#549 Latané Conant: Why Are 75% of Customer Insights Ignored?

Latané Conant is a four-time CMO, author, community builder, and Chief Market Officer at Parloa, and we spoke about why companies spend heavily trying to understand customers while often making it harder for those same customers to talk to them. After having “spent millions of dollars… trying to understand customers,” she realized nine months ago that another part of many businesses was effectively doing the opposite.

Her approach to AI-driven customer experience starts with a simple principle: “observe first, then build.” Instead of launching AI agents because the technology is available, companies can analyze customer conversations to uncover friction, identify the right use cases, and measure customer effort and satisfaction more accurately. Her research found that customers will wait about three minutes and repeat themselves twice before leaving, while only one in four companies surfaces customer insights and acts on them.

For Latané, the goal ultimately comes back to customer lifetime value—and to making complicated technology useful. “What motivates me is learning and teaching others what I've learned,” she says, describing her process of breaking complex AI concepts into practical actions leaders can actually use.

Listeners get a practical framework for turning customer conversations into better AI decisions, lower friction, and stronger customer value.

Key takeaways

Listen to customer conversations before deciding which AI agents to build.Track customer effort and CSAT from conversations, not only surveys.Fix friction before customers wait three minutes and repeat themselves twice.Turn service conversations into product, sales, and retention insights.Observe deployed AI agents for hallucination, drift, and performance issues.Tie customer-experience improvements back to customer lifetime value.