The Most Valuable Customer Data Is Already in the Conversation

Every day, customers tell companies what they need, what they do not understand, and what prevents them from moving forward. They explain why they abandoned a purchase, which part of a service caused frustration, and what they expected to happen next.

Most organizations already possess this information. It exists in chats, calls, messages, and complaints. Yet, much of it remains dispersed across systems or is used only to resolve the immediate issue.

Companies have become very good at measuring outcomes. They know how many customers purchased, abandoned a process, contacted support, or rated an experience positively. What is often missing is the reason behind those results. That explanation may already be inside the conversation.

The Gap Between Measurement and Understanding

A company can have multiple customer experience dashboards and still lack a clear understanding of its customers.

PwC’s "2025 Customer Experience Survey," conducted among 5,511 consumers and 406 executives in the United States, found that 84% of executives had increased spending on customer loyalty. At the same time, 83% acknowledged that they needed better tools to understand what actually drives purchases.

The study also identified a clear perception gap: about 9 out of 10 executives said customer loyalty had increased in recent years, but only 4 out of 10 consumers agreed.

This difference is relevant beyond the US market. A company may see stable satisfaction scores or repeated purchases and interpret them as loyalty. Customers may simply remain because switching is inconvenient, prices are competitive or they have not yet found a better option.

Conversations provide another layer of information. A repeated question may reveal an unclear process. A request for confirmation may show a lack of trust before a payment. A customer who contacts a company several times about the same issue may expose an operational problem that a resolution-time metric fails to capture.

Individually, these interactions can appear anecdotal. At scale, they reveal patterns that can affect conversion, retention, and operating costs.

Experience Has a Business Consequence

In Mexico, KPMG’s latest "Customer Experience Excellence" study considered the perspectives of more than 5,000 consumers across 10 industries, 35 sectors, and over 200 brands.

The national customer experience score reached 8.28 out of 10 in 2025, compared with 8.21 the previous year. The improvement was positive but limited: No brand evaluated by the study has exceeded nine points since 2022.

The differences between industries offer additional insight. Automotive achieved the highest score, at 8.58, while telecommunications ranked last, at 7.85. KPMG identified operational failures, limited personalization, and weak omnichannel integration among the continuing challenges in lower-performing sectors.

These problems do not appear suddenly in an annual index. Customers describe them every day. They ask why information received through one channel differs from another, why a process requires several contacts, or why a company cannot recognize a problem already reported.

There is also a financial consequence. The PwC survey found that 29% of consumers had stopped buying from a brand because of poor customer experience. Although the study was conducted in the United States, the result illustrates what is at stake when companies detect frustration only after it changes customer behavior.

From Conversations to Decisions

Artificial intelligence makes it possible to examine thousands of conversations and identify recurring intentions, questions, and points of friction. The objective should not be simply to generate summaries, but to connect those patterns with business decisions.

Companies can use this information to understand which questions tend to appear before a successful purchase, which problems generate repeated contacts, and which stages of a process create the most abandonment.

The technology can organize the evidence, but leadership still has to decide what matters, assign responsibility, and measure whether the resulting changes improve the business. A list of frequent customer questions has little value if no one corrects their underlying causes.

This analysis also requires clear governance. KPMG found that 29% of Mexican consumers were concerned about the security of personal data in AI-enabled experiences, while 24% worried about incorrect information. Listening more closely cannot come at the expense of privacy, transparency, or trust.

This shift—from treating conversations as isolated interactions to using them as business intelligence—will be part of the discussion at the fifth edition of Blip ID, which I will be attending in São Paulo in early September. The event will bring together leaders from technology, marketing, sales, and customer service to examine how conversations can contribute to revenue, operational efficiency, data-driven decisions, and customer experience.

Bringing these functions into the same discussion is significant. The information customers provide should not remain within a single channel or team. Its value lies in helping the business understand what needs to change and act on it. Customers are already explaining where companies can improve; the next step is to listen at scale and turn that understanding into action.