The “What” Trap and the “When” Opportunity

I took the photo to present this post from Google DeepMind on Pexels, I found it great to represent the direction to follow in terms of creativity.

⦁ When a company is small, the conversation with its customers flows naturally. There are few people to serve, and in every interaction — whether in sales, in the office, in the service or in the after-sales service — you can ask, listen and learn. It is in these conversations that the best ideas for improvement and growth.↑

But when companies grow, the landscape changes. From serving 10 or 20 customers, we went on to hundreds, thousands, maybe millions. And the conversation, that human interaction so rich in detail, begins to disappear. Without the time or resources to listen to everyone, companies are turning to a well-known and widespread tool: the survey.

The survey problem: fatigue and bias↑

Surveys are born with the intention of measuring, but their design is far from perfect. From the first question, the client already makes a mental effort to understand and answer. With each additional question, your thinking ability and accuracy deteriorate. In the fifth question, the answer can be anything but honest. And by the time the open field—the instance that many academics consider to be the most valuable in a survey—the client is already exhausted.

“In addition, the survey is not only tiring, but it also biases. The questions reflect what we think is important, not necessarily what is relevant to the customer. In our search for information, we often close ourselves to what we should hear.

On the other hand, if we truly value the free field—that gold mine of unstructured insights—we face another challenge: processing hundreds, thousands or millions of unique, diverse and complex comments. It's a titanic task that, without adequate tools, becomes a bottleneck.

The chance to hear what we “need” to know.

This is where woku was born. Aware of the limitations of traditional surveys and conversations, we created an agile, simple and emotional tool. woku eliminates questions to reduce the client's cognitive load. In less than a minute, anyone can express what they really think.

How do we do it? Through images and emotions. It's like when we see a birthday photo: we don't need a quiz to remember the jokes, the music or the taste of the food. The image awakens memories and allows for authentic and fluid expression.

And how do we process so much information?

The key lies in artificial intelligence. With the current maturity of tools such as language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP), we can analyze thousands of comments, classify them and extract the insights that matter. But most importantly: it helps us discover what we need to know, not just what we want to ask.

The new challenge: the “where” and the “when"

The real change is not in asking better, but in capturing better. The big question is no longer what I want to know, but where and when I should listen.

Is it at the same time of the experience? A little later? Through a QR, a link in an email, or directly from an app? This is the area where companies must innovate today. Because only by understanding the customer's context can we collect the most valuable thing: their truth.

Look for what we “should” and not what we “want” to know.

Today, companies have an unprecedented opportunity in their hands. Thanks to artificial intelligence and tools like woku, we can listen to customers again, even when there are thousands or millions of them. But to achieve this, we must focus less on what and more on where and when. We must understand that we don't have to look for what we want to know, but what we should know. Only then will we be prepared to make intelligent decisions that truly drive business growth and profitability.