3 reasons why organizations go without human insight

Today, terms like “customer experience” and “user centricity” litter countless websites.  While organizations across industries know the value and staying power of being customer-obsessed, many still go without human insight solutions or user research platforms. 

Becoming aware of the need to be more customer-centric doesn’t necessarily mean enterprises are taking action to implement the research solutions needed to fully adopt these concepts into their processes and workflows. Studies by Gartner and PwC have shown that 90% of customer-facing employees said they understood their customers' needs, but only 38% of consumers agree. There’s still a disconnect happening. 

One of the best ways to bridge this gap in unmet customer needs is to integrate a human insight solution that puts researchers, designers, digital product teams, and marketers face-to-face with real customers at a moment’s notice. But despite the availability of user testing platforms, there’s often still resistance to incorporating them into product development workflows. This article will examine some of the most common objections to human insight platforms and why they’re misguided.

1. Leadership is missing the value of human insight

In many organizations, multiple sign-offs are required to purchase and implement a new human insight platform or experience research solution. In some cases, decision-making might fall to individuals unfamiliar with the benefits of a human insight platform or siloed off in another department, unaware of the need. When this happens, the people who want the new tool have to band together, lobby for it, and do their best to put together a compelling business case as to why it’s worth the investment. 

Of course, doing all of that takes time. So rather than falling behind on their current work to fight for a tool, it’s often easier for people to give up and resign themselves to working with what they’ve got. 

Instead of giving in to the resistance, educating those in the organization who don’t yet see the value of human insight and customer research is worthwhile. Start by identifying and quantifying—as much as possible—the time and money lost to issues like customer service requests, insufficient research capacity, and developer rework. Doing so makes the lack of human insight more tangible. The proof is already out there that the aforementioned metrics can be drastically improved with the right human insight platform. In one of our surveys with 200 customers who had adopted UserTesting, 56-94% of them said they saw notable improvements in each of those respective areas. 

2. Human insight isn’t in the budget, yet

All successful organizations rely on data. The term “data-driven” seems to have been plastered on every company homepage at one time or another in the last few years. No business leader in their right mind would give up the tools that allow them to calculate things like profit/loss, pipeline, engagement, or subscriber numbers. Those metrics are considered vital, and therefore, some of the budget is allocated to them.

Human insight platforms provide a different—but equally valuable—type of data compared with common data analytics tools. They reveal the qualitative rationale behind the numbers. Yet it’s common for these kinds of tools not to be prioritized. What’s going on here? 

Often, organizations don’t budget for this kind of experience research because they’re unaware of the value they’re missing out on. When this is the case, those trying to implement human insight solutions may run into the “not in the budget” roadblock. In reality, however, the organization has enough money to pay for a human insight solution. However, because leadership teams already planned and set budgets without human insight in mind, money was never set aside for it.

It’s time for leaders to realize that the quantitative data within their organization only tells half the story of user behavior. Without a human insight platform in place, the only way to fill in the rest of the story is with guesses and opinions. And those are costly. Painting a clear and equal picture of quantitative and qualitative data is another valuable way to bring others on board with adopting human insight as a priority. 

3. You don’t know what you don’t know

Wayne Dyer once said, “When you change how you look at things, the things you look at change.” This is strikingly accurate regarding the speed and efficiency of research solutions today. 

When research is viewed as an expensive and time-consuming slog, it’s natural for teams or entire organizations to avoid it. But human insight platforms can facilitate a powerful shift in that perspective.

As soon as teams realize that there’s no question too big or small for human insight, as soon as they feel the speed at which results can be produced, processes, departments, and products start to evolve. Human insight can seep into more areas of an organization until it becomes an integral part of every step in a product’s lifecycle—from ideation and development to marketing and sales. All of this ultimately ladders up to impressive business results. In the same survey of 200 customers (across more than 15 industries) mentioned above, they all reported an average ROI of more than 550%. While numbers like that can be hard to comprehend, they can help you communicate the impact of adopting human insight. 

Why you should leverage human insight to mitigate risk

It’s ironic that organizations' decisions to go without a user testing platform sometimes come from a “risk-averse” rationale. For example, some might resist the adoption of human insight because it’s too risky to “waste” budget on a new research tool. At the same time, however, the organization’s product, marketing, and business development decisions are finalized based on little more than one or two leaders’ opinions or “expertise.” 

That isn’t to say that expertise isn’t valid and useful. However, organizations must gamble on their decision-making without properly testing and validating that expertise. They have to wait until launch day to see if they’re right. If this is happening at your organization, it can be helpful to ask people which is riskier: Avoiding change and relying on guesswork for the foreseeable future, or doing the work—right now— to incorporate a feedback and decision-making system that can adapt and serve the organization for years to come?