It is so very easy to claim that your customers are the lifeblood of your company.  After all, they pay everyone’s salary don’t they?...

In our data driven and insight led world we have access to the deepest seams of customer data spilling over with rich gems to be mined, polished and marvelled at! On the face of it, having this abundance of rich data should in theory give sufficient insights to tick all the right customer leadership boxes.  Or does it?

Could it be in fact that this abundance of data becomes such an effective tool for insight and for driving our activation that we forget to actually open our eyes and ears and engage directly with an actual customer!

By denying ourselves these engagements - real or virtual - we miss the nuances voiced in customer perspectives, the actual words being used, facial expressions and the look in their eyes. While data may level all arguments, and enable great analytical thinking and progress, it can’t voice perspectives nor prompt us to engage deeper, or ask sharper more expansive questions that react to an inflection, a facial expression or an honestly articulated point of view. 
   
 In her bestselling book ‘Uncharted - How to map the future together’ Margaret Heffernan writes about some of the challenges data brings to businesses and executives who fear being wrong to such an extent that they crave the certainty that data brings. However, as a consequence, they lose the ability to think freely and creatively.   

At Defy Expectations we are by no means suggesting you quit being data hungry, absolutely not!
We are however advocates of a more balanced diet, complimenting both digitally mined data sets with real world customer insights and diverse, creative thinking.

We love helping clients recalibrate to find that balance and thus build the kind of customer leadership capabilities that can be leverage across their organisations for impact and results.

Contact us for a consultation so we can look into your eyes, ask some deep questions and understand more about you and your requirements!