Ok, so this is not going to be a typical blog post where I talk about some technology, focused these days in the big data or security space and how it impacts the customer experience.
Nope.... This is going to be a "Pet Peeve" blog post about something that has driven me crazy for years...
And that pet peeve is the use of the word "Insights"....
For the last few years now, every single vendor under the sun, regardless if they are an analytics company or not, have been talking about providing you "Insights" into your data or your operations or your customers etc...
JUST STOP IT!!!
No one and I really mean NO ONE is really providing customers with Insights.
What they are providing customers with is data, graphs, charts, dashboards and any other cool, wiz bang visuals that can be generated by a software program.
But can we please just agree that these are not Insights. They are just another way of showing someone data and then forcing them to extrapolate from there what the data actually means, which will then eventually end up with a human generating some real Insights.
What I want to see more of in the industry in general is the software providing the end user with a full blown, actual Insight. So instead of showing someone a pie chart with 8 slices in it that make up a customer segmentation, there is a short description of what the data means, why it is important, a bit of context around it and a link provided that allows the person to explore the data that generated this Insight a bit more.
I think of Insights as "Leads". The machine doing the heavy lifting of finding where you should be focused, based on the data and then allowing the user to dig deeper if need be.
So, please vendors, stop talking about how you all provide "Insights". And instead focus on building software that actually does provide Insights.
