With long-running conflicts still raging on, Trump’s tariffs causing global economic uncertainty, constant reminders from Mother Nature about the impacts of human-led climate change, and a stagnating UK economy, you’d forgive consumers for feeling rather down in the dumps.

But somehow – despite a backdrop that’s increasingly akin to the plot of a disaster movie – optimism in the UK has actually been rising. Over the last few months Maru’s Optimism index has shown a general improvement in the feeling of UK consumers.

As the UK’s cost-of-living crisis continues to shape both the economy and people’s buying behaviours, an ever more turbulent political & economic environment brings with it increasing instability. In today’s business climate, it’s more important than ever for brands to have a key understanding of how their customers ‘think’.

At the start of 2025, UK consumers are focused on the creation of sustainable environments that allow them to thrive.
Contrary to the hype of new year resolutions, the first few months aren’t about dramatic transformation or high-pressure attainment: it’s about prioritising nurturing and taking incremental steps towards stability.

For many in financial services, Consumer Duty is proving to be more than a compliance exercise - with the new standards driving a significant shift in how companies are thinking about consumer protections and customer experience (CX).

The ideal airport lounge experience. Air travel has had its challenges over the last three years; airlines and airports need to entice their frequent flyers back to drive both volume and profitability, and one of the ways of doing this is through the airport lounge experience to ensure traveling is a pleasurable experience for premium and frequent flyers.

January is traditionally when people commit to a healthy start to the New Year, whether giving up alcohol with dry January, joining a gym to get fit, or altering their diet by giving up meat. We examined this using our weekly Omnibus study of a nationally representative sample of 1,000 people and uncovered some interesting facts about Veganuary.

Learning at all levels of the organization sets the foundation for success in many ways, including retaining top talent, increasing employee satisfaction in the workplace, and better customer service. This begs the question; how can organizations evaluate their L&D programs and provide the reassurance to continue investing time and resources into their employee’s growth?

While many companies recognize the value of keeping essential business software up-to-date, employee research techniques and solutions are often overlooked. Here are five signs that it’s time to upgrade your employee research.

We spoke to 1,000 nationally representative UK consumers to better understand how companies and brands can best respond and connect with consumers in times of financial stress, by taking a holistic view of stated attitudes and unlocking deeper emotional needs.

Consumer Duty is an opportunity for both improved customer outcomes and a deeper understanding.

Consumer Duty raises the bar of regulatory consumer protection in the financial services sector by shifting the regulation paradigm from a process-driven approach to one based on customer outcomes.

To achieve this, firms need improved customer insight to engage teams and consistently provide products, services, and communication to deliver good outcomes.

The cost-of-living crisis is dominating the media and occupying many people's minds. The cost of basic, essential items such as food and energy bills have increased rapidly in a short period of time and much faster than average household wages. We spoke to 1,000 nationally representative UK consumers to better understand how companies and brands can best respond and connect with consumers in times of financial stress by taking a holistic view of stated attitudes and unlocking deeper emotional needs.

We spoke to 1,000 nationally representative UK consumers to better understand how companies and brands can best respond and connect with consumers in times of financial stress, by taking a holistic view of stated attitudes and unlocking deeper emotional needs.

Maru is delighted to be chosen as one of the top 5 Customer Experience Management Solution Providers in U.K. for 2022. Maru is an industry leader, providing technology and expertise to help businesses better understand and improve the experiences their customers are having.

With the recent explosion in buy now pay later (BNPL) products, many financial institutions have entered this high-growth, pre-regulation market. Millions of consumers have embraced these services to spread the cost of their online shopping.

Maru conducted a survey of U.K. consumers of these products polling members of Maru’s Voice UK online panel. The results make the case for bringing in immediate regulations to protect vulnerable consumers from a growing and unmanageable debt gap they will be increasingly challenged to repay—avoiding a repeat of the payday lending crises of 2018.

Equifruit, a Canadian company importing bananas into the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, saw the need for ethically sourced bananas and fair treatment of farmers. Their challenge was spreading the fair-trade message for fruit.

Unstructured data in Customer Experience (CX) programs needs to be analyzed and delivered at speed, essentially real-time. The program also must be able to go deep with understanding to optimize insight and action.

These principles of speed and depth are core to the Maru software ecosystem and are central to the delivery of understanding executed by our users either within the enterprise or via our advisory experts.

In the many proven use cases that we see there are a set of 5 best practice rules which guarantee outstanding delivery from unstructured data programs.

If anyone believed that COVID-19 and its associated restrictions may have given enterprises a chance to slow their pace and plan the way forward on a relaxed schedule, then they have been sorely disappointed. The global pandemic has accelerated digital transformations, fueled technological innovation and investment, and disrupted the workforce in ways that few could have imagined just 18 months ago. Unsurprisingly, rapid change has impacted insights delivery too.

When sharing the Maru Text Analytics capability with clients, one of the first questions we are often asked is ‘What level of accuracy can I achieve?”

Speaking to people keen to use automated verbatim analysis tools, they’ve often been promised 100% accuracy from this sort of technology in the past, only to find that this is never the case.

Accuracy is frequently dependent on a number of different factors. Using Maru’s Text Analytics, maximum accuracy is achievable but it needs to be considered in a framework of best practice golden rules for unstructured data analysis.

Questions of Cybersecurity and Compliance are rarely out of the headlines these days. It is a serious set of issues for Enterprise working with Software vendors. For the vendor appropriate delivery requires a serious commitment in resource, policy and continuous assessment.

To help Enterprise inform thinking on the suitability and credibility of Software vendors we have defined below the four main themes that should be evidenced by CX and Insights Software providers.

Great CX programs shape the roadmap to deliver better experiences. Yet most programs are focused exclusively on metrics which summarize how the customer rationally thinks about a touchpoint post the experience. This focus on the rational misses the crucial emotional element of a brand experience. We have evidence that brilliant customer outcomes are the result of using these rational metrics that show the business what needs improving combined with Emotional CX measurement which uncovers how it needs improving.