How To Love a Customer

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...

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 Y...

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...

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. Th...

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 thr...

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Lisa Knowles, Strategic Program Manager at Miro, shares how she used an AI workflow she’d built inside Miro to prepare for a meeting with a Japanese customer she’d never spoken to. By pulling together CSM notes, scoping documents, annual reports, and competitor data, she walked into the room with tailored recommendations and a full presentation — in Japan...

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Lennard Winters, Product Manager leading IKEA's global customer audience platform, reveals two quietly powerful stories about what happens when you truly listen to customers. The first: a customer discovery session where shoppers admitted they'd stopped saving wishlists — because they trusted retargeted ads to remember their browsing for them. The second:...

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Domonique Brown—Head of Customer Experience at Liquid IV—shares how one frustrated customer completely changed her approach to building CX at scale. Early in her time at the company (when she was just employee #11), Domonique responded to a Facebook message with playful brand energy borrowed from her beauty industry background. Within minutes, that custom...

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Rufus Weston—insights leader with decades of experience at BBC, Nike, Just Eat, HarperCollins, and now running his own consultancy—shares how one powerful mantra from a CMO changed everything: "Love your customer like you love your wife." What started as a simple phrase became the foundation for how Rufus thinks about building customer-centric cultures, p...

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Eli Weiss — longtime DTC operator and now a leader at Yotpo — shares how a single customer email at OLIPOP exposed a major production error: root beer accidentally canned as Vintage Cola. What could have been written off as a confusing complaint instead became a defining moment in how fast, empowered CX teams can protect a brand from disaster. Acting quic...

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, James Villacci , Head of Global UX Research at HelloFresh, shares how one scrappy usability test—run on top of a New York City dumpster—uncovered a critical friction point in the signup flow and proved just how directly customer problems can impact revenue. James explains how that moment helped shift HelloFresh from seeing research as “nice to have” to bu...

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Olga Arsenii, Head of Customer Insights at Qonto, shares how one frustrated customer exposed a weakness in their onboarding experience—and sparked a company-wide movement to fix it. While analyzing feedback with her team, Olga discovered that many new users felt alone and overwhelmed during account setup. Support agents were reading scripts instead of sol...

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Anastasia Zdoroviak—former CX leader at DoorDash and Rappi, now Chief Customer Experience Officer at Snoonu—shares a personal story that perfectly captures what great CX really means. One night in Mexico City, her daughter couldn’t sleep because of mosquitoes. The stores were closed, delivery slots were full, and no quick fix seemed possible—until her own...

In this episode of How to Love a Customer, David McDaid from END. Clothing shares the customer story that transformed his company's approach to quality - one where everything possible went wrong. Warehouse delays, customs issues, weather problems, a missing package, and finally the wrong item delivered after a week and a half. Instead of writing it off as bad luck, David's team created an internal...

In this episode, Julia Zuber from Lime Home reveals how a seemingly minor guest complaint about sleep quality led to one of their most impactful customer experience improvements. What started as scattered feedback about uncomfortable nights turned into a company-wide pillow revolution that transformed guest satisfaction scores. Julia shares the detective work that uncovered the real culprit behind...

In this episode, James McGhee from Foot Asylum shares the customer story that completely changed how he thinks about experience design, and it involves a whole butchered pig, a narrowboat, and a freezer that couldn't handle the cold. When James took an escalation call from a customer whose entire year's worth of pig meat had spoiled due to a faulty freezer, he discovered something crucial: the exp...

In this episode, Abdul Khaled from E.O.N. Next reveals how they cracked the code on customer engagement in one of the world's most boring industries - energy. With customers only engaging once per month when they receive their bill, E.O.N. Next had to make that single touchpoint count, transforming complaints about high bills into opportunities for deeper customer relationships. Abdul shares the f...