing whether you need any additional resources or tools

What this meant for Castor:

  • Getting buy-in for the project was easy,
  • Strat-ups and scale-up environments are fast pace and stakeholders are maxed out on productivity.
  • Understanding their goals and tailor our CX program to provide a real benefit to their business units is a priority.

Step four: Uncover

After engaging with everyone and extracting all the data that you need, it’s time to move to the fun part: uncover. This is where you draw out insights from all the information you’ve been bringing together and start transforming it into actionable insights. Approach:

  • Identify trends and themes across the data sources,
  • Determine the artifacts to best capture insights inline with your current produce and service offerings,
  • Quantify and prioritize,
  • Generate recommendations to address the opportunity areas.

What this meant for Castor:

  • Starting with 7 customers from a specific segment,
  • Pooling all of their informations from the data sources included in V1 of our frameworks,
  • Identifying themes and trends with these customers, then quantifying with supplementary data.

You want to start by identifying trends and themes across the data sources. Next, you need to determine the best tools to showcase this information and share how your customers are experiencing your products or services. In a B2B environment, this can be quite challenging because there are so many different people involved: the customers, the buyers, and the users themselves.

It’s important to quantify and prioritize what you find as well. You might find that you have a lot of qualitative information, from user interviews for example. Quantifying that will make it easier to present and digest.

The final and most important part of the uncover stage is generating recommendations to address the opportunity areas that you’ve found thanks to all your data.

When you pool all that information from every stage of the customer journey and organize it into a snapshot for each customer segment, you’ll have the first version of your framework and report. Congratulations! Here’s what that looked like for us:

Alt: Table with five columns titled Awareness, Consideration and purchase, Implementation and onboarding, Utilization, engagement and retention, and finally Advocacy. The top covers questions you need to ask at each stage. The next section covers gain and pain points that you can chart as a line, with sections for opportunities at the very bottom.

One last point on the uncover stage is that we found it really valuable to leverage industry reports and information on our competitors to make our recommendations more robust. You can never have too much data.

Step five: Influence

It’s time for the final piece of the CX framework puzzle: influence. This is all about communication and creating access to customer information, which is arguably the most important piece. This is all the more crucial in a remote-first company like Castor, where there is a huge value in clearly linking each stakeholder group’s insights and priorities.

The main challenge here is reducing the scope and trying not to cram too much into your first iteration.

Alt: graph with two axes. Left axis is titled: Interest of stakeholders. Bottom Axis: Influence of stakeholders. Divided into four sections, Keeping them completely informed, Manage most thoroughly, low touch, but accessible, and anticipate needs.

We mapped out all the channels that we can use to communicate our data and insights. On one side of the map, we put the high-touch and low-touch communication channels people can use if they want more information – Confluence, Slack, All Hands, and Lunch and Learn.

On the other side, we've got more of a tailored approach to information sharing that’s built around our key contributors and our influences within the leadership team. This includes things like one-on-ones and workshops.

There are a lot of ways you can communicate with your stakeholders, but don't let that discourage you. Everybody likes to take in information in their own way, so listen to your stakeholders and find out the best way for them to learn. While you’re at it, ask what format is going to best allow them to action your insights. You want to make sure they’re getting as much value as possible out of your work.

Learn from our mistakes

To wrap up, I want to leave you with three lessons we learned along our journey of building a new CX framework. We made these mistakes so you don’t have to.

  1. Get internal buy-in. Full disclosure: this wasn’t actually a mistake we made – our stakeholders were super open to our ideas. Nonetheless, it bears repeating: if you communicate effectively with your stakeholders and get their buy-in, everyone will be able to fully realize the value of your system.
  2. Stay focused and plan to scale. To start with, your MVP should provide just the essential information that will make the biggest impact. You can scale it as your company grows. Embrace the feedback. Stay open to different points of view from your stakeholders. These can form the basis of the most important improvements to your program.