Why It’s Time To Stop Treating Insights Teams As A Service

As an Insights team lead, how often do you have a seat at the strategy table? If you’re like many teams, the answer is probably somewhere between ‘sometimes,’ and ‘not at all.’

With shifting business priorities in 2024, this reality is becoming more important for Insights professionals to consider. Restructures, layoffs, and new growth KPIs are dictating how VoC and Insights teams are being asked to prioritize and conduct research.

This presents a unique set of opportunities and challenges for Insights teams. They often hold the keys to customer thinking, preferences, and behavior – all fundamental truths that fuel business growth. But many organizations have Insights teams set up to fail.

Without an early seat at the strategy table, Insights teams end up operating as a service function. This not only leaves critical data out of decision-making, it contributes to a culture of doing research that doesn’t move the needle for the business.?

If this sounds like your team’s current way of working, what should you do instead?

Leaders must shift the position of the Insights function from a cost center to a strategic growth partner.

Here are some things to keep in mind to position your team for success.

The service model spectrum

Your Insights team may be sitting on a goldmine of customer data. But if it’s operating as a service function, most of that gold will go unused.

One tell-tale sign of a service mentality is when stakeholders approach the Insights team for surveys to validate business decisions or initiatives that are already underway. If this is the case, Insights is likely in a service role. Researchers will be limited in their ability to conduct research that will drive growth, both from a culture and bandwidth perspective.

The same goes when it comes to survey design. If you find that stakeholders are coming with prescriptive survey questions in hand, researchers will be busy collecting data to satisfy the campaign or scorecard KPIs that need optimizing. The same applies to your VoC survey strategy.

So how do you self-assess where you are between strategic growth partner, and service function? One question to ask is how often, and early, the Insights team is engaged when setting strategy.

A helpful framework is offered up by author Richard Rumelt in his book, ‘Good Strategy/ Bad Strategy,’ where he outlines three components that make up every great strategy. Reflecting on these building blocks can help you get a gauge of what level of strategy your Insights team is operating at.

First is the Diagnosis stage. Rumelt pegs the first step to achieving any goal as getting clear on challenges. Asking questions like, “what makes this hard?” or, “why can’t we just accomplish this tomorrow?” helps clarify the problems before you dive into solutions.?

The second is establishing a Guiding Policy, which outlines an overall approach for dealing with the challenges identified in the diagnosis.

The third building block is Coherent Actions, or the set of activities designed to overcome the challenges and get the outcomes you want. Actions across the team should honor the guiding policies to ensure they compound and build upon one another.

As an Insights team, the more you are embedded in the diagnosis stage, the more you’ll be able to operate strategically.

New ways of working: First-class insights

Moving towards more frequent engagement with Insights teams does more than empower careers and cultures. It improves the bottom-line.

According to a study by the Aberdeen Group, ‘The Business Value of Building a Best-in-Class VoC Program,’ companies using first-class VoC methods saw nearly 10x the annual revenue growth due to 55% higher customer retention compared to teams running a lesser quality program.

So what does a first-class program look like, and what are some practical ways to get moving in that direction?

In short, you want more people from across the organization coming to the Insights team to set strategy, not validate decisions already being made. Lots of inbound inquiries asking for inputs into decision-making to firm up strategies is a good sign.

To connect to the ‘Good Strategy/ Bad Strategy’ framework, you want Insights included in the strategy setting as early as possible. This looks like participating in the Diagnosis phase. When involved at this early point, Insights has an opportunity to shape growth themes, business decisions, and can operate effectively as the primary owner of all survey design.

One of the simplest ways you could start to measure the strategic success of your Insights team is by how the rest of the company engages with them. Look at how integrated they are into the operating system of the company, and work up from there.

As an Insight leader, you’ll know that you’ve started to make progress if you’re no longer fighting for budget, own an established seat at the strategy table, and have control of your survey strategy.?

How to get started

If you’re not quite sure where to start, here are some practical steps any Insights team lead can take to begin establishing a more strategic presence in your organization.

Align with the company north star metric. Make sure your research efforts are as closely related to the company’s north star metric as possible –?whether that’s increased users and revenue or reduced churn. To maintain a seat at the strategy table, you’ll need to deliver insights that directly support the business’ goals. If you’re not certain on how to make this link, here’s a helpful question to ask: does the research you’re doing or insights you are providing help the company learn what’s most valuable for customers? Is it in a lane where someone can actually take action to create that new value in line with the company goals? If the answer is no to either, it’s time to re-evaluate the research you’re doing.

Get the flywheel spinning. If your Insights function has been operating as a service function up until now, you’ll likely have some work to do around managing internal perceptions of your role and contributions.

To get the strategic insight flywheel spinning, you may have to inject yourself into meetings and get yourself in the rooms where strategy is being set. The best way to do this is by showing up with tremendously valuable insights that inform better decision-making with data.

Tell your story effectively. It’s critical that you contextualize data for your audience, presenting the right insights in the right way. Leading with empathy and framing data for comprehension will go a long way. For example, if you’re presenting to C-suite, you’ll want to contextualize your findings against a backdrop of themes like brand loyalty or brand-level NPS. Presenting to leaders of business functions, like the product team on the other hand, will likely need to be tailored to business unit level metrics like customer or product feedback.?

In summary

Shifting Insights teams from service providers to strategic partners is paramount for organizational growth. By integrating teams early into strategy discussions and aligning research with business goals, teams can move beyond being data service providers to being catalysts for meaningful innovation and growth.

At Kapiche, we specialize in setting Insights teams up for success by providing the tools to quickly aggregate and contextualize customer feedback in one place. If you’d like to chat about how we can help along these lines, feel free to reach out to me anytime.