How one warm-food complaint exposed a churn problem nobody could see | Victoria Weiss (Senior Director of CX, Smalls)

How one warm-food complaint exposed a churn problem nobody could see | Victoria Weiss (Senior Director of CX, Smalls)

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Victoria Weiss, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Smalls, shares the story of a loyal customer named Jill whose frozen food kept arriving warm, and how that single escalation exposed a delivery problem that was quietly driving subscribers away. After several layers of escalation got Jill nowhere, Victoria got on a call, fixed her immediate problem, then asked the question most companies skip: how many other customers are hitting this exact issue? Drawing on a decade in DTC customer experience, from agent work at Rent the Runway to leading CX at Daily Harvest, Little Spoon, and now Smalls, Victoria explains why one escalated customer is usually a signal rather than an outlier. She breaks down how she quantifies a problem before leadership will act on it, why she refuses to wait on the analytics team, and how bringing both data and real customer stories to the table is what actually moves people. Victoria also gets into how she builds and empowers a CX team, why agents should be trusted to make the right call even when it costs money, and where AI fits into modern customer experience. She's deploying it carefully, starting with the easy stuff, with one rule she won't bend: customers can always reach a human. Plus her take on the DTC industry's stubborn habit of treating CX as a cost center, and why Amazon went from writing the book on service to a model of what not to become. Tune in to learn how to turn a single frustrated customer into a company-wide fix, how to make leadership listen with scrappy data, and why great CX in DTC comes down to trust, empowerment, and actually listening.

Why the best customer support is the one that's never needed | Olga Ivanova (Senior Director of CX, inDrive)

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Olga Ivanova, Senior Director of Customer Experience at inDrive, shares what it actually takes to run CX for the world's second-most-downloaded ride-hailing app — operating across 48 markets, on a two-sided bidding platform, where drivers and riders set their own prices and cash is still how most payments work. The company started as a Facebook group in Yakutia, Russia, where ordinary people fought back against taxi drivers hiking prices in minus-42-degree weather. That founding obsession with fairness, Olga Ivanova explains, isn't just a values statement at inDrive — it's baked into every policy, every script, and every product decision. At the centre of this episode is one of the hardest problems in two-sided marketplaces: what do you do when a rider and a driver tell completely different stories, and your support agent wasn't there? Olga Ivanova walks through how inDrive built an LLM-assisted conflict resolution model — seven factors, fully automated inputs, designed specifically to remove the burden of impossible judgements from support agents. She also explains why transparency matters so much for drivers who depend on the platform for their income, and how inDrive measures whether the model is actually working. Olga Ivanova also makes a case that's rarer than you'd think in CX circles: that "delight" is the wrong goal for most teams. Especially in functional categories like ride-hailing, consistency beats surprise every time. She describes what she calls the "carpet of automation" — the risk of automating support contacts without tracking what's underneath, so problems get quieter without ever getting solved. Her approach: look at all contact reasons, automated or not, because a problem resolved in one second is still a problem if it keeps happening. Tune in to learn why the best customer support is the kind that never gets contacted — and what it actually takes to build CX infrastructure that's fair, consistent, and honest about what's broken.

How CitizenM turned a failed internal app into a masterclass in listening | Casper Overbeek (Chief Product Officer, CitizenM)

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Casper Overbeek — Chief Product & Experience Officer at CitizenM — shares how the boutique hotel brand scaled from 10 to nearly 40 properties without losing the thing guests actually come for: genuine human hospitality. He starts with an honest story about a product failure. CitizenM built an ambassador app, rolled it out with confidence, and watched almost no one use it. The fix came only after they did what they should have done first — talked to the frontline staff. One remote iPad restart feature changed everything. Casper unpacks what made CitizenM's model work: ambassadors with a single KPI (guest satisfaction), no check-in desks, and an inverted hierarchy where frontline staff sit above leadership. He explains why revenue is an outcome not a strategy, how CitizenM's deliberate choice to be not for families or pharmaceutical conferences is precisely what lets them be excellent for the guests they do serve, and what it takes to hold core principles under commercial pressure as you scale. He also goes deep on feedback — specifically how piping live customer comments into a Slack channel, visible to everyone in real time, created a team culture of immediacy that no monthly dashboard ever could. And he shares a changed view on AI: a year ago he didn't believe it could be empathic enough to matter in hospitality; today he's involved in a startup handling hotel phone calls via AI — partly because 40% of hotel calls were going unanswered in the first place. Tune in to learn why the best CX programs aren't the most sophisticated ones, why consistency and coherence matter more than delight, and what a coffee shop called Gratitude has to do with building a brand that lasts.

