Whose Perspective Is Missing in your Customer Strategy?
Why Better Customer Insight Start with Different Perspectives
Every summer, the focus naturally shifts towards families.
Marketing campaigns focus on school holidays, “things to do with the kids” dominate social media and visitor attractions, leisure and entertainment organisations naturally spend more time talking about family days out. That makes perfect sense. Families with school-age children represent an important audience and, for many organisations, the summer holidays are one of the busiest and most important trading periods of the year.
What caught my attention recently, though, wasn’t the focus on families itself. It was a social media post describing the challenge of a busy mum trying to book a family day out. It was a genuine example of customer frustration, but it also made me think about how quickly we can begin to view an experience through a single lens.
It’s easy to hear one story and unconsciously start designing for that person. The reality, of course, is that every customer arrives with a different set of priorities, pressures and expectations.
How Our Own Experiences Shape Customer Insight
Over the years I’ve spent plenty of weekends and school holidays taking my five nieces and nephews to attractions, theatres and museums. Those experiences have taught me a great deal about what makes a family visit enjoyable and, just as importantly, what can make it unnecessarily stressful. I’ve seen the excitement of planning a day out, the reality of trying to keep everyone happy once you’re there, and the difference seemingly small details can make to the overall experience.
At the same time, I am also a customer as an independent woman in my late forties. Whenever possible, I deliberately avoid school holidays, choosing quieter periods when I can take my time and experience somewhere in a completely different way.
All perspectives are valuable, and together they ought to be a reminder that there is no such thing as a typical customer.
Every one of us sees the world through our own experiences. They shape how we solve problems, how we interpret customer feedback and, often without realising it, the assumptions we make when discussing improvements. That’s true of customers, but it’s equally true of the people making decisions inside organisations.
The Hidden Blind Spots in Customer Experience Decisions
Perhaps that’s why assumptions can be so difficult to spot. They rarely feel like assumptions because they make perfect sense to us.
Someone who has spent years working in operations will naturally notice operational friction. A marketing professional is likely to focus on messaging and communications. Colleagues responsible for fundraising may instinctively think about relationships and long-term engagement. Equally, someone who has been a member for years will experience an organisation very differently from a first-time visitor, just as a family with young children will notice different things from a couple visiting on a quiet weekday.
None of those perspectives is wrong. In fact, every one of them has something valuable to contribute. The challenge comes when they’re the only perspectives represented around the table. The longer we work within an organisation, the easier it becomes to forget what it feels like to experience it for the first time. We become familiar with our own processes, language and ways of working, often without realising it. Customers don’t have that advantage. They experience our organisations exactly as we present them, bringing their own expectations, motivations and experiences with them.
Sometimes that’s where blind spots begin to emerge. It’s rarely intentional, but it can influence everything from marketing campaigns and customer journeys to product development and investment decisions.
Why CRM and Technology Reflect Customer Assumptions
One of the things I’ve always valued about working across arts and culture, live entertainment, attractions, leisure and sport is seeing how different organisations approach remarkably similar challenges. Although every organisation serves a different audience, many of the questions are the same. How do we encourage people to return? How do we remove friction from the customer journey? How do we create experiences that people genuinely value?
Working across multiple sectors has continually reinforced one lesson: there is no such thing as a typical customer. What works brilliantly in one organisation may be completely wrong for another because the audience, context and objectives are different.
That’s why independent perspectives can be so valuable. When you’ve worked somewhere for years, it’s only natural to become accustomed to established processes, familiar language and accepted ways of doing things. Someone seeing the organisation for the first time brings a different perspective. They ask different questions, notice different things and often spot opportunities that those closest to the organisation no longer see.
The strongest decisions come from bringing those perspectives together. Staff understand the organisation from the inside. Customers understand what it feels like to experience it. Combining those viewpoints creates richer conversations and better informed decisions.
Better Customer Insight Starts with Better Questions
One of the simplest ways to challenge our own assumptions is to become more curious.
Rather than asking whether a new idea will work, perhaps ask who it works for. Whose needs are being considered? Whose voice is shaping the discussion? Which audiences are well represented in the data and which might be less visible? If a customer journey appears straightforward to us, is that because it genuinely is, or because we’re already familiar with it?
Those questions won’t always change the answer, but they often change the conversation. They encourage us to pause before assuming that our own experiences are representative of everyone else’s and remind us that understanding customers is rarely about finding a single answer. It’s about recognising that different people experience the same organisation in very different ways.
The Question Every Organisation Should Ask
Every summer, organisations will quite rightly continue to focus on families. They remain an incredibly important audience and one that deserves careful thought and investment. The opportunity isn’t to shift attention away from families, but to remember that every audience is made up of individuals whose lives, priorities and expectations are shaped by very different experiences.
Perhaps that’s why one simple question has stayed with me since reading that social media post.
Whose perspective is missing from this conversation?
Whether you’re reviewing a customer journey, planning a marketing campaign, investing in new technology or simply looking for ways to better understand your audiences, it’s a question worth returning to.
Sometimes the biggest opportunities don’t come from collecting more data. They come from recognising that our own experiences are only ever one part of the picture and that the best customer insights often emerge when we’re prepared to look beyond ourselves.
