The most underused data you already own

Every company we work with has the same buried asset: years of free-text notes attached to customer records. Call summaries, complaint histories, the sentence somebody typed after a difficult site visit in 2019.

It is the only data in your business that no competitor and no model provider has. It is also, in most companies, completely unread.

Why it goes unused

Because it is unsearchable in practice. You can find a note if you know which customer and roughly when. You cannot ask « which customers have mentioned this problem before? », and that is the question with the value in it.

This is precisely the kind of task where a language model is genuinely better than what came before, because the notes are prose and prose is what these systems handle well.

The three questions worth asking of ten years of notes

Which customers raised the same issue that this one just raised? Which accounts show signs of frustration we did not act on? What did we promise verbally that never made it into a contract?

Each of those is a real commercial question, each is answerable from data you already hold, and none of them requires new information.

The practical caveat, which is substantial

These notes contain personal data and frequently contain opinions about people. Both the customer’s staff and yours.

Before any of this, two things. Confirm with your provider that the processing happens under your contract and in a location you have agreed — the September questions. And accept that this is exactly the sort of processing your data-protection obligations cover, which for most Swiss SMEs means it is permissible and documented rather than forbidden.

Where to start

One customer, one question, one afternoon. Take the notes for a single account and ask the three questions above by hand.

If the answers are interesting for one customer, they are interesting for four hundred, and you will have learned that from an afternoon rather than from a project.