Nine minutes, eleven suppliers
Elin moved house, and her assistant compared eleven suppliers in nine minutes. It put two decisions in front of her. Together they took about forty seconds of her attention. Nobody visited a website, nobody saw an advertisement, nobody was persuaded.
In most companies there is one person who feels that first, and it is rarely the CEO. It is the brand director. She has a campaign calendar, an agency, a sponsorship, a positioning statement signed off by the board, and a quarter to prove it all works. Her entire instrument panel is built for a human being who looks, reads and hesitates. Elin did none of those things.
The nine minutes you were not part of
The customer journey no longer starts with the customer. It starts with an agent acting on a model of her values, assembled from what she has bought before, what she cancelled, what she complained about and what she allowed. By the time Elin is involved, the field has been narrowed from eleven to two.
Those nine minutes are a market you can enter. What the agent reads is knowable:
- your terms, in full, including the clauses your copywriters soften
- your actual prices and how often they change
- your service record, as it appears in public data and in what previous customers reported
- whether your systems can answer a structured question from another system
What changes for the brand director
She spent a decade building preference in people, and now she is building eligibility in machines. The hero film still has value for the forty seconds Elin does spend. Everything that happens before those forty seconds is decided on evidence she does not control from a studio.
The uncomfortable part is budget. Her largest line items buy attention from an audience that was never in the room during the comparison.
Preference built in people still matters. It now has to survive a comparison that happened without them.
Positioning becomes a claim that gets checked
"Best service in the market" used to be a sentence. It is now a query. An agent can test it in seconds against response times, resolution rates and what people wrote after cancelling.
What the brand director does with that
She picks the three claims her organisation makes most often and finds out whether they hold up in public evidence. Where a claim holds, she makes the proof easy to find and easy to parse. Where it does not, she either fixes the operation behind it or changes the claim. Both are faster than defending a slogan the comparison already rejected.
The quarter you are measured on
You can see this inside one reporting cycle. Count how many of your new customers arrived through a comparison you never touched. Count how many support conversations began with a question that was clearly machine-formatted. Both numbers exist in your systems already.
Give the brand director those two numbers every month and she will reallocate her own budget. She does not need a new mandate. She needs visibility into the nine minutes.
What you do on Monday
- Ask your brand director which three claims your company makes most often, and ask what public evidence supports each one.
- Pull one month of inbound conversations and mark the ones that started with a structured, machine-like question. Share the count with the board.
- Publish your terms, prices and service data in a form another system can read without a human in between.
- Give one person ownership of how your company appears to agents, with a budget line and a monthly number.
Chapter six of CX+AI follows Elin through those nine minutes and shows what the agent weighed on the way to two options. If you want to map that comparison for your own category, the Agentic Journey Map walks you through it step by step. Bekijk de materialen