🎛️ The customers you don't hear from may matter more.

Do you ever answer those long customer surveys? I don’t. Who does? Are they really representative of your customers? That’s just one reason why so many voice of the customer programs might as well be mute.

In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we talk with Mark Treschl, general manager, VOC, at Quantum Metric, about what companies must do instead to truly understand customer behavior.

Also today … A tiny performance lift can turn into a rule way too fast. Mike Utskins explains how to test to learn something useful about the creative, and make work that doesn’t just optimize toward yesterday’s winner.

It’s time to re-think the efficacy of traditional customer surveys and Net Promoter Scores in modern customer experience management.

A smart next step is to pair real-time behavioral data with predictive AI models to capture insights from the silent majority.

Take these steps to prepare for this shift:

• Combine user session analytics with attitudinal feedback to trigger immediate, contextual interventions.
• Stop managing NPS targets and focus on resolving friction during live customer journeys.
• Deploy AI lookalike modeling to analyze behavior patterns of silent, non-responding users.

Angelina Eng tackles the classic standoff between marketing and finance when top-line revenue growth fails to yield healthy profit margins.

The key for your team is to break down sales by customer segment to prove incremental value to leadership.

Take these steps to align your marketing budget with financial reality:

• Segment sales data by buyer type to isolate true net-new acquisition from discounted repeat purchases.
• Run geographic holdout tests to measure actual campaign incrementality rather than relying on platform metrics.
• Uncouple media strategy from promotional discounts to evaluate whether smaller offers preserve healthy margins.

Mike Ukstins cautions against optimizing for micro-metrics at the expense of creative innovation and overall strategy.

It’s a good idea to audit your dashboards and align every reported metric with a business decision.

Take these steps to protect your creative strategy:

• Audit reporting dashboards to eliminate metrics that fail to drive distinct business actions.
• Combine historical performance data with strong creative judgment when designing new campaigns.
• Establish deliberate testing hypotheses before changing creative layouts or brand messaging.

AI can generate a page in seconds. It can’t decide what your brand looks like. That’s why Optimizely built the design system first — one hero component, one heading style, one button — then let agents compose within it. 64 templates, consistent by default.

• Why 13 hero components collapsed into one
• Where AI design falls down, and how to catch it
• How structured content earns citations in AI search

Constantine von Hoffman exposes the gap between ChatGPT’s surge to 60,000 advertisers and its projected ad revenue shortfall for OpenAI.

You can easily leverage this by running low-cost CPC experiments to evaluate whether conversational ad formats drive genuine customer acquisition for your brand.

Here’s what you need to know about this rollout:

• Test low-bid CPC campaigns to benchmark ChatGPT’s cost per acquisition against traditional search ads.
• Prepare your team to build and govern interactive AI agents for mid-funnel conversation ads.
• Connect live conversion data using measurement integration partners like LiveRamp and Tealium to measure ROI.

Reid Holmes reframes customer experience investments by detailing how small, deliberate gestures generate high-margin, word-of-mouth growth.

Shift your focus toward allocating 5% of your budget to remarkable customer moments that drive retold stories rather than transient ad clicks.

Use these tips to improve strategy:

• Reserve 5% of your budget for unprompted customer appreciation moments.
• Add a dedicated CRM field to track customer referral sources accurately.
• Compare LTV and retention metrics between referred users and paid acquisition channels.

Greg Kihlstrom addresses how consumer-facing AI agents disrupt traditional buyer journeys by evaluating policies and completing checkouts independently.

This serves as your cue to structure brand data and customer policies into machine-readable assets that automated assistants can parse instantly.

Ready to adapt your strategy for AI-mediated commerce?

• Structure return, warranty, and shipping terms as machine-readable data.
• Enable server-side tracking to capture checkout events completed by third-party agents.
• Standardize channel policies to avoid automated filtering by purchasing bots.

Join Search Influence’s Will Scott to learn how to optimize your website for AI engines. Discover practical Generative Engine Optimization tactics that make content easier for AI systems to understand, retrieve, and cite—without relying on guesswork or generic advice.

• Optimize pages using entities, semantic triples, and direct answers.
• Evaluate existing site content to spot and prioritize critical gaps.
• Master actionable tools and techniques for immediate AI visibility.

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