To explore this challenge, we posed three fundamental questions to a panel of experienced practitioners. Their responses, rich with real-world examples, reveal a clear consensus on what works. We then dug into the research from fields like organizational behavior, cognitive psychology, and change management. The result is this comprehensive guide, where practitioner wisdom is not just shared, but validated and explained by scientific principles. It shows that to make insights actionable, CX professionals must move beyond reporting and become facilitators of change, masters of context, and champions of collaboration.
This is the foundational question. The consensus among our practitioners is that insights stall when CX is treated as an isolated function rather than a core business philosophy, and when organizational structures create barriers to action. The science overwhelmingly agrees.
Yanuar Rezqi, a CX practitioner with deep experience in building customer-centric cultures, argues that the problem often starts with a fundamental misunderstanding of what CX is.
"The most fundamental misunderstanding about CX is that CX is a unit or division, not a fundamental way of company thinking in winning business. Of course, this is a huge mistake. So CX is only pictured from a beautiful blueprint on paper rather than building a customer-based culture."
This observation is a textbook example of what researchers call organizational silos. A 2024 study in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice defines silos as isolated groupings that hinder communication and cooperation(1). The study notes that while silos help organize people, they can create an environment where knowledge and skills are not shared. Yanuar’s point that change must start with the top leader is also a cornerstone of established change management theory. John P. Kotter’s seminal 8-step model for change, first outlined in 1996, identifies a failure to create a powerful guiding coalition and a sense of urgency as primary reasons why transformations fail(2).
Frances Chapireau, founder at BuildCX Consulting, builds on this, distinguishing between two types of barriers: the structural and the human.
"There are structural reasons, like having clear governance and accountability... and the fact that businesses are often very siloed... And then there are the more human factors: making collaboration across functions work, company politics, risk aversion, our own natural cognitive biases."
Frances’s mention of cognitive biases is particularly astute. Research has shown that a dozen different cognitive biases can impact professional decision-making, with overconfidence and confirmation bias being particularly prevalent (3). Confirmation bias, the tendency to favor information that confirms existing beliefs, is a major hurdle for CX insights that challenge the status quo. Furthermore, research from Harvard Business Review highlights that while most executives recognize the importance of breaking down silos, they struggle to make it happen(4).
Katie Faulkner, an Optimisation Strategist at Forj.digital, provides a concrete example of these silos in an agency environment.
"In many agencies, CX struggles not because insights aren’t valuable, but because organisational silos prevent them from being shared with ease. Teams are divided by channel... Teams optimise for their own KPIs, which leads to duplicated experiments, conflicting strategies, and inefficiencies."This aligns with recent research in Business Horizons which identifies three traps that cause organizations to lose focus on customers over time: product focalization, rigid organizational boundaries, and a fixed-pie mindset(5). Katie’s experience is a perfect illustration of these rigid boundaries in action.
Insights remain on paper when company culture sees CX as a department, not a mindset, and when organizational silos, misaligned incentives, and cognitive biases create a hostile environment for action.
If the first challenge is structural, the second is about empowerment. How do we equip and enable employees, especially those on the frontline, to act on the customer realities they witness daily? Our practitioners agree: it requires a combination of top-down vision and bottom-up involvement. The science points to the importance of managing cognitive load and fostering psychological ownership.
Yanuar Rezqi stresses the importance of leadership and clear competency.
"The reality of the customer must be seen from top to bottom, so again, sharing the vision from the top leader and cascading it down the chain is very important. The first thing is that every employee must have the qualifications and competencies required by the company. Skill development in stages is important."
Frances Chapireau offers a practical philosophy: start small and involve people early. She warns against the “big-bang launch” of a new platform or dashboard, which can feel like “just another tool” to busy operational teams. She shares a brilliant example from a restaurant client:
"We went and spoke to the operations teams who would be using the dashboards. We asked what they needed and what they didn’t. We removed topics like price because they had no control over that. And we created a category for overall praise (like 'it was great')... but we hid the comments. It meant they didn’t have to scroll through endless comments that, whilst positive and nice to read, were not actionable... Less is almost always more! Obviously, more specific praise about the staff, for example, would get its own topic and be shown."
This “less is more” approach is strongly supported by Cognitive Load Theory. The theory suggests that human working memory is limited, able to process only about seven (plus or minus two) pieces of information at a time(6). When a dashboard is overwhelming, it creates extraneous cognitive load, reducing a person’s ability to make quality decisions. By removing non-actionable information, Frances’s team reduced the cognitive load on the restaurant staff, allowing them to focus on the insights that mattered. Research confirms that information visualization can improve decision quality and speed, but only when it doesn’t overload the user(7).
Katie Faulkner echoes this theme of early involvement and cross-team collaboration.
