Bethan Blakeley on Client-Side Insights

Bethan Blakeley brings 15 years of research and insights experience to her role as CX and Research Manager at SimpliSafe UK, where she's building the insight function from scratch as a team of one.

In this episode, Bethan shares her journey from agency life to the client side, including the unexpected benefits of going deeper with one organisation rather than broader across many. She discusses why activation trumps methodology—no matter how brilliant the research, if nobody acts on it, it might as well go straight in the bin.

On AI, Bethan offers a refreshingly honest perspective from someone navigating the daily reality of vendor noise and stakeholder expectations. She recounts discovering that senior colleagues were running her work through ChatGPT for summaries (fortunately, her version was better), and reflects on the constant pressure to do more with less using AI tools.

Looking ahead, Bethan shares what she's planning to explore next year, including synthetic data and agentic AI—though she admits she's never been a fan of black boxes and wants to understand the nuts and bolts before committing.