Struggling to drive action? Conduct an insight audit

Many XM teams struggle to drive action. Often, there is an overlooked root cause: Underdeveloped insights.

Even well-established data and insights teams regularly produce insights that fail to turn into meaningful action. For example, only 18% of the respondents in our 2025 CX Practitioners Study said they are strong at responding to insights with action. Experienced leaders recognize that this limits the impact they can have on their business.

While there are many reasons for this – competing priorities, unclear goals, lack of resources, and more – there’s an important one that tends to be overlooked: underdeveloped insights.

Checklist for a fully developed insight

Insights come in many shapes and sizes. Some uncover unknown unknowns, while others clarify or quantify known factors. Some confirm beliefs while others shift paradigms. Regardless of their form, a genuine insight teaches something new and actionable.

Too often, however, data and insights teams fall short – presenting data points or trends as insights without giving stakeholders enough to act on. For example:

20% of customers are dissatisfied with the in-store experience

While this is a great seed for an insight, many stakeholders will find this insufficient for driving meaningful action. They have existing priorities, limited resources, and might not even know what to do with it in the first place! There is more work to be done on the insight itself.

To help you develop your data points into full-fledged insights, consider the following checklist:

While not guaranteed, an insight that includes these details has a significantly higher chance of driving change.

For teams accustomed to primarily delivering data points or trends, fully developing every insight can be a substantial increase in workload. But this is neither practical nor necessary for every insight. For example, low-cost and easy win actions have a low burden of proof. In these scenarios, an exhaustive analysis is neither necessary nor economical. Spend your best efforts where they are justified – on higher cost, higher risk actions.

Remember, one actionable insight is more valuable than one hundred that go unused.

Conducting an insight audit

You can use the concept of a fully developed insight to conduct an insight audit, helping you evaluate the quality of insights your team produces. This exercise will help you identify your strengths and what you can do to close gaps in your approach.

To conduct an insight audit:

1. Compile a list of insights. Gather all insights your team has generated over the past 12 months. These can be related to your company’s products, services, support, or other processes.
2. Document the status of each insight. For each insight, specify whether it was actioned, shared but not actioned, not shared, or if the status is not known. Insight tracking tools can help with this.
3. Evaluate insight quality. Assess how well each insight meets the criteria for a fully developed insight. Adapt the checklist provided above to meet your needs.
4. Identify patterns and opportunities. Using your list of insights, consider:
   • How many insights does your team typically generate each quarter?
   • What percent meet your standard for a fully developed insight?
   • Which criteria appear to be most difficult for your team?
   • What distinguishes insights that are actioned from those that aren’t?
   • How can you reallocate efforts to maximize the impact of your insights?

The results may be surprising. A clear picture of the state of your team’s insights will help you make improvements to increase the impact of your work.

Bonus tips for turning insights into action

While high quality insights are the foundation driving action, we would also like to offer a few additional recommendations to increase the likelihood of success:

• Use existing momentum. This means focusing on customer and employee journeys that are already a priority for the organization. It also means focusing on stakeholders that are likely to collaborate and make the most out of your insights.
• Communicate the WIIFM. Lead with what your stakeholders care about (“WIIFM” = “What’s in it for me?”) to increase the likelihood of getting the attention and resources you need. For example: “We think the organization is leaving $xM on the table this year due to XYZ issue. Here’s why…”
• Tailor your approach to your stakeholders. Some stakeholders will always ask for the data while others respond better to stories. Some want a debate while some want a memo. If you aren’t familiar with the style of the person you want to influence, ask members of their team for advice.
• Suggest clear next steps. Some people respond better to a specific recommendation on how to respond to the insight while others respond better to an offer to help design a solution. Regardless, propose a specific next step and track it to completion.
• Maintain visibility. Your work is not done once you’ve made your recommendation. In addition to helping you measure your impact, maintaining visibility will help you identify where stakeholders may need additional clarification or reminders.
• Celebrate your stakeholders. Driving meaningful change requires you to work with other leaders throughout the organization. Celebrating their contributions and success will help you build relationships and generate momentum.

Call to action

For many Experience Management teams, developing high quality, actionable insights is job #1. To help you evaluate your performance in this area, consider conducting an insight audit. Following this exercise, you may also want to set quality standards for what constitutes a fully developed insight for your team. If you do this, make sure your team has the skills, resources, and priorities to meet your quality bar.

The bottom line: An insight audit will help you identify gaps that may be preventing your team from maximizing its impact.