The more-data myth: Why 3 in 4 leaders still delay decisions

Companies have never collected more customer data. Confidence hasn’t caught up.

Give leaders more customer data, and they’ll make faster, more confident decisions. At least, that’s the myth we’d like to believe. New research from TheyDo tells a different story.

For The Decision-Confidence Gap report, Sapio Research surveyed 1,000 business decision-makers on behalf of TheyDo. The survey found that 3 in 4 delay or avoid a decision at least once a month because they don’t have enough context about the customer or business impact. For 4 in 10, it happens every week. More data alone hasn’t fixed that.

The problem usually isn’t the amount or quality of the data. What’s missing is shared context. How do different signals relate to one another? And what should happen next?

It’s a familiar pattern in enterprise CX. Companies have spent years collecting customer data, and far less on connecting it. Teams end up with plenty of evidence and no shared way to make sense of it.

The gap is worst at the top. C-suite leaders are more likely than other decision-makers to say a lack of context is their biggest barrier to good decisions, and it shows in how they work. Among them, 4 in 10 delay or avoid decisions at least several times a week, twice the rate of the heads and senior managers below them.

Why doesn’t more data help?

Most large companies have invested heavily in understanding their customers. They have feedback tools, real-time listening, product analytics, dashboards, research, and contact center data. The data is there.

The trouble is that each team collects it, reads it, and acts on it in its own way. So when leaders sit down together, the same questions keep coming up.

Take a drop in NPS. One team blames onboarding, another blames pricing, and a third has data pointing to a service handoff. Everyone has evidence, and nobody agrees.

Or take budget planning. Three business units make three strong, data-backed cases, but none of them line up. The decision goes to whoever argues best.

That’s common. In the research, 77% of decision-makers said their dashboards, CRM data, and customer feedback tell different stories at least some of the time.

How Lufthansa lost weeks to a problem that didn’t exist

Lufthansa’s team spotted a drop in ancillary revenue. It looked serious enough to trigger analysis, cross-team reviews, and a real conversation about changing the roadmap.

Weeks later, they found the cause somewhere else in the customer journey. Another team had launched a promotion that was steering customers toward a bundled option. The metric had dropped because the experience was working exactly as intended.

The data had been there all along. Nobody had the context to read it.

What’s missing: Shared context

A single signal only tells you part of the story. NPS fell. Call volume went up. Customers dropped out at a certain step. Any one of these can be misleading on its own.

Context connects them. It shows how a signal fits into the customer’s wider experience, what else was happening at the time, and whether one team’s change affected another part of the journey.

That matters most in large organizations. Customers experience one company, but that company runs on dozens of teams, systems, and functions. Without shared context, each team can have good data yet still reach different answers, and decisions slow down or stall.

Why this matters even more with AI

AI is becoming part of how enterprises make decisions. It can work through huge amounts of data quickly, but without connected context it runs into the same problem people do: it’s working from a partial picture.

That’s the central argument of the full report. The quality of AI-supported decisions depends on connected customer context.

Without that context, more data rarely leads to better decisions. Mostly, it leads to more meetings about the data.

Get the full findings

This article covers one part of the research. The Decision-Confidence Gap: Why AI decision quality depends on connected customer context also looks at:

• How AI is speeding up decisions faster than organizations can build confidence in them

• How decision speed is already affecting the customer experience

• Why trust in AI-supported decisions still depends on human validation

• What sets apart organizations with a deeper understanding of their customers

About the research

TheyDo commissioned Sapio Research to survey 1,000 business decision-makers with direct influence over budget allocation at organizations with more than 1,000 employees. Respondents represented financial services, utilities, retail, health care, manufacturing, and telecommunications across Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The research was conducted online in June 2026.

TheyDo is the experience context platform for enterprise teams. It connects customer feedback, operational data, and journey insights into a shared context, giving people and AI the evidence they need to understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what to do next.