Senior Manager, Customer Insights

Senior Manager, Customer Insights

7-Eleven is an iconic family of brands with over 86,000 locations, surpassing every retailer in the world. We revolutionize convenience, restaurants and fuel through cutting edge innovation working hard to be the customer's first choice. 7-Eleven empowers our employees to 'activate awesome' and make a meaningful impact in their stores and communities every day. If you're ready to grow, lead and make a difference, come join our team and help shape the future of convenience.

We are seeking a Senior Manager, Customer Insights to lead and elevate our Customer Insights function, ensuring insights are strategically embedded across the organization and directly influence key business decisions.

This is a primary research role. Our Analytics team owns behavioral, transactional, and performance data; Customer Insights owns understanding why customers think, choose, and behave the way they do through qualitative and quantitative research, customer feedback, and market intelligence. The two functions partner closely so the business gets one coherent story about the customer.

This role owns the Customer Insights research roadmap and project pipeline, aligning research investments with enterprise priorities and delivering measurable business impact. The ideal candidate is a strategic thought partner who proactively identifies knowledge gaps and recommends research that influences growth, innovation, customer experience, loyalty, merchandising, and brand strategy. They approach the work with an ownership mindset treating every project as a business investment, and pressure-testing whether a question can be answered faster or more efficiently through existing research, secondary sources, or a partnership with Analytics.

This individual thrives in a fast-paced retail environment, operating with urgency to deliver decision-ready answers on the timelines the business actually needs, and creating clarity where the question itself is still ambiguous. They serve as a trusted advisor to senior leaders across Marketing, Merchandising, Operations, Loyalty, and Digital.

This position is based in our corporate office located in Irving, Texas and will require the individual to reside in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Key Duties and Responsibilities:

Strategy and Roadmap Ownership

• Own the Customer Insights roadmap, intake process, and research pipeline, ensuring resources are aligned to the highest-priority business objectives.
• Proactively identify customer knowledge gaps and recommend research that drives growth, innovation, customer experience, and business performance.

Customer Foresight and Competitive Intelligence

• Own the enterprise view of customer need states how needs are evolving, which are underserved, and where headroom exists and keep that framework current, validated, and usable by innovation, merchandising, and brand teams.
• Build a forward-looking read on where customer behavior is heading, not just where it has been, pressure-testing which shifts are durable signals worth building against and which are noise.
• Own competitive customer intelligence: understand how competitors and adjacent channels are meeting the same customer needs and frame the risk and opportunity from the customer's point of view occasion and trip share, switching triggers, and unmet needs a competitor is serving better.
• Anticipate the questions leadership will need answered next, bringing a point of view before it is requested.

Cross-Functional Partnership and Influence

• Serve as a strategic partner to leaders across Marketing, Merchandising, Operations, Loyalty, and Digital, translating business challenges into actionable research plans.
• Build durable relationships across functions and influence without authority, aligning stakeholders with competing priorities around a single, credible research agenda.
• Partner with Analytics to pair the 'what' of behavioral and transactional data with the 'why' of primary research, ensuring both functions tell one story rather than two.
• Synthesize research, customer feedback, and market and competitive intelligence into compelling narratives that influence decisions at every level, up to the executive team.

Research Design and Execution

• Oversee the design, execution, and delivery of qualitative and quantitative research programs, ensuring methodological rigor and actionable recommendations.
• Own the always-on listening portfolio the ongoing visit satisfaction survey program, brand health and tracking studies, and any customer community or panel protecting continuity of measurement and delivering clear reads on how customer sentiment is trending.
• Turn visit-level sentiment into action, partnering with Operations, Merchandising, and field leadership to identify what is driving satisfaction and dissatisfaction and to validate whether interventions moved the score.
• Embed research into the innovation and product development process, from early opportunity framing through concept testing, in-market validation and lead after-action reviews that capture what the customer learning got right.
• Ensure every deliverable ends in a recommendation, not a data dump, and track findings through to the business action they informed.

Team Leadership

• Lead and develop the Customer Insights team, providing coaching, prioritization, and guidance to ensure high-quality execution and professional growth.
• Set clear priorities and make transparent trade-off decisions when demand exceeds capacity.
• Grow research craft and storytelling capability across the team and create opportunities for direct exposure to senior stakeholders.

Continuous Improvement

• Continuously improve how the function operates: strengthen intake and prioritization, standardize deliverables, build a searchable insights repository, and reduce cycle time from question to answer.
• Manage external research vendors and budget with sound judgment, reassessing partners and reallocating investment as priorities shift.
• Uphold research ethics, respondent trust, and responsible use of customer data across all programs.
• Promote a customer-centric culture, democratizing access to insights and demonstrating the function's impact on business outcomes.

Education and Experience:

Education: Bachelors / 4 yr degree

Years of Experience: 8+ yrs

Years of Management Experience: NA

Specific Knowledge and Skills:

Required

• Bachelor's degree in business administration, behavior science, customer research, marketing, finance, statistics, economics, or a related field.
• 8-10+ years of experience in Customer Insights, Consumer Insights, or Market Research.
• Demonstrated experience building and managing strategic research roadmaps aligned to business objectives.
• Experience leading, coaching, and developing high-performing research teams.
• Proven ability to influence senior and executive stakeholders through storytelling and customer-centric recommendations, including leading presentations with executives.
• Deep expertise across qualitative and quantitative methodologies survey design and sampling, tracking and brand health studies, concept and product testing, attitudinal segmentation, customer journey research, focus groups and in-depth interviews, and trade-off methods such as conjoint or MaxDiff.
• Experience developing and applying need-state, demand-space, or jobs-to-be-done frameworks, and using them to guide innovation, assortment, or brand decisions.
• Strong business acumen with the ability to connect customer insights to financial, operational, and strategic outcomes.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and shaping clear recommendations from incomplete information.
• Track record of improving how a function works introducing processes, tools, or approaches that increased speed, quality, or efficiency.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills, with the ability to present research concisely and persuasively.
• Ability to solve problems both independently and as part of a team through a structured approach.

Preferred

• Experience running ongoing customer satisfaction or experience measurement programs on platforms such as Qualtrics, Alida, Medallia, Mintel, Nielseniq and etc.
• Familiarity with AI-enabled and agile research approaches, and a point of view on where they add value versus where traditional primary research is required.
• Experience in retail, convenience, grocery, restaurant, or CPG or another high-velocity, multi-unit environment.
• Experience integrating primary research and secondary research findings with loyalty, CRM, behavioral, or transactional datasets to create a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior
• Experience with syndicated and secondary research sources for category, trend, and competitive intelligence.
• Experience with trend, foresight, or futures work cultural and consumption trend tracking, scenario thinking, or emerging-behavior research.
• Experience partnering with loyalty, CRM, or analytics teams to combine survey research with first-party customer data.

This job description is intended to describe the general nature and level of the work being performed by the individuals assigned to this job. This is not an exhaustive list of all duties and responsibilities. Management reserves the right to amend and change the duties and responsibilities of this job to meet business and organizational needs, as necessary.