Customer-listening systems have become adept at identifying what customers want and how they feel, but they often miss a third critical signal: when customers expect action. By combining AI with human judgment to detect subtle cues about timing, organizations can make better innovation decisions, prioritize product changes more effectively, and avoid overreacting to every complaint. To do so, they should incorporate urgency into customer-feedback systems, interpret signals in their linguistic and cultural context, and link them to clear decision rules that match the timing of their response to customers’ expectations.