The dilemma of customer insight and data - why more isn't working

We’re collecting more insight than ever but are we understanding our customers better or just drowning in data?  

At home our inboxes are overflowing with feedback requests. "How was your experience?" "Rate your satisfaction." "Would you recommend us?" While at work, we’re faced with endless dashboards displaying countless metrics, and our teams dutifully track everything from social media scores and satisfaction ratings to survey trends. Yet paradoxically, as business leaders we often feel more distant than ever from what truly matters to our customers.  

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. Our recent research shows that 78% of customers feel they get too many feedback requests. They're feeling pestered rather than heard. Yet despite all this measurement activity, overall customer satisfaction continues to decline. 

The problem is not a lack of data; it's an overabundance of the wrong kind of data being used in the wrong way. As business leaders, we've become addicted to "more". We're convinced that if we just collect more data, from more surveys, across more channels, we will find the answers we need.  

We are drowning in a deluge of averages, asking customers questions they can’t even answer and this is shielding us from the real experiences of the people we serve. 

The Inside-Out Trap 

This feedback epidemic stems from a fundamental mistake: seeing the world from the "inside out". As an organisation, you are naturally closer to your own products, services, and internal processes than you are to your customers' lives. This internal focus leads us to ask questions that matter to us, not to them. 

Consider the example of a bus company installing Wi-Fi on all its buses. They may have asked customers if they wanted Wi-Fi, and customers said "yes". From an inside-out perspective, this looks like a customer-led decision. However, if they had truly started from the outside-in, they would have understood that the real job of a bus is to get someone from point A to point B. The average bus journey is often under 15 minutes, and most people already have internet on their phones. The presence of Wi-Fi on the bus makes no real difference to the customer's decision to ride it. The survey question was about the company's product, not the customer's problem. 

This inside-out approach creates a false sense of security. Leaders become convinced they are close to customers, but in reality, they are only close to customers' opinions of their business and their internal processes, rather than on what actually matters to their customers. 

 Mistaking Opinions for Decisions 

Look at the measurements we focus on - a high Net Promoter Score (NPS) or customer satisfaction (CSAT) score feels good, but these metrics are just opinions. The truth is, revenue comes from customer decisions, not customer opinions. 

What actually matters is customer behaviour – are customers choosing to buy from you, stay with you, or do more with you? Are they behaving in a way that allows you to brilliantly deliver value?  

Take high street banks, pushing customers toward digital channels to reduce branch costs. The metric that matters isn't customer satisfaction scores about the digital experience – it's whether customers actually choose to use digital channels for their banking needs. You can measure this behaviour directly without asking a single survey question. 

This is the core shift we need to make. Instead of chasing more opinions, we should focus on understanding the decisions and behaviours that drive our business. By prioritising what truly matters to customers and measuring their actions, we can escape the feedback epidemic and finally start to build an organisation that is genuinely customer-led. 

How to move from opinions to insight 

Here are four ways you can make the move from simply collecting opinions to gathering genuine meaningful insight:

1. Review your what you are asking customers today: Look at every survey, email, and feedback touchpoint through your customers' eyes. Is this appropriate to their situation? Does this help you understand their behaviour and make better choices internally? 

2. Identify your key behavioural metrics: What customer actions actually drive your business results? Focus your measurement efforts there. 

3. Train your teams to think outside-in: Help everyone understand the difference between asking questions that matter to you versus questions that matter to customers. 

4. Design for changing behaviour internally: Be bold and step back to see how the data is being used today, challenging whether it really helps you earn customer decisions.  Stop and remove confusing, conflicting and inside-out measures.  Do less, but make customer performance even clearer. 

Becoming truly customer-led isn't about collecting more feedback – it's about developing deeper empathy for your customers' world and focusing on the behaviours that drive mutual value. 

Organisations that make this shift won't just reduce customer survey fatigue, they'll build stronger, more profitable relationships based on genuine understanding rather than superficial metrics, helping you to innovate and do better for your customers, so they keep choosing you.