Many CX teams find themselves in a cycle of producing detailed reports that are met with initial interest but ultimately fail to translate into meaningful action. To break this cycle, we must shift our mindset. As CX practitioner Yanuar Rezqi notes, "The most fundamental misunderstanding about CX is that CX is a unit or division, not a fundamental way of company thinking in winning business." This shift from CX as a function to CX as a core philosophy is critical for driving real change.
This article outlines five common pitfalls that prevent customer insights from driving change and offers actionable strategies, blending established best practices with on-the-ground experiences from CX leaders.
One of the most common mistakes in communicating customer insights is presenting a wealth of data without a clear call to action. To move from simply reporting data to guiding decisions, frame every finding in terms of its implications and the actions that should be taken. Instead of stating that “20% of customers churn after their first month,” reframe it as “We are losing one in five new customers due to a confusing onboarding process, and here is a three-step plan to address this issue.”
This requires a shift in how CX is perceived within the organization. As Yanuar Rezqi emphasizes, this change must be championed from the top:
"The fundamental thing to be able to change from paper to daily life is that it must start with the top leader in the company, who must be able to lead by example, convey the vision periodically, and build a customer-based system and culture across all units and employee levels."
A comprehensive, 70-slide presentation or a 100-page report can be overwhelming for busy decision-makers. To ensure your message sticks, lead with the headline story. Use concise executive summaries, short video clips of customer interviews, or single-slide visuals that make the key insight undeniable.
CX consultant Frances Chapireau of BuildCX Consulting advises that "less is almost always more," especially when communicating with busy operational teams. She recalls a project with a restaurant client where the initial dashboards were overwhelming.
"We went and spoke to the operations teams who would be using them. We asked what they needed and what they didn’t. We removed topics like price because they had no control over that... For one of those clients I massively reduced the complexity of the dashboards they had. They were overwhelming as they were. We have to remember that these operational teams are extremely busy, and they are not behind a computer all day. The feedback had to be easy to digest and feel immediately relevant."
Timing is everything. Even a groundbreaking insight can be rendered irrelevant if it is not shared at the right point in the decision-making process. To avoid this pitfall, work backward from your stakeholders’ decision-making calendar. Align your research and communication efforts with key milestones such as strategy meetings, budget allocation cycles, and campaign planning sessions.
Frances Chapireau also highlights the value of a phased rollout to build momentum. Recounting her experience with a telecom client, she says:
"They created the space for teams that were ahead in the process to share their learnings with teams who hadn’t launched yet... this meant a lot of sharing ideas about what worked and what didn’t. This kind of exchange is invaluable as well. It means the teams who are yet to launch can see the value the other teams are already realising. It creates momentum, instead of a big ‘ta-da, here it is!’ launch, which can fall flat."
When insights are simply “thrown over the fence” to stakeholders, they are less likely to feel a sense of personal investment. To foster a sense of ownership, involve stakeholders in the research process from the very beginning. This co-creation process not only boosts buy-in but also ensures that the research is directly relevant to their priorities.
Katie Faulkner, an Optimisation Strategist at Forj.digital, points out that organizational silos are a major barrier to ownership. "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... and insights produced by one team rarely feed into another."
To combat this, Faulkner recommends embedding CX into daily workflows through "regular meetings with channel leads, integrated into QBR sessions to drive reflection and future planning, joint client calls, and even leveraged office proximity to sit alongside other teams. These small, consistent interventions helped CX insights become a shared reference point rather than a slide deck."
Some organizations unintentionally reward activity over impact. If the primary metric of success for a CX team is the “number of studies completed,” the focus will naturally shift to producing more reports, regardless of whether those reports lead to any meaningful change. This creates a cycle of busywork that fails to move the needle on the customer experience.
This is often a symptom of the siloed thinking that Katie Faulkner describes, where "teams optimise for their own KPIs, which leads to duplicated experiments, conflicting strategies, and inefficiencies."
To break this cycle, shift the focus to impact-based KPIs. Instead of tracking the number of reports produced, measure the number of strategic decisions that were influenced by your insights, the revenue generated or cost savings achieved as a result of your recommendations, or the product features that were improved based on your findings.
Communicating customer insights effectively is both an art and a science. It requires a deep understanding of the data, a keen sense of storytelling, and a strategic approach to stakeholder engagement. By avoiding these common pitfalls and adopting a more proactive and influential approach to communication, CX practitioners can ensure that their hard-won insights do not just inform the organization, but transform it.
As Katie Faulkner aptly puts it, "CX fails not because people don’t care about customers, but because organisational structures and incentives often work against shared understanding." By deliberately creating opportunities for collaboration, embedding insights into decision-making, and balancing the priorities of different teams, CX moves from strategy decks into the daily behaviors that improve customer experience, team efficiency, and the bottom line.
Yanuar Rezqi is a seasoned CX practitioner with extensive experience in building customer-centric cultures within large organizations.
Frances Chapireau is a CX consultant at BuildCX Consulting, specializing in helping clients turn customer feedback into actionable insights and operational improvements.
Katie Faulkner is an Optimisation Strategist at Forj.digital, where she focuses on integrating CX and experimentation to drive results in digital marketing.
Knit. (2025, September 22). Why Your Insights Aren’t Driving Change (and How to Fix It).Harvard Business School Online. (2021, November 23 ). Data Storytelling: How to Tell a Story with Data.
