Part of the Bright Sparks series, written by Geri Goldie, Head of Customer Experience
So we collect everything.
Every click. Every login. Every survey response. Every device. Every interaction. Every possible metric technology allows us to capture.
Organisations are now spending millions collecting information they may never use, storing data they don’t need, and creating risks they don’t fully understand. 68% of enterprise data is never used. 54% of it is never even accessed.
We have to ask – has the data revolution reached the point of diminishing return?
The famous British Olympic rowing team had a single question that guided every decision:
“Will it make the boat go faster?”
Customer experience leaders need an equivalent.
Not “Can we measure it?”
Not “Should we build another dashboard?”
But simply:
“What decision will this help us make? What will we do differently as a result?”
Because somewhere along the way we’ve confused what technology makes possible with what customers actually need.
Increasingly, I see organisations asking for more dashboards, more reports and more measurement points simply because they’re available. There’s also a fear of missing something important. If everyone else is collecting this data, perhaps we should too.
It’s understandable. But it’s rarely the best place to start.
The most valuable conversations don’t begin with ‘what can we measure?’. They begin with ‘what are you trying to achieve?’. Only then can you work backwards to identify the handful of measures that genuinely matter.
A good customer experience partner shouldn’t simply build every dashboard that’s requested. Sometimes our job is to challenge assumptions, explain the consequences and simplify the problem.
It means more governance. More cyber risk. More compliance. More storage. More administration. More survey fatigue for end users.
Every day the world creates almost 500 million terabytes of new data. Yet organizations analyze only a fraction of what they already have. Still, we continue to collect more—not because we’ve identified a question that needs answering, but because technology makes it possible. Every new data point comes with a price: storage, governance, cyber security, compliance and the reputational risk that follows if it’s ever exposed.
When the average data breach now costs £4.44 million, perhaps the question isn’t “What else could we collect?” but “What is the cost?”
Storing data may look cheap by the gigabyte, but it becomes expensive by the habit. At standard cloud rates, 100TB of unnecessary data can cost tens of thousands a year before anyone has secured it, governed it, backed it up, searched it, audited it or explained why it was still there after a breach.
And often, very little additional value is created. Less than 10-15% of customers reply to surveys or feedback – which means that what that data is telling you is of very little relevance. The more compelling data point is that up to 90% of your customers don’t think there is any value to them of engaging with you via this survey.
Many airports measure satisfaction through the famous smiley-face buttons.
But what they gather is often meaningless, untargeted and deeply unsophisticated.
Children press them for fun. Frustrated travellers don’t bother. Most passengers simply walk past; high net value passengers don’t even walk past them as they bypass them through fast track pathways and airline lounges. A more sophisticated response is required using technology to analyse passenger flow, queue lengths and dwell time where we can learn far more about where improvements are needed. Data isn’t a silver bullet – good date might be.
Its new Wi-Fi network generated hundreds of technical metrics showing everything was working perfectly. Yet students kept complaining they couldn’t get connected.
The issue wasn’t the network. It was the joining experience.
Some students misunderstood how to use the QR code instructions, and some were trying to connect games consoles and devices that hadn’t been considered during testing. The organisation had measured everything the technology could tell them – but almost nothing about what the student was actually experiencing.
The best customer experience teams should have the confidence to say, “You don’t need to collect that.” Increasingly the role of those individuals has to be to advocate for the user – reduce frictions, improve ease, keep my data safe.
Because the goal isn’t always to build the biggest data lake; it’s to make better decisions.
Before adding another KPI, launching another survey or asking customers for one more piece of information, ask the same question that transformed an Olympic team:
Will it make the boat go faster?
Data isn’t just about the numbers – it’s about the decisions they enable, and Geri is on hand to share her expertise.
Spark the conversation with Geri
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Head of Customer Experience
Geri leads Roc’s Service Managers and shapes our customer-first culture - driving initiatives that improve both customer and colleague experience, and putting the customer at the heart of every decision.
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