From Social Listening to CX Intelligence
When Sameer Narkar founded Konnect Insights roughly a decade ago in Mumbai, the original problem he wanted to solve was deceptively simple: customers think they are talking to one brand, but the brand treats them as a dozen separate channels. Email lands in one tool, Twitter in another, phone calls in a third, and none of those systems talk to each other. That fragmentation produces a broken experience on the customer side and a blurry picture on the brand side. What started as a social listening product gradually expanded, driven by customer demand, into a full omnichannel platform now serving more than five hundred brands across thirty-five countries, in sectors like banking, telecom, and retail, entirely without outside funding. Sameer described that bootstrapped path with refreshing honesty: the VC conversations happened, they mostly did not work out, and in hindsight the company is better for it. Revenue from customers funded the roadmap, which meant the roadmap stayed anchored to real problems rather than investor narratives.
What Dashboards Cannot Tell You
The pivot that defines where Konnect Insights sits today came from watching leaders consume beautiful dashboards and then ask the same deflating question: so what? Numbers do not stick the way stories do, and a chart showing an NPS score of 4.9 tells a CEO almost nothing actionable. Sameer recounted sitting in front of the CEO of a large fashion brand, a customer of four years, and demonstrating something that had never been available to that executive before: the ability to simply ask a question in plain language and receive a strategic answer drawn from years of aggregated customer signals. The CEO asked the system to reconcile what the marketing team, the PR team, and the customer care team were each separately reporting, and to surface the ground reality beneath all three decks. That is the shift Sameer is betting on, moving CX from an operational cost center that reports metrics upward into a genuine intelligence function that shapes strategy at the top. He calls it CX Intelligence, and frames the longer horizon as a front office operating system where model context protocols connect every piece of a company’s software stack into one queryable layer by around 2027.
Language, Sentiment, and the Signals Most Brands Are Missing
For an audience rooted in localization, the multilingual architecture of Konnect Insights is where things get particularly interesting. Processing customer signals across Arabic dialects, Portuguese, Spanish, and dozens of other languages is not simply a translation exercise, as Robin pressed Sameer to acknowledge. Cultural norms around complaint, power dynamics embedded in language, and the way dissatisfaction surfaces differently in different markets all sit underneath the raw text. Sameer was candid that early NLP-based sentiment models achieved around 80 percent accuracy on non-English content, with English closer to 95 percent. Today, with purpose-built LLMs running on the company’s own GPU infrastructure across six regional cloud environments, those numbers have climbed to 90 to 95 percent for non-English and effectively 100 percent for English. Critically, Konnect Insights positions AI not as a replacement for human agents but as a force multiplier. A query that once took five back-and-forth exchanges to resolve can be handled in the first reply because the agent arrives at the conversation already holding a full AI-generated summary of the customer’s history across every channel. Sameer made one point that landed with particular weight: silence is a signal. A customer who has stopped engaging is telling you something, and a human eye scanning dashboards will miss it every time. The AI does not.
If any part of this conversation made you rethink how your organization is reading, or ignoring, what customers are actually saying across languages and channels, episode 249 is worth your full attention. Watch on YouTube to catch the full back-and-forth between Robin and Sameer, or Listen on Simplecast if you prefer audio on the go. Either way, the conversation will change how you think about the gap between the CX data you have and the strategy you could be building from it.
Robin Ayoub 
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