Understand the psychology behind why your insights might not be landing and how CX Leader, Jenny Jeffcoat transformed stakeholder resistance into customer-centric action.
Picture this: You've spent a fair amount of time analysing your customer feedback, uncovered valuable insights, and prepared a compelling presentation. You walk into the stakeholder meeting confident that your data will drive meaningful change. Instead, you're met with polite nods, a few notes taken, and then… "How do we actually act on this?"
If this scenario sounds familiar, you're not alone. During a recent webinar, we polled customer experience professionals about how their insights typically land with stakeholders. The results were telling:
The challenge isn't the quality of your insights, it's how they're presented and received. In this blog we’ll be breaking down the key learnings from our Insight to Influence Webinar and the experiences of Jenny Jeffcoat, Director of CX at Grainger plc.
Jenny faced a range of CX challenges when she joined the Grainger. Having previously worked in CX at M&S and P&O, in this new move to the Property sector she was tasked with improving customer experience for a business that had thrived on decades of leadership experience and gut instinct.
"My job wasn't to prove them wrong," Jenny explains. "It was to make them better, to take them from saying 'I think' to 'I know.'"
The company had fallen into what Jenny calls the "loudest voice in the room" approach to customer issues. Conflicting priorities emerged regularly: the retention team wanted to keep customers longer, while the acquisition team pushed for higher rents from new tenants. Without data-driven validation, decisions were made based on anecdotal evidence and whoever argued most persuasively.
Jenny's breakthrough came when she mapped customer feedback onto the company's existing customer journey…but with a twist. Instead of the five touchpoints the business thought were important, she used verbatim customer feedback to identify nine stages that customers naturally talked about in their reviews and surveys.
These nine stages mapped directly to the company's organisational structure:
This way of looking at the customer journey made immediate sense to every stakeholder because it reflected how they already organised their work, but was the result of direct customer verbatim. A win win.
Jenny's key innovation was holding what she calls the "instinct to insight" workshop. Instead of presenting findings directly, she made it an interactive exercise, asking stakeholders to predict what customers would say at each journey stage.
This approach created several powerful dynamics:
Why did this approach work when isolated insights had failed? In our webinar, Zoe (Wordnerds Customer Success Manager) presented some incredible research into the way we humans process information and revealed that our brains can only consciously handle a small fraction of the information we encounter. To cope, we filter based on what's familiar and relevant to our goals. Confirmation bias.
When stakeholders receive isolated insights that don't fit their existing mental frameworks, those insights get filtered out. But that’s not because stakeholders don't care, it’s because their brains literally can't hold onto information that doesn't have a place to go.
The customer journey backed by verbatim provided that missing structure. Instead of random facts floating in space, every piece of feedback had a logical place where it belonged. The framework acted as scaffolding that made the insights stick.
The transformation didn't stop with the workshop. Jenny implemented the customer journey as a "living, breathing" dashboard in Power BI — the business intelligence tool her organisation already used. During the webinar, our in-house BI analyst showcased a living customer journey map for the travel and hospitality sector.
Every new review or survey response automatically updated the journey map in real-time. This meant stakeholders could see the immediate impact of their improvement initiatives on customer sentiment. This dashboard serves as an interactive working tool that informs daily decisions.
The results speak for themselves: the company's CEO now starts customer discussions with "I know" instead of "I think," and their Net Promoter Score has steadily climbed as they've taken action based on customer feedback rather than assumptions. Putting verbatim at the heart of voice of customer, has positively impacted their other CX metrics.
While Jenny used a customer journey, the specific framework isn't what matters most. The magic lies in using something that already has meaning in your organisation.
Firstly, a quick framework 101. A framework is just a way to organize feedback into groups so you can dive deeper into your data. There are two types: Theme based frameworks and category-based frameworks.
Imagine you’re organising a Spotify playlist (or Apple music… whatever floats your boat): theme-based would be one playlist of 29 songs, while category-based would be folders like "Rock," "Jazz," and "Pop," with individual songs inside each folder.
Here are a few examples of frameworks that could work for you:
The key is identifying what frameworks already hold currency in your organisation. Ask yourself what lens or approach your senior team makes decisions based on. What appears in strategy documents, or how operational teams organise their work? This might spark some ideas for frameworks you could use.
Ask yourself:
You don't need separate surveys for each stage. Use existing verbatim feedback to understand what customers naturally talk about at different points. Look for contextual clues in their language that indicate where they are in your chosen framework.
Build your insights into whatever business intelligence tool your organisation already uses. Make it update automatically so stakeholders can see the real-time impact of their actions on customer sentiment.
Set up regular reviews where stakeholders revisit the journey map, discuss changes, and plan new initiatives based on evolving customer feedback.
The beauty of this approach is that you'll know quickly if it's working:
As an insights professional, you're essentially taking on the role of business translator (definitely add that one to your CV). Your job is to present insights in a way that makes sense to others, transforming massive unstructured data into meaningful, actionable intelligence.
The most brilliant insights in the world won't drive change if they don't fit into how your stakeholders think about and organise their work. But when you present those same insights using familiar frameworks, they stop being extra information to process and start being essential pieces of puzzles your stakeholders are already trying to solve.
By discovering frameworks that already exist in your organisation, you can transform customer insights from interesting information into impactful customer insight.
You’ll surface insights that naturally lead to better decisions. When you use familiar frameworks as your foundation, stakeholder resistance melts away because people don’t need to think differently, you're giving them the customer voice within the way they already think.
