Conflicts are an unfortunate part of life. Whether they are borne from differing opinions, complex situations, or contrasting data, conflicts arise in many places in a business daily and stakeholders without insights have a challenge to overcome them.

FlexMR have published an article on Greenbook on 8th March 2024, entitled How to Nurture Synthesis and Eradicate Business Conflicts with Insights, exploring just this topic and encouraging the use of insights to overcome significant business challenges and cultivate a culture of customer salience.

Nurturing Business Synthesis with Insights

In a perfect world, all stakeholders would turn to the insights team, or an insights resource centre where they can find the insights stored. However, stakeholder engagement is one of the largest challenges insight experts face in modern market research. We know that insights help to create the one true view of the customer across an organisation, but there are significant challenges standing in our way. 

Barriers to Synthesis

Organisational silos a challenge as old as time, as teams who specialise in areas work in those areas and do not believe that others will be able to provide value. Or that they could provide value to other teams. If they are in line with business objectives, why should they open up their processes and strategies to the scrutiny of others? As long as their decisions are backed by the data they generate or hold in their team, they do not need to collaborate with other teams who do not possess the ‘right’ knowledge. 

Another challenge lies in conflicting data. Alongside the impacts from those silos, data being generated in all those areas from differing sources are more than likely to lead to conflicting views on customers, and thus conflicting strategies directing each team in a different direction and an organisation that only gets in its own way. 

Conflicting data occurs more often than insight experts like to admit, and this presents the challenge of keeping stakeholders’ faith in insights, while also explaining how conflicting data arose and how they will deal with it.

Cultivating Customer Salience

Having one true view of the customer across an entire organisation is the best road to success. It is taught in courses across the business acumen, but only sometimes is it followed in practice.

This one view, this undeniable Customer Salience imbued in working practices, mindsets and all decisions and conversations will be tough to get off the ground, so how would insight experts help this happen?

By debunking prevalent customer myths and conflicts across the stakeholder organisation, ensuring the insight team becomes the first and only port of call for official insights, and creating dedicated insight communication channels for stakeholders to use whenever they need research or insights.  

Discover more in the full article on Greenbook now.

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