If you ask marketing leaders what they own in their respective organisations, most are likely to say campaigns, content, media, brand.
Rory Sutherland has argued for years that this is far too narrow. His view is that the discipline that understands human behaviour should have a say in any decision that shapes how a customer feels about a company right from Product design, Pricing, the claims process, the call centre script and so on. Marketing should be the function that walks into any room in the business and asks: where is the friction that is costing us customers?
Most marketing teams do not operate that way. I did not either, until I spent nearly two years running a 120-member renewals call centre at Star Health Insurance.
The experience is the marketing
A health insurance policy renews at least a year after the first purchase. A lot happens in that year.
A claim that was handled badly. A hospital that was not in the network when the customer needed it most. A call centre interaction that left them feeling like a number. A product they did not fully understand because nobody explained it well at the point of sale. Any one of these decides whether a customer renews or walks. None of these frictions sit in the marketing brief. But all of them show up in the call recordings. You see them in the data, segments of customers not renewing, not because the product is wrong but because something in the time between purchase and renewal broke the relationship.
Marketing that measures itself only to the first conversion is solving a smaller problem than it thinks. The question is not just how do we get more customers. It is what kind of customers are we getting and are we setting them up to stay.
Data is a revenue function
When you are dialling 10,000 customers a week, data quality is not an IT problem. It is a revenue problem.
An agent dialling a customer whose policy already renewed is a wasted call and a poor experience. An agent dialling at the wrong time of day for a segment that only picks up in the evening is wasting capacity. Dialling a customer who has always renewed on time, ten times in 2 weeks could be accelerating churn, not preventing it.
Every one of these is a data problem. And every data problem, at scale, has a real cost.
CRM data has to be treated as a living operational asset, not a reporting tool. Lifecycle stages need to be accurate in real time. Contact history needs to be complete, including the digital touchpoints, not just call records. Propensity scores need to be refreshed on a cadence that matches the speed at which the team is making decisions.
Marketing teams that think data and analytics is someone else's function will always be operating below their potential. The insight that a segment is underperforming is far less useful than the operational discipline to ensure the data feeding that segment is correct, current and complete.
QA is market research
Call centres run QA to measure compliance and performance. Agents are scored on script adherence, disclosures, objection handling etc. That is useful to run an effective call centre operations. But, it can do much more.
The most useful thing is to treat every call recording as a voice of customer. What objections keep coming up that the script does not address? What process changes will prevent the frictions causing most objections? What language is the customer using to describe their hesitation to renew/purchase and does it match the language in our communications? What questions are agents not able to answer that a customer expects them to know?
When I started listening to calls this way, what stood out most was that the objections customers raised were rarely what they appeared to be. A customer who says the premium is too high is sometimes saying exactly that. But often they are saying something else. I had a difficult experience at the network hospital. My claim took too long. I do not feel confident you will be there when I actually need you.
Price is a convenient objection. It is easy to give and does not require explaining a bad experience. What sits underneath it is harder to hear and more important to act on. No marketing dashboard reveals that. No NPS score captures it fully. You only get it by being close enough to the actual conversation to hear what is not being said.
QA done right is one of the most cost-effective forms of market research available to a brand. Most organisations treat it as a compliance exercise. That is a significant amount of insight being left untouched.
The mandate marketing should be pushing for
The call centre is an extreme case. Most marketing teams will never run one.
But the structural problem it reveals is not specific to renewals or insurance. Most large organisations have split the customer mandate across multiple functions. Customer experience owns service quality, NPS, and complaints. Sales owns conversion and revenue. Marketing owns communications and brand. Each team measures a different slice and optimises for it independently.
The customer does not experience these as separate functions. They experience the company. A bad claims settlement that drives churn registers somewhere as a retention problem. A product explained poorly at point of sale registers as a sales problem. A brand that feels distant registers as a marketing problem. But they are all the same problem: a failure to understand and serve the customer across the full relationship.
The function best placed to connect these dots is marketing, if it earns and holds the mandate. Not because marketing should manage operations or run claims. But because the CMO's team should be the voice of the customer inside the organisation.
Udhayakumar Pasupathi leads growth, retention at Star Health Insurance, including the renewals and lifecycle function.