You know a ton about your customer, but there's a good chance you're lacking that last bit of information that will complete the picture. This “missing piece” reality is so profound for forward-thinking companies, that as high as 88% of businesses report that they “correlate data obtained from third parties to enhance their understanding of each customer.”

So what does that mean exactly? Quite simply: businesses often purchase massive volumes of information from data providers to complete a full picture of their customers. Today, however, artificial intelligence is powering natural conversations where customers provide those missing “puzzle pieces” of data willingly. This “zero-party data” in which the customer has knowingly provided information to a business is at the heart of the offering of ON, a leader in the conversational A.I. space.

Lead Product Manager András Holczinger and the team of engineers and technology experts have long looked at chat as a powerful mechanism in driving zero party data collection for businesses.

“The great thing about our approach is that most of our data that we collect is zero-party data, so it happens very transparently with the end user’s consent. We ask them a question and they answer the question directly, and this can be used in providing insights to our customers on how to best serve their audiences.”

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As all this data is captured from conversations, figuring out when, how and where to store it is another issue tackled by Holczinger and the ON team. In a recent partnership, Holczinger teamed up with Sacramento Republic FC, one of the United Soccer League’s [USL] most recognized franchises, to bring conversational data directly to the CRM tool used by the team.

“We set up a flow for their season ticket renewal campaign where users expressed their interest in chatting about the next season’s tickets and we captured that information– just a few questions back and forth. We recorded that in Sac Republic’s HubSpot instance, where they can set up automations and get that information into the right hands.”

This wealth of “new” information can be valuable for businesses in targeting the right group at the right time. Add to that the reality that this data doesn’t come with a price tag and you have a disruptive source in a number of industries.

“We can build from there and make it more powerful by qualifying and prioritizing the messages that are coming in unsolicited. Take a question about a specific order asked of a retail brand – our platform can decide whether to answer it automatically or get it in the hands of the customer support team.”