Don't treat evals as a mere checklist. Instead, use them as a creative tool to discover opportunities. A well-designed eval can reveal that a product is underperforming for a specific user segment, pointing directly to areas for high-impact improvement that a simple "vibe check" would miss.

A B2C company used topic tagging on reviews and discovered "free samples" were consistently mentioned in their most positive feedback. They had this perk but never promoted it. Adding it to their marketing communications directly increased customer lifetime value.

Customers are guarded with salespeople for fear of being sold. However, they are candid with customer service, freely sharing complaints and unmet needs. This makes the CS department an invaluable, and often untapped, source of sales intelligence and expansion opportunities.

The most valuable consumer insights are not in analytics dashboards, but in the raw, qualitative feedback within social media comments. Winning brands invest in teams whose sole job is to read and interpret this chatter, providing a competitive advantage that quantitative data alone cannot deliver.

The most critical insights for Chili's revival came not from consumers, but from its 70,000 employees. Their feedback on operational friction and guest interactions directly fueled simplification, menu changes, and investments that improved the customer experience.

The software practice of analyzing user clicks can be applied to any business. For retail, identify your top-spending customers and reverse-engineer their entire journey, from their first store visit to their big purchase. This helps find common patterns—like interacting with a specific employee—that can be replicated for all customers.

Effective AI moves beyond a simple monitoring dashboard by translating intelligence directly into action. It should accelerate work tasks, suggest marketing content, identify product issues, and triage service tickets, embedding it as a strategic driver rather than a passive analytics tool.

An LLM analyzes sales call transcripts to generate a 1-10 sentiment score. This score, when benchmarked against historical data, became a highly predictive leading indicator for both customer churn and potential upsells. It replaces subjective rep feedback with a consistent, data-driven early warning system.

Instead of broad surveys, interview 10-12 satisfied customers who signed up in the last few months. Their fresh memory of the problem and evaluation phases provides the most accurate insights into why people truly buy your product, allowing you to find patterns and replicate success.