In my quest to provide more value to my clients, I read and experiment a lot.
I am constantly looking for proven business concepts and asking:
How can we modify this using AI, train the AI to understand a wellness business, and turn the idea into a practical system that makes the organization work better?
I recently read an interesting article about a company experiencing a revenue slowdown.
The founder had invested in several expensive research tools.
He had downloaded numerous market reports and created an impressive spreadsheet of market estimates.
What he did not have was a record of recent conversations with his customers.
That is backward, but it happens frequently.
Research tools are easy to purchase.
Customer conversations can be uncomfortable to initiate.
Businesses consequently spend months researching, building, and changing things before asking customers what they actually want.
The central idea was simple:
Before making a major change to your product, service, pricing, or marketing, speak with the people who purchased from you and the people who stopped purchasing from you.
Research tools can tell us what is happening across a market.
Customer conversations help us understand why people purchased, why they stayed, what disappointed them, and why they eventually left.
Both sources of information are useful. The proper order matters.
I would begin with two groups.
Start with people who purchased or joined within the past 3 to 6 months.
This gives them enough time to experience the business and encounter genuine strengths or friction points. It is also recent enough for them to remember what prompted their purchase.
Include some of your most engaged customers and some who are participating less than expected.
Speak with people who recently stopped purchasing, canceled their membership, or failed to renew.
This is the group many businesses avoid. It may also contain the most valuable information.
Do not use the conversation as a disguised sales call. Your immediate objective is to understand what happened.
Start with approximately 10 people from each group.
Compensation communicates that you respect the person’s time and experience.
Options might include:
A $50 to $100 gift card
An account credit
A complimentary service
A future membership credit
Access to a premium experience
Entry into a meaningful prize drawing
The right incentive depends on the business, but it should be valuable enough to encourage thoughtful participation.
Let people respond using the format that requires the least effort.
Possible formats include:
A 20-minute recorded conversation
A private voice recording
A video response with the camera turned off
A guided questionnaire
A scheduled video call
Voice responses can be especially valuable.
People generally provide more detail when speaking than when typing.
Tone, hesitation, enthusiasm, and word choice can also reveal information that a numerical survey misses.
Explain how the information will be used. Tell participants that their responses are for internal improvement and will not be publicly attributed without permission.
Do not ask every participant all 25 questions. Select approximately eight to 10 core questions and use follow-up questions when an important subject emerges.
What was happening in your life or business when you began looking for a service like ours?
What problem were you trying to solve?
What result did you hope to achieve?
What were you using before choosing us?
What other businesses or alternatives did you consider?
Why did you ultimately choose us?
Was anyone else involved in the decision? What mattered most to that person?
What did you expect when you first purchased or joined?
How did your first 30 days compare with those expectations?
Was there any point during the purchasing or onboarding process when you felt confused or uncertain?
When did you first feel confident that you had made the right decision?
Which part of your experience has provided the greatest value?
What have we done better than you expected?
What did you expect us to provide that we have not provided?
Which services or benefits have you not used?
What has prevented you from using those services?
How well do you understand everything available to you?
What sometimes prevents you from engaging as consistently as you intended?
If you could change one part of the experience, what would you change?
How would you describe us to a friend who had never heard of the business?
What originally caused you to purchase from or join us?
What were the primary reasons you stopped?
Was there a specific experience that influenced your decision?
What are you using instead, and how well is that alternative meeting your needs?
What would we need to change for you to seriously consider returning?
Before uploading anything to AI, listen to the recordings and read the responses yourself.
AI can identify patterns quickly.
It may not recognize the importance of a pause, a change in tone, or an unusual phrase.
Make your own notes first.
Then transcribe the recordings and use AI for the organizational work.
AI can help you:
Identify recurring themes
Count how frequently each issue appears
Compare current and former customers
Separate isolated complaints from consistent patterns
Identify unexpected competitors
Extract supporting quotations
Find the language customers use to describe their problems
Suggest possible improvements
Prioritize retention and revenue opportunities
Upload the transcripts after removing unnecessary personally identifiable information. Then use this prompt:
You are a customer experience and retention analyst for a wellness business.
Analyze the attached interviews from current and former customers. Do not invent information or assume a pattern exists without sufficient evidence.
Identify:
The primary reasons people purchased.
The strongest reasons current customers stay.
The most common friction points.
Products, services, or benefits customers do not understand.
Factors that reduce participation or engagement.
Experiences that create trust and loyalty.
The primary reasons former customers left.
Competitors or alternatives they considered.
Changes that might cause former customers to return.
Exact phrases customers use to describe their needs and experiences.
For every finding, state how many respondents mentioned it. Identify whether they were current or former customers and provide an exact supporting quotation.
Do not create quotations, combine separate statements, or present an isolated comment as a widespread pattern.
Organize the findings into:
What the business should protect
What the business should improve
What the business should test
What requires additional research
Finish by recommending the five highest-priority actions. Rank each by expected customer impact, potential retention or revenue impact, cost, difficulty, and confidence in the available evidence.
AI is good at organizing large amounts of qualitative information.
It can still misunderstand a comment, overstate a theme, or attach the wrong quotation to a finding.
Require evidence for every claim.
Then check each quotation and theme against the original transcript before making a decision.
The greater the potential consequence, the more carefully the result should be verified.
Once the analysis is complete, ask:
Have the reasons people purchase changed?
Does our marketing reflect what customers actually value?
What friction could we remove quickly?
What problems require a larger operational change?
Are customers asking for a service we have overlooked?
Which competitors or alternatives appear repeatedly?
Who actually influences the purchasing decision?
Are we using the same words customers use?
What warning signs appear before someone leaves?
What could improve retention without requiring a major investment?
The purpose is not to collect more information.
The purpose is to make better decisions.
The system is straightforward:
Customer conversations create the evidence.
AI organizes the evidence.
Leadership decides what the evidence means and what to do next.
Before purchasing another research platform or making a major change, speak with the people who have already experienced your business.
They may know more about your next revenue opportunity than another market report ever will.
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