Listening to the Largest Customers to Shape a $21B Shipping Strategy

When I joined one of the world’s largest container shipping companies, leadership was rethinking its market position. Competition was intense, margins were volatile, and the company needed to define a clearer strategy for how it wanted to win.Rather than starting with internal analysis, I began with customers.

Where the work started

I personally interviewed the company’s 25 largest global accounts; major freight forwarders and direct enterprise customers responsible for a significant share of global volume. These conversations focused on how customers actually experienced the company: reliability, service quality, decision speed, and what made them move volumes between carriers.

The message from the market was clear.

Price mattered, but consistent service quality and operational reliability were becoming the real differentiators.

Turning customer conversations into strategy

My role was to translate these frontline insights into something leadership could act on. Working closely with external consultants supporting the company’s strategy work, I helped convert the customer findings into concrete inputs for the company’s strategic repositioning around service quality.

To support this shift, I established and led the company’s first Customer Insights function, creating a structured way to continuously capture and interpret customer perspectives across the business.

• leading the foundational research that informed a new global customer segmentation,

• building a small global team of customer insights managers,

• selecting and managing research and analytics partners,

• designing the company’s customer insight framework, including how research was conducted and how insights were shared with leadership.

The goal was simple: ensure that the voice of the customer consistently informed strategic and operational decisions, rather than appearing only in occasional research reports.

This included:

Impact

1. Strategy Grounded in Customer Reality

Customer insight became a direct input into strategy discussions, giving leadership clarity on what mattered most to large global shippers and freight forwarders.

2. Sharper Market Segmentation

New segmentation provided a precise view of customer needs across logistics segments, helping commercial and operational teams focus on the right service improvements.

3. Permanent Research Capability

The company moved from ad-hoc research to a scalable, ongoing capability for understanding customers at scale.

Reflection

The most valuable insight did not come from dashboards or reports, but from listening directly to customers at the frontline of the business.

Those conversations created clarity about what the market actually valued. The real work was translating that clarity into decisions leaders could act on.

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