Jubin Varghese

Let’s start simple. Who are you, and what do you do with social data that others might not expect?

I’m Jubin Varghese. I work at the intersection of social intelligence, behavioural science, and customer experience. What I do with social data might surprise people because I don’t treat it as just a listening tool or a trend tracker. I use it as a behavioural signal. I look for the “why” behind what people say, not just the “what”.

A lot of teams stop at sentiment or volume. I’m more interested in friction, emotion, and unmet needs. Social data, when used properly, shows you where people hesitate, where expectations break, and where trust is earned or lost. I spend a lot of time translating that messy, emotional data into something practical that product, marketing, and leadership teams can actually act on.In short, I use social data less like a dashboard and more like a window into human behaviour.

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What’s something in our industry we pretend to understand, but don’t?

Sentiment. We talk about it as if it’s a fixed, objective truth, but it rarely is. People don’t express emotion in neat positive or negative buckets. Sarcasm, humour, cultural context, and frustration all get flattened when we oversimplify sentiment.

We also pretend that a single metric can explain how people feel about a brand. It can’t. Real understanding comes from triangulating social data with context, behaviour, and lived experience. Until we’re more honest about that, we’ll keep mistaking confidence in numbers for clarity in insight.

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What’s a moment this year where social data helped your team do something bolder, faster, or better?

This year, social data helped our team move faster by giving us timely, real world feedback when we needed it most. Instead of waiting for reports or scheduled research cycles, we were able to see customer reactions as they were happening across public online conversations. Ultimately, social data helped us be more responsive, more relevant, and better aligned with customer reality at the pace the business needed.

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What’s one belief about your audience that social data completely upended for your teams?

That silence means satisfaction. Social data showed us the opposite. Some of the most loyal or constrained customers weren’t vocal at all, while the loudest voices weren’t always the most representative. It pushed us to stop equating noise with importance and start paying attention to patterns, not volume. 

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If you could build your dream social intelligence team from scratch, with no legacy and no limits, what roles would you include?

I’d focus on a small team made up of people with a natural eye for spotting patterns in social conversations and a clear understanding of why people choose to speak online, in what context, and at what moments.

That needs to be paired with enough technical knowledge to work confidently with large datasets, and a strong understanding of customer experience and insight, so what’s observed in social translates into something meaningful for the business.

For me, social intelligence works best when those capabilities come together, rather than being split across multiple roles.

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When do you feel like you’re doing your best work?

I feel like I’m doing my best work when I can move beyond surface-level sentiment and focus on understanding the context behind what people are saying. That’s where behavioural thinking really adds value, helping interpret not just how people feel, but why they’re talking in a particular way at that moment.

It’s especially effective when that context helps teams avoid oversimplified conclusions and instead see the full picture of a customer experience. For me, the most satisfying work is when insight adds nuance, challenges assumptions, and leads to clearer, more confident decisions.

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What’s your browser history giving away about you this week?

A slightly unhealthy number of news tabs. I tend to read four different newspapers a day, which might sound excessive. On the positive side, it helps me understand the wider context behind online conversations, so when people react strongly or share something widely, I have a clearer sense of what’s driving that response!

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