5 Hidden Costs of Gated Insights (And How to Fix Them)

Your customers are talking. But who's listening? 

Every day, valuable customer feedback flows into your organization. These insights are packed with potential, offering valuable clues about what's working, what's broken, and what your customers crave. 

But too often, that information stays locked away in department silos or hidden behind restrictive pay-per-seat models and licenses. When that happens is, you don't just lose access. You lose momentum. 

Let's take a closer look at what's really at stake when insights are gated, and how opening access can create real, measurable value across your entire organization. 

Restricted Insights Slow Down Decision-Making 

When insights aren't readily available, decisions slow down. Perhaps you've experienced this firsthand. You need to answer a market trend or tackle some customer issue, but you're stuck waiting until someone pulls a report or shares a dashboard. The moment passes.  

Studies by McKinsey found that organizational speed is critical to superior performance. Companies that operate at greater speed are quicker off the mark, more adaptable, flexible, and responsive; they're better positioned for leadership than those that don’t keep their foot on the pedal.  

For example, IKEA faced challenges in analysing vast amounts of customer feedback across multiple languages. With Caplena, they processed over 3 million feedback comments monthly in more than 40 languages, enabling 16,000 employees worldwide to make faster, data-driven decisions.  

Disconnected Teams Create Broken Customer Journeys 

Broken customer experiences are created by team silos. Imagine this: In customer feedback, your support team has noticed a recurring problem. But that feedback never reaches your product team. As a result, it goes on annoying customers for months.  

When different teams share insights, they can quickly piece together the full picture with less effort. They can spot and fix issues early, before they escalate to a crisis.  

The result? Smoother, more consistent experiences across every customer touchpoint. 

The Cost of Guesswork vs Informed Decisions 

When customer insights aren’t easily accessible, teams often rely on assumptions or old data to guide decisions. But companies that consistently use detailed customer data in their decision-making are nearly 2.8 times more likely to see meaningful revenue growth. 

One effective way to reduce guesswork is by asking open-ended questions. This type of feedback gives customers room to explain their experiences, often revealing issues that close-ended surveys miss. You'll find more about the power of open-ended feedback in this playbook. 

With Caplena, teams can analyze large volumes of open-ended feedback and turn it into quantified insights. Everyone can visualize them to know what is happening or ask questions to a chatbot interface to get fast and precise answers.  For instance, Lufthansa's insights hub, is accessible to all its key stakeholders, so everyone can hear the voice of customer and act on continuous improvements for their area.

"

We effortlessly decode customer feedback, track and segment the passenger journey."

Thomas Storbeck

Senior Manager Customer Insights

Topics, sentiments, drivers of satisfactions and trends become clear, and everyone can act on them. No more guesswork. 

You're Paying for Feedback Nobody Uses 

Analysing feedback takes time, money, and resources. But if only a handful of people can access the insights, the return on that investment diminishes quickly.  

According to Forrester, nearly 75% of voice-of-the-customer data collected by organizations is never shared beyond the team that collected it. That means opportunities for improvement stay locked in a silo. 

Why does this happen? Sometimes it’s the cost of adding more users to a CX platform. Other times, dashboards are too complex, or teams lack the training to turn raw data into action. In many companies, insights end up siloed not by intention, but because the tools aren’t built for easy access. 

Caplena makes it easier to overcome these barriers. With intuitive reporting and unlimited reporting-only users, anyone on your team—not just analysts—can access, understand, and act on customer feedback.

Innovation Bottlenecks: How Insight Gaps Kill Great Ideas Before They Start 

Your frontline employees aka the ones who interact with customers daily, often have the best ideas for improvement. But without access to broader customer insights, their suggestions stay limited to what they personally observe. You're missing out on the power of informed innovation. 

"

AI-driven feedback analysis has transformed how we understand customer sentiment at Kia Europe. By swiftly processing and categorizing thousands of open-ended responses, Caplena helps us identify key trends and improve the overall customer experience across our European markets. For example, we can now analyze app store reviews and perform competitor benchmarking of car charging services. This allows us to stay ahead of industry trends and better align with consumer expectations."

Cosmin Donose

Assistant Manager CX Intelligence

Our customer, KIA Europe, tackled this challenge by sharing customer feedback directly with their dealerships. This gave frontline teams a clearer picture of recurring issues and trends, enabling them to respond more quickly and effectively. By giving more people access to customer insights, they turned everyday observations into smart, insight-driven actions. Read the full story here.  

Un-gating Insights: The Path Ahead 

Access to insights doesn’t mean the creation of chaos. It’s about giving your teams the information they need to make better decisions. Here’s what happens when insights are democratized: 

• Teams self-organize based on the top customer priorities 

• Ownership increases employee engagement  

• Faster, better responses lead to more satisfied customers 

• ROI on feedback analysis multiplies with cross-team collaboration 

How to Start Sharing insights across your Organization 

• Look across your organization and pinpoint the teams that would benefit from direct access to customer insights—think beyond just CX or research. 

• Put a clear and simple process in place to share feedback and make it easy for teams to understand what the data means. 

• Offer short training sessions or guidance so people feel confident using the insights to inform their work. Our team at Caplena is here to support you every step of the way, from rollout to onboarding and beyond. 

• Set up feedback loops so teams can see how their actions, based on insights, are making an impact. 

• Identify the meaningful metrics to measure success over time. Start with satisfaction scores like NPS or CSAT, then the topics your customers talk about, their corresponding sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) and their impact on satisfaction scores. These give you a blueprint to monitor overtime. 

Begin by asking yourself: Who in your organization would be able to make better decisions if they heard customer feedback immediately?  

Let’s connect and explore how Caplena can help everyone in your organization turn customer feedback into faster, smarter decisions.