True customer insight doesn’t emerge automatically as you go about your business, not even if you have a lot of interactions with your customers or care a lot about them. Caring deeply about someone doesn’t mean you understand them deeply—just ask any parent of a teenager!

To generate Customer Insight, you have to turn your data into insight.

A mature Customer Insight system has…

Regular Evaluation Conversations: It doesn’t do you any good to collect a lot of data and leave it alone. The whole point is to use this data to make improvements. Schedule these in advance and take them seriously.

Criterion for Evaluating the Data: In these conversations, you can filter your insights through the lens of your organizational priorities. And you can set your organizational priorities with the insights you uncover. Don’t have random conversations or chase trivial issues. Set clear criterion.

Accountability for Previous Decisions: Sadly, you can’t assume that because you discussed it, it has been implemented. Even executives benefit from a check in to see if everything is in progress—and that’s assuming nothing has to be adjusted because the implementation revealed new insights.

Humility: The biggest barrier to learning is assuming you already know. Ironically, this is most likely to happen the more successful you have been lately. So, the more successful you are, the more intensely you have to pursue humility.

And the most mature Customer Insight systems include the following practice: live observation.

You should get in the field—yes, you—and see your customers interact with what you sell. There’s no substitute for being there in person. Walk the floors of your hospital and talk to your patients. Visit the stores and work the register for a little bit. Listen in on service calls with your staff. Stay connected to the heart of your business: your customers.

I know, you are really busy and already don’t have enough time to get your tasks done, but there are big benefits to having your leadership team, even the CEO, make a habit of getting into the field.

Most of the senior leaders I work with started in the field. Maybe that’s true of you too. You were a supervisor on the jobsite or the original accountant who took care of clients. But as you grew in leadership and as your company grew, the natural consequence is to lose your connection to the feel of the business. The danger is that you don’t realize it’s happening. You still see some clients, but you used to personally interact with 50 percent of your client base each year, and now you talk to 5 percent—and they are all the older clients from the early years. You went from personally interacting with these people to reading reports, and you don’t realize what you’re missing.

In this scenario, you still think you know your customer, but you’re using old data and/or you believe that the 5 percent you see fully represents the rest of your customers.

I’m not saying your team is lying to you in their reports, and I’m not suggesting that you need to return to being a frontline staff member. But I am saying that you used to conduct live observation of your customers as a normal part of your job, and now you are going to have to work at it. What was once automatic now needs to be intentional.

And if you did not grow up in the business, then this might be even more valuable to you. All the best reports and smartest strategy discussions can’t deliver the wisdom and credibility that comes from hands-on field experience. When you get out of the office and get on-site, you will learn a lot and you will earn a lot of trust from your frontline staff.

More tactics like this can be found in the book Make Your Brand Legendary by Scott Wozniak, the CEO of Swoz Consulting. You can get your copy here: https://amzn.to/3PD3szu