Your Barriers to maximising the value of your Customer Insight
Interestingly, the interim results from our recent poll on barriers to realising value, are revealing that there isn’t one most common barrier to maximising the value of your customer insight.
Instead, your votes have identified 7 equally likely barriers. Perhaps it really is, as Proverbs puts it, “the little foxes who spoil the vineyard”.
They say a problem shared is a problem halved, so hopefully it helps you to understand the barriers that other leaders are facing. In this post I’ll also share some initial thoughts on interventions that may help you overcome them.
That poll randomized the order of presenting choices, so in no particular priority, here are the barriers you have identified so far:
- Lack of interest/sponsorship from top leadership team
- Lack of skills/knowledge in customer insight team
- Lack of clear Customer Insight strategy
- Little cooperation with Marketing/Operations to act on insights
- Lack of team future focussed on outcomes/action
- Insufficient investment in technology/analytical infrastructure
- Lack of digital skills (specifically) in customer insight team
Quite a set of challenges. Proving once again the diversity of the Customer Insight Leader role and how many plates you need to keep spinning.
I’m relieved to see that a few of our past blog posts were relevant to some of these challenges. Do let me know if these helped:
- How to create a culture of action
- How can you influence at the top table?
- How to secure buy-in for your customer insight plans
- Understanding Data Science & how to develop your Data Scientists
- How to develop Domain Knowledge in your Analysts
- Lessons from speaking to Marketing Leaders
- Partnering with your Digital Leader
- How to develop a Customer Insight Strategy
It’s also interesting to see that these results partly overlap with your answers to an earlier poll on which external services you’d seek. However, for that poll the top three services you chose were:
- Training for your customer insight team
- A ‘health check’ to benchmark your team’s capability
- Bespoke consultancy to address a specific business problem
Thanks again for the feedback and I will seek to respond to these needs in future content on this blog. Without straying into making this site an advertisement, you might also like to know that several of the needs identified above could be met through the services provided by the Laughlin Consultancy, so I would advise checking out our “TLC” link to the sponsor of this site.
OK, advert over. I will keep you updated on how answers to this poll change. Do please keep voting so we can shape the content here to focus on the barriers todays Customer Insight Leaders face. Meanwhile I will look into future content on here for Customer Insight Strategy, cooperating with Marketing+Operations, infrastructure and digital skills for insight teams. If you come across other great content out there, on these themes, do please comment below and I’ll seek to include in future “Others” guest posts.