Royston Lim - Independent Consultant

In this podcast, Ray Poynter (Chief Research Officer at Potentiate) interviews Royston Lim (Independent Consultant) about the future of insights, as part of our Powering Human Experience series of interviews being hosted by Potentiate.

Listen to the interview by cliking below

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Podcast Summary

Royston’s background spans management consulting and client-side insights, with his most recent role being General Manager Customer Strategy and Insights at Virgin Australia. At Virgin Australia Royston was involved in merging research with data analytics to create a single customer view and using that to understand customer purchasing behaviour.

Customer-centricity, in travel, includes understanding how people move from thinking about travel through to making a booking, and how this varies by whether they are travelling alone, or with a family, or for work. The next step is to find the points where companies can make an intervention to influence decisions.

Despite the pandemic, some things are not going to change, including the insights industry. ‘Business will always need insights’ – and this was even more important during the pandemic. Two things that do seem to have changed are a) the speed of insights has got event faster and b) the flexibility created by platforms and tools like communities mean that things can move quickly and appropriately.

Trust is huge for businesses these days, partly fed by the range of choices that consumers have. Insight professionals need to engender trust with research participants, from collection through to use.

We need to create links between insights and strategy and between insights and the data analytics processes. For example, asking questions like what does this specific technique measure, is it actually useful, what is the context? Data analytics and insights are two-sides of the same coin. But research and insights have some way to go, to make themselves sufficiently useful to the data analytics process. 

About Royston Lim, Independent Consultant

Royston is a strategic executive with experience in strategy planning and execution, customer experience and value management, loyalty, and data analytics and insights across consumer-focused industries such as airlines, supermarkets and retail, and family entertainment. He brings a customer-centric and insight led approach to strategy and the development of initiatives to deliver customer outcomes. His most recent role was General Manager Customer Strategy and Insights at Virgin Australia where Royston had responsibility for research and insights with a focus on delivering a single customer view across the business and re-defining the airline's customer value proposition.

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