At Dunnhumby, we harness a distinctive blend of technology, software, and consulting to make Customer Data Science accessible to all, enabling every business to enhance competitiveness and growth by adopting a customer-centric approach.With a 30-year history of global partnerships, Dunnhumby has consistently utilized Customer Data Science to curate exceptional, individualized customer experiences across every interaction point — whether in-store, offline, or online. The impact is clear: a strategic upper hand over both traditional and emergent competitors, bolstering both top-line and bottom-line growth.In my role as Head of Customer Knowledge in South Africa, I oversee a dynamic program that merges customer insights with data science and strategic customer strategy formulation. My focus is to implement and drive a customer-focused cultural shift within organizations. Through the Customer Knowledge framework, we enable our clients to refine and transform their customer strategies, placing the customer at the epicenter of their daily operations and ensuring an unparalleled understanding of their customer base.

I am responsible for embedding a discipline of data usage across the business, from initiation (identifying opportunities and insights) through to final evaluation of performance and return on investment.

Pondering Panda are leaders in Digital Research and were first to market with mobile research in South Africa. We’ve conducted over 7 million digital interviews across all major digital platforms, 1.2 million of which have solely been devoted to improving our understanding of research design in the digital world. We understand how to create research that will produce valid, reliable data, and adapt it to the devices that your customers are using, especially since our approach is device agnostic. We offer both Quantitative and Qualitative research, with the key differentiator being that our research is always "in the moment". The exciting part of being in a start-up is that there is plenty of opportunity to get involved in everything. Formally though, my role is about furthering the Pondering Panda offer and continuing to challenge and disrupt the status quo of how traditional market research is conducted; in particular through the adoption of technology and utilizing non-traditional approaches for market research like data collection through crowdsourcing via the M4JAM platform. I also oversee a Data Scientist, and together we identify new opportunities to streamline and automate data delivery and insight development, including using natural language processing for unstructured text data and machine learning for predictive model development. I also head up the Research Executive team, managing all client research projects, ensuring design will address clients objectives and that reports and presentations are also accordingly aligned, delivering insight that will drive business value. I am also actively engaged in new business development and manage the broader Pondering Panda team.

I head up a team of software developers. We utilise our skills to solve market research problems, often in non traditional ways. In particular we develop technical software applications to facilitate client research needs. I am passionate about data and technology, and how to use and harness it smartly to tell better stories and extract greater insight, while all the time overlaying my extensive market research experience (spanning both customer and consumer insight) to add richness, depth and context.