"We embedded CX into day-to-day workflows through regular meetings with channel leads, integrated into QBR sessions... These small, consistent interventions helped CX insights become a shared reference point rather than a slide deck."
This approach of involving stakeholders in the process is a powerful way to overcome the “Not-Invented-Here” (NIH) syndrome, a well-documented organizational resistance to external knowledge(8). By co-creating the understanding of the insights, Katie’s team fostered a sense of psychological ownership. Research on co-creation shows that involving stakeholders in the process is a key strategy to foster this sense of ownership and accountability for change(9).
This is the final, crucial step. An insight can be understood and its importance recognized, but still fail to translate into a concrete action plan. Making insights stick requires making them unavoidable and assigning clear ownership. Here, the practitioners’ advice aligns perfectly with research on accountability and narrative persuasion.
Katie Faulkner puts it best:
"Insights don’t die in meeting rooms when they are made unavoidable. This means embedding them into processes where decisions are actually made, highlighting them as decision constraints, and consistently linking them to measurable outcomes. Over time, these habits create a culture where ignoring insight becomes the harder path, and action becomes the default."
She provides a stellar example of this in action, negotiating a collaboration between SEO and CX teams where ownership was split based on page goals. This act of negotiation and embedding CX into the process is a powerful form of data storytelling. Research from Harvard Business School shows that framing data within a narrative can evoke an emotional response that makes points more memorable and more likely to be acted upon(10).
Frances Chapireau shares a similar strategy from her time on the client side, using “business partners” to bridge the gap between the insights team and the business units.
"They acted as our eyes and ears on the ground. They helped give us the context we needed as we built our insights decks. We also often followed-up presentations of results with more hands-on meetings to discuss the ‘now what?’ part... where owners were put in place and items got prioritised."
This “now what?” meeting is critical. It’s where accountability is formally established. Research on meeting effectiveness consistently shows that a lack of clear action items and assigned owners is a primary reason why meetings fail to produce results.
This idea of assigning ownership is the final piece of the puzzle. As Yanuar Rezqi concludes:
"Every insight discussed in the meeting must be confirmed as the most urgent and most impactful to customers today... create an actionable program that is clearly measurable in terms of quality and time... Of course, it is very important to determine the relevant person in charge so that it doesn't die after the meeting is over."
This directly reflects the principles of accountability that are essential for any effective organizational process. Without a named owner, a task is simply a suggestion.
The path from insight to action is not a straight line. It is a complex, human-centric challenge that requires more than just good data. As our practitioners have shown, and as the science confirms, it demands a shift in culture led from the top, a commitment to empowering employees through early involvement and practical tools, and a relentless focus on making insights an unavoidable part of the decision-making process. By blending the art of practitioner experience with the science of organizational behavior, CX professionals can finally ensure their work does not just live in slide decks, but thrives in the daily actions that create real value for customers and the business.
Frances Chapireau is Founder of BuildCX Consulting, specializing in helping clients turn customer feedback into actionable insights and operational improvements.
Yanuar Rezqi is a seasoned CX practitioner and one of the driving forces behind
CX.ID, with extensive experience in building customer-centric cultures within large organizations.
Katie Faulkner is an Optimisation Strategist at FORJ Digital, where she focuses on integrating CX and experimentation to drive results in digital marketing. (1) Jones, A.A., Uhd, J., Kabore, C.D., & Cornett, K.A. (2024). Breaking Down Silos in the Workplace: A Framework to Foster Collaboration. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, 30(6), E306-E311.(2) Kotter, J.P. (1996). Leading Change. Harvard Business School Press.
(3) Berthet, V. (2022). The Impact of Cognitive Biases on Professionals' Decision-Making. Frontiers in Psychology. PMC8763848.
(4) Edmondson, A.C., Jang, S., & Casciaro, T. (2019). Cross-Silo Leadership. Harvard Business Review, May-June 2019.
(5) Dalsace, F., Bonnet, D., & Lange, K. (2025). Customer centricity: Digital technology and leadership to the rescue. Business Horizons.
(6) Arnold, M. et al. (2023). Dealing with information overload: a comprehensive review. Frontiers in Psychology. PMC10322198.
(7) Eberhard, K. (2023). The effects of visualization on judgment and decision-making: a systematic literature review. Management Review Quarterly, 73, 167-214.
(8) Katz, R., & Allen, T. J. (1982). Investigating the Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome: A look at the performance, tenure, and communication patterns of 50 R & D Project Groups. R&D Management, 12(1), 7-19.
(9) Van der Zouwen, T. (2025). Enhancing the Impact of Co-Creation Research: Large Scale Interventions with a Stakeholder Steering Committee for Whole System Engagement. Journal of Participatory Research Methods.
(10) Harvard Business School Online (2021). Data Storytelling: How to Tell a Story with Data.
