When Brilliant Customer Insights Get Watered Down

From the “Descent to Average” to the truth that nobody cares about your business as much as you do, author John Sills argues that being truly customer-led means protecting insights and designing experiences colleagues can actually deliver.

Brilliant customer experience ideas don’t usually fail because frontline teams can’t deliver them. They fail because, somewhere between insight and implementation, organisations dilute them into mediocrity.

Author John Sills calls this “The Descent to Average.”

“Often, the reason for failure of a great idea is less about the frontline implementation, and more about how the original idea has been designed, something we call ‘The Descent to Average’,” says Sills.

“This is when a great idea enters ‘production’ in an organisation, and every department, finance, legal, distribution et al, gets to have their say on the idea, bending it and shaping it to fit their own outcomes, becoming more distant from the original insight, and what really mattered to customers.”

The end result is watered down into a “quick win” that ticks everyone’s boxes, but doesn’t truly move the needle for customers.

The Inconvenient Truth

The first uncomfortable reality brands must face is that customers don’t care about you as much as you care about yourself.

“That nobody cares about your business as much as you do,” says Sills.

“People in organisations spend a lot of time thinking about their own organisation and industry… But customers, in most instances, don’t really want to be thinking about your organisation at all; you’re a conduit for them to achieve whatever their real outcome is.”

Too often, companies design experiences that reflect their own priorities rather than their customers’.

Balancing Wants With What’s Possible

Even when organisations recognise what customers want, the tension comes in delivering it at scale. For Sills, the solution lies in deciding how to be “meaningfully distinct.”

“Organisations need to carefully consider how they want to be meaningfully distinct from the competitors and alternatives available,” he says. 

“To be meaningfully distinct at scale, organisations need to be sure of their own strengths and capabilities that they can build on. They also need to have a view on where the world is going in the future.”

This isn’t about chasing generic goals like being “easy” or “simple.” It’s about clarity of purpose and having the courage to deliver on it.

Moments of Belief

But even when insights are clear, buy-in isn’t automatic.

“This happens all the time, to be honest. And often, it’s not with any malice or lack of care from those colleagues who aren’t bought in; they just don’t have the belief needed to make difficult and often inconvenient choices.”

The solution is to expose decision-makers directly to customer realities. Bring them into research, let them meet customers, or even use videos to show real stories. And when necessary, take a leap.

“Another is to take a chance and do what you think is right, asking for forgiveness more than permission. If you try something, and it works, you can use that to prove to colleagues that the insight is right, and you should do more for customers in the same way.”

Beyond Pain-Points

Being customer-led doesn’t mean simply asking people what they want. It means going deeper.

“It’s often a misconception that being customer-led means doing what customers want, just asking them, and delivering that. Doing that will just lead to fixing pain-points, being slightly behind customers’ expectations, rather than setting them.”

Instead, Sills argues, companies need to live in the customer’s world: “leaders need to reconnect with the reality of their customers’ lives, spending real time with them, having real experiences. This creates a visceral, emotional connection, in a way that graphs and data can’t.”

Practical Creativity

Even in times of constraint, creativity thrives.

“Creativity doesn’t have to be about big, expensive ideas. In fact, creativity often works best when constraints are involved.”

And sometimes, the simplest acts, like showing care, ownership, or being present for customers, create more lasting experiences than grand gestures.

The biggest risk to great customer ideas isn’t customers, it’s the organisations delivering them. The descent to average isn’t inevitable, but it requires courage, clarity, and conviction to resist it. 

For leaders, the challenge is to protect the spark of customer insight all the way to execution and to remember that being customer-led isn’t about reacting to what people say they want, but about understanding what truly matters to them and daring to deliver it.

ALSO READ: Experience Hub: What the Future Contact Centre Looks Like