How Dexcom is Powering Smarter, Human-Centric Marketing with Discuss

“With Discuss, we have everybody from marketing supervisors to VPs engaging in live conversations with our consumers and driving a level of customer empathy that we have never had before.”
– Georgie Farmer, Sr. Manager Customer Experience and Insights at Dexcom

From the Digital Marketing World Forum (DMWF) presentation, Real Voices, Real Emotions, Real Connections: How AI is Powering Human-Centric Marketing

Watch the full session here.

About Dexcom

Dexcom is a leading glucose sensing and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) manufacturer for diabetes management. For more than 25 years, their technology has transformed how people manage diabetes and track their glucose, helping them feel more in control and live more confidently. Central to Dexcom’s mission is a commitment to user-first innovation, listening closely to the voices of those living with diabetes and designing tools that simplify their everyday lives.

Challenge

Dexcom, like many modern marketing teams, was up against the realities of the consumer-driven world we live in today, where brand success depends on real-time understanding of customer needs. But three key barriers made true customer closeness difficult to achieve: 

• Marketers have been too far removed from real customer conversations.
  Marketers want, and need to understand their audiences deeply, but often lack the time, tools, budget, or research expertise to have these conversations. Traditional research tools and methods made it hard to give these teams the ease, confidence, and opportunity for direct engagement with their audiences.

“Our marketers weren’t close enough to our customers. There was always someone in the middle interpreting feedback, whether it was a consultant or an agency,” said Georgie Farmer. “And when it comes to a health condition like diabetes, not everybody has that lived customer experience, so it can be really tricky to build that customer empathy, that real connection with customers.”

• It’s hard to make human-centric decisions when you don’t have direct ownership of the insights.
  With many consumer conversations, feedback, and insights being gathered and stored externally by third party agencies or siloed to just the insights teams, Dexcom’s marketing teams were often at arms length from real customer conversations with valuable insights buried in decks or reports and not available on-demand. 

• Traditional methods can’t keep up with the speed of modern marketing.
  Campaign timelines are shorter than ever, the pressure to innovate is constant, and consumer expectations are evolving faster. But traditional research methods aren’t designed for this pace, making it nearly impossible to quickly test marketing messages, positioning, product concepts and ideas with audiences at scale.

Solution

To overcome these challenges, Dexcom adopted Discuss as its market insights platform for real-time, customer understanding on a global scale.

One global market insights hub 

Discuss offers a globally accessible hub that brings all of Dexcom’s consumer connections under one roof—human-led interviews, self-paced research activities, and past research (which can be uploaded to the platform), to AI agents that support the entire research lifecycle to video editing and analysis tools. This centralized and searchable research repository makes it easier for Dexcom’s global teams to access insights on-demand, easily bringing consumer voices into their decisions.

And with AI-led questions and tech check capabilities built into the Discuss platform, Dexcom can ensure every participant signs and agrees to a consent form with an embedded NDA before any research interview takes place.

“We needed a central place to store all our projects, something that would help us house and find key insights quickly and really drive efficiencies across the organization.” 

– Georgie Farmer, Sr. Manager Customer Experience and Insights at Dexcom

Actionable insights in an instant with the power of AI agents.
With Discuss’ AI agents, Dexcom is dramatically accelerating their time to insights. Rather than teams spending hours sifting through hours of recordings, transcripts, and notes, Discuss’ Insights Agent does the heavy lifting to analyze research. Whether human-led interviews, self-paced feedback activities, or uploaded research, the AI agent surfaces themes, quotes, and links findings to research objectives in minutes.

Discuss’ Agents also break down language barriers for Dexcom’s global empathy projects, summarizing interviews across multiple languages and countries.

Unlimited research model that incentivizes more customer connections.
Discuss’ unique approach gives Dexcom unlimited access to qualitative research — allowing teams to engage regularly with their target audiences while maintaining cost efficiency. This unlimited model also offers Dexcom the essential services and support they need for all of their research projects including live tech support on every session, recruiting respondents, project management, and more.

Results

With Discuss, Dexcom has reimagined the way its marketing and insights teams engage with consumers, enabling faster decisions, deeper customer understanding, and greater global reach.

• Giving marketers direct access to test concepts, messages, and ideas with hard to reach audiences across the globe.
  With Discuss, Dexcom’s lean team of marketers can now test concepts, messaging, and ideas directly with hard-to-reach audiences around the world. They’ve captured in-the-moment feedback from segments like nurses, groups traditionally difficult to engage, ensuring their marketing resonates with the audiences who matter most. And with Discuss’ global capabilities, Dexcom gathered insights from four markets in just one month, increasing their global customer understanding across new and existing markets, without sacrificing the speed or quality of the insights.
  
• Utilizing AI to go from insight to campaign launch faster than ever.
  Discuss’ AI agents have dramatically reduced the time it takes to go from customer conversation to campaign execution. Instead of waiting days for summaries, Dexcom teams instantly receive tailored insights, complete with key themes, relevant quotes, and presentation-ready highlight reels. They can even ask the AI their most pressing questions, to which the AI will deliver a detailed answer complete with relevant quotes. What once took days, now takes minutes, allowing marketers to say “yes” to more initiatives.

“These kinds of insights used to take me several days to pull together, and now with Discuss’ AI agents, we’re able to deliver them in just a few hours. In one instance, we finished the research on a Tuesday evening, and while I was in the airport, I used the Insights Agent to create the summaries. We sent them to the team within the hour and by lunchtime the next day, we were already debriefing with the creative agency. It was an incredibly fast turnaround.”

– Georgie Farmer, Sr. Manager Customer Experience and Insights at Dexcom

• Powering human-centric marketing rooted in real customer voices.
  Discuss enables Dexcom to ensure customer voices are embedded in every strategy. Whether it’s refining messaging, launching new products, or optimizing user experiences, with Discuss, real consumer feedback is a living part of how Dexcom builds relationships and drives innovation.
  
  
• Getting 10x more insights for 1x the budget.
  Thanks to Discuss’ unlimited research model and all-in-one platform, Dexcom has significantly increased the volume and frequency of its in-depth customer conversations, without having to invest the time, budget, and effort that other traditional research methods demand. More teams can explore ideas, validate marketing strategies, and stay close to the customer while maintaining the integrity of the data as well as cost efficiency.

With Discuss, Dexcom is redefining what it means to build a brand that listens, responds, and grows with its customers at the center.