Why the people closest to your customer are the last ones asked | Jai Patel (Principal | Retail Excellence & Consumer Experiences, Nike)

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Jai Patel, Principal | EMEA Nike Store Partner Management : Retail Excellence & Consumer Experiences — a retail leader who started on the shop floor at 15 and has since worked across Next, Selfridges, Bicester Village, and Dyson — shares how the gap between boardroom strategy and in-store execution is the real CX problem most brands aren't solving. The moment that crystallised it for him: standing in a Nike store in Liverpool while customers shouted at his team because the receipt printer was broken, and realising the operational failure was only half the story. The other half was that nobody at head office had thought about what it felt like to be the person in the middle of it. Jai traces how that observation shaped his work at PVH — where he found store teams delivering brand programmes "robotically," running through mental checklists instead of actually connecting with shoppers. The fix wasn't a new process. It was building the feedback loop that had never existed: giving store associates a platform to say what they saw, what customers were frustrated by, and what corporate decisions were making their jobs harder. He describes the moment in France when 30 store managers stopped engaging within five minutes, and what it took to earn their trust — including telling them plainly that he'd stood where they were standing. He also walks through the Bicester Village WhatsApp initiative — how a luxury outlet destination maintained its high-touch experience during COVID by connecting real store team members with shoppers via WhatsApp rather than routing them to a chatbot. Getting the brand partners on board meant mapping two different customer journeys and finding where they actually overlapped. The tech was straightforward. The alignment wasn't. Tune in to learn why consumers remember intent, not efficiency — and why the companies that build great retail experiences are the ones that treat their store teams as a source of insight, not just a vehicle for execution. Jai is about to start a new chapter at Nike's corporate partner store team, which makes this conversation a rare look at how someone with 30 years of floor-up experience thinks about strategy from the inside.

How a subscription cancellation became a company-wide act of kindness | Jordan Cousins (Director of CX Operations, Who Gives A Crap)

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Jordan Cousins, Director of Customer Experience Operations at Who Gives A Crap, shares how a single cancellation email — from the family of a long-time customer moving into aged care — turned into a company-wide moment of generosity. The customer happiness team spotted the signal, asked a couple of careful questions, and before long the internal Slack thread had exploded with ideas. Welcome gifts went out. The co-founder wrote a handwritten letter. No tracking, no referral code, no social post attached. Jordan explains how Who Gives A Crap's "random acts of crappiness" work precisely because they aren't measured. He walks through why the company deliberately splits customer happiness (the frontline) from customer experience (the insight work) while keeping them in one department, and why that separation makes both jobs better. Drawing on nearly seven years at the profit-for-purpose paper brand — and earlier stints launching Deliveroo in Australia — he makes the case that kind gestures only land when the fundamentals underneath already work. He's equally direct on what's overhyped: the "deliver and delight" trend minus the deliver, and the framing of AI as a solution rather than a tool. He shares the story of a chatbot the team built four years ago that quietly failed — not because it was bad, but because customers never saw it. Every touchpoint flowed through email, so customers hit reply. The new approach embeds AI into the email queue, handling the fast, low-emotion requests while keeping humans on anything that needs real judgement. Tune in to learn why Who Gives A Crap protects the human moments, automates the transactional ones, and does kind things for customers with nothing attached to the end of them — and why, in Jordan's words, "if it's a choice between a robot or a human, the human wins."