Sharing here a video that Esteban Kolsky, Chief Evangelist, CX, at SAP, embedded in his ever popular “In a CX minute: Customer experience musings” column. The video is 20 minutes in length, and could’ve gone longer. At base, the two of us are trying to help companies prepare for a world without cookies that track our online activities and third-party data brokers who sell personal information under the false claim that it helps marketers target relevant advertising messages to specific individuals more accurately.

Opus Research believes that a better alternative to third-party data of questionable provenance is “Conversational Intelligence” (CI), which will be dealt with at length in a soon-to-be-published research report. Ideally, CI is what happens when brands do a better job of listening to their customers, accurately recognizing their intent and responding accordingly. The concept often maps to “in-conversation” application of natural language understanding (NLU) and predictive analytics to contact center call recordings or transcriptions of chats carried out through Web sites, text messages or other messaging platforms.

Our collective wisdom for the post-tracking world is to “listen better”, which means authenticating customers early, often or continuously and capturing (with permission, of course) virtually 100% of conversations, across all channels and modalities. A corollary to better listening is to “do more with less”. That means, that brands should stop trying to build customer profiles or aggregations of customer data from third-parties. The more accurate portrayal of individual needs and intents come directly from those individuals. If companies truly want to delight their customers, they need to apply conversational AI for virtual assistants and agent assistance that understand or anticipate what customers or prospects want while they are engaged in a conversation.

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