Senior Manager, Customer Insights

About the role

7‑Eleven is seeking a Senior Manager, Customer Insights to lead and elevate the Customer Insights function. This primary‑research role will own the research roadmap and project pipeline, aligning investments with enterprise priorities and delivering measurable business impact. The position is based in Irving, Texas and requires residence in the Dallas‑Fort Worth area. The role serves as a trusted advisor to senior leaders across Marketing, Merchandising, Operations, Loyalty, and Digital, translating business challenges into actionable research and ensuring insights are embedded across the organization.

Key Duties and Responsibilities

• Strategy and Roadmap Ownership: Own the Customer Insights roadmap, intake process, and research pipeline; proactively identify knowledge gaps and recommend research that drives growth, innovation, customer experience, and business performance.
• Customer Foresight and Competitive Intelligence: Maintain an enterprise view of evolving customer needs, validate frameworks for innovation and brand teams, build forward‑looking reads on behavior shifts, and own competitive intelligence on how rivals meet customer needs.
• Cross‑Functional Partnership and Influence: Serve as a strategic partner to leaders across Marketing, Merchandising, Operations, Loyalty, and Digital; translate challenges into research plans; influence without authority; partner with Analytics to combine “what” (behavioral/transactional data) with “why” (primary research); synthesize findings into compelling narratives for executive decision‑making.
• Research Design and Execution: Oversee design, execution, and delivery of qualitative and quantitative programs; manage the always‑on listening portfolio (visit satisfaction surveys, brand health tracking, customer panels); turn sentiment into action with operational partners; embed research into innovation and product development; ensure every deliverable ends with actionable recommendations.
• Team Leadership: Lead and develop the Customer Insights team, providing coaching, prioritization, and guidance; set clear priorities, make transparent trade‑offs, grow research craft and storytelling capability, and create exposure to senior stakeholders.
• Continuous Improvement: Strengthen intake and prioritization processes, standardize deliverables, build a searchable insights repository, reduce cycle time, manage external vendors and budget, uphold research ethics and respondent trust, and promote a customer‑centric culture by democratizing access to insights.

Education and Experience

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in business administration, behavioral science, customer research, marketing, finance, statistics, economics, or a related field.
• Experience: 8+ years of experience in Customer Insights, Consumer Insights, or Market Research; 8‑10+ years of experience specifically in those areas.
• Management Experience: Not required, but experience leading, coaching, and developing high‑performing research teams is preferred.
• Required Knowledge and Skills:
  • Building and managing strategic research roadmaps aligned to business objectives.
  • Influencing senior and executive stakeholders through storytelling and customer‑centric recommendations.
  • Deep expertise in qualitative and quantitative methodologies (survey design, tracking studies, concept testing, segmentation, journey research, focus groups, in‑depth interviews, conjoint/MaxDiff).
  • Developing and applying need‑state, demand‑space, or jobs‑to‑be‑done frameworks.
  • Strong business acumen to connect insights to financial, operational, and strategic outcomes.
  • Comfort operating with ambiguity and shaping clear recommendations from incomplete information.
  • Proven track record of improving function efficiency through new processes, tools, or approaches.
  • Excellent oral and written communication; ability to present research concisively and persuasively.
  • Problem‑solving skills both independently and collaboratively.

Preferred Experience

• Running ongoing customer satisfaction or experience measurement programs on platforms such as Qualtrics, Alida, Medallia, Mintel, NielsenIQ, etc.
• Familiarity with AI‑enabled and agile research approaches and a perspective on their value versus traditional primary research.
• Experience in retail, convenience, grocery, restaurant, or CPG environments—especially high‑velocity, multi‑unit settings.
• Integrating primary research with secondary data, loyalty, CRM, behavioral, or transactional datasets for a comprehensive view of customer behavior.
• Utilizing syndicated and secondary research sources for category, trend, and competitive intelligence.
• Conducting trend, foresight, or futures work—cultural and consumption trend tracking, scenario thinking, or emerging‑behavior research.
• Partnering with loyalty, CRM, or analytics teams to combine survey research with first‑party customer data.