E.ON Next × Verve: Always-On Customer Insight Through Verve Intelligent Personas & Simulations (VIPS)

Shortlisted for the MRS' Best Activation of Insight Award 2026.

E.ON Next had invested in robust customer segmentation, but that understanding remained static - locked in reports and periodic research rather than accessible in real time. Marketing, CRM, proposition, and strategy teams were making decisions at speed, but customer understanding wasn't keeping pace, creating a growing gap between how fast the business moved and how well it stayed grounded in customer reality.

Verve and E.ON Next addressed this by evolving the existing marketing persona segmentation into a dynamic, interactive suite of Verve Intelligent Personas & Simulations (VIPS), trained on segmentation data, cultural context, and ongoing primary research. Through a self-serve interface, teams could question personas directly, testing messaging and propositions before committing to traditional research. Adoption was driven by a distributed "customer champion" model embedded across functions, supported by structured training and continuous optimisation.

The impact has been substantial. Usage grew to 30 active users across 12 teams, generating thousands of prompts. Time-to-insight fell by 90%, with tasks once taking days or weeks now completed in minutes. In one example, using personas to optimise smart meter communications eliminated the need for further research entirely, saving £100,000 and cutting decision time from six weeks to a few days - with persona outputs validated against existing quantitative findings. Across the business, this translated into a £100,000 reduction in research spend, a 30% drop in reliance on ad hoc projects, and materials entering formal research already pre-screened for effectiveness. Customer insight, once siloed within specialist teams, is now shifting toward single sign-on access for the whole organisation, embedding it as core decision-making infrastructure rather than a standalone tool.