The art of communicating customer insights

Following on from my recent article about The five customer insight basics to drive engagement, I have been thinking that there is much more discussion worthy around how businesses need to think about deploying their insights.  By this I specifically mean how Insight professionals are communicating customer insights  to their internal clients across the business.

 If you consider the profile of many Insight professionals they have often come from quite a narrow spectrum of experience.  I don’t mean any dis-service by this, far from it.  But what I do feel it has lead to a tendancy to rely on two things:1)    A preference to seek a tool to churn out automated information to the end consumer and2)    A heavy reliance on tables, charts, graphs and dashboards through which the insights are communicated I hope it is not too heretical, but how many people out there can readily and intuitively read a large table of numbers and anything but the simplest graph?  Multiply that into a 20-30 screen dashboard or powerpoint deck and you have one huge task ahead of you to engage your audience and least of all hope that some of it sticks. We always do our best to deliver our thinking as succinctly as we can, but at the end of the day we are not necessarily professional communicators and still end up being reliant on the traditional Office mediums. I can’t help but think how different our work could be with the help of some more people from creative industries such as advertising, TV and the arts.  Everything these people do is about communication and often of very complex ideas with no words or numbers to back them up. I’d be really interested to hear from people that have experience of different ways of communicating insights and start to investigate some new approaches we could all adopt to up the game.