Hi Team!

The sun is shining, flowers are blooming, seasonal depression is nearly gone, and Noah is almost 5 YEARS OLD???

Where did the time go?

Something I’ve been thinking about since watching Noah start to communicate what he actually thinks: the gap between what people say directly to you and what they say when you’re not in the room.

Your CX team has gotten really good at one thing: managing what comes through the inbox.

Tickets are tagged, response times are solid, and AI handles the easy stuff. But the feedback that doesn’t come through support is growing way faster than the feedback that does.

Customers are posting about your product on TikTok, comparing you in Reddit threads, and leaving reviews explaining exactly why they switched.

None of that shows up in Zendesk. You optimized the speed at which you respond to a shrinking percentage of actual customer sentiment.

This week, I want to talk about why most brands are operationally faster but strategically blind, and what it actually looks like to build a feedback system that sees the whole picture.

Let’s dive in.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Syncly.

Your CX team is fast. But fast at what? Managing the 10% of feedback that actually reaches your inbox.

Syncly was built to close that exact gap.

It pulls in feedback from support tickets, product reviews, and social channels into one place where you can actually search, ask questions, and spot patterns without spending a week pulling exports.

Here’s what stood out to me:

1️⃣ Ask it like you’d ask ChatGPT: Type “what are customers saying about our new product?” and get actual answers backed by real customer quotes. No dashboards to configure. No reports to wait for.

2️⃣ It sees what your helpdesk can’t: The whole point is that it goes beyond tickets. Amazon reviews, TikTok comments, Reddit threads — the places your customers talk when they’re not talking to you. That’s where the real signal lives.

3️⃣ You find the problem before it becomes a ticket: Real-time alerts on sentiment shifts mean you can catch issues while they’re still a Reddit thread, not after they’ve become 200 angry emails.

Brands like Fenty Beauty, Kosas, Neuro, Hum Nutrition, Needed, Organika, Banza, and Adidas are already using Syncly to turn scattered feedback into decisions they actually feel confident making.

If your CX stack only sees what customers say to you, you’re missing the bigger picture. Syncly shows you what they’re saying about you.

Book a demo with their co-founders to get a free demo with your own data.

Book a Demo

Think about how you actually behave as a consumer

When a product disappoints you, most people don’t open a support ticket. Sometimes they do, maybe, if the issue is transactional: wrong item, missing package, billing error. You need a resolution, and only the brand can give it to you.

When the issue is qualitative, the formula changed, the fit is off, the experience wasn’t what you expected, most people don’t email support. They post about it, leave a review, reply to someone else’s comment, and vent in a subreddit all in the same week.

The volume of external feedback is outpacing ticket volume by multiples, and the gap keeps growing.

Your customer just spent 11 minutes explaining why your product sucks in a Reddit thread with 400 upvotes. You’re still waiting for them to email you.

Side note: At OLIPOP when we shifted from more than 50% ecom in peak COVID to mostly retail in 2022. We saw almost 0 customer complaints from retail, for the same products that had tickets coming in on ecom.

This hits omnichannel brands even harder.

What seeing everything actually looks like

The shift is structural. It’s about whether your feedback infrastructure treats support tickets as the only input, or as one input among many. When you can pull in reviews, social comments, and community discussions alongside your ticket data, a few things change, and they compound over time.

• You stop reacting and start anticipating: A sentiment shift on Amazon reviews often precedes a spike in support tickets by weeks. If you can see that shift in real time, you can act before it compounds.

• You stop guessing what customers actually care about: Internal teams spend hours debating what language to use, what features to prioritize, what’s driving churn, while customers have already explained it in a TikTok comment thread or a subreddit you didn’t know existed. If you’re not watching those channels, you’re making product decisions based on incomplete data.

• You stop optimizing for the wrong problems: Some issues generate many tickets but don’t affect retention, while others generate none but drive silent churn at scale.

If you can only see ticket volume, you’re allocating resources based on noise, not impact. You’re fixing the loud thing, not the thing that matters.

The uncomfortable reality

If a creator with half a million followers posted a negative video about your product tomorrow, how long would it take your team to know about it. If the answer is “when someone on the team happens to see it,” you have a blind spot that no amount of ticket automation can fix.

You’ve built a system that’s soooo good at handling customers who reach out, but completely useless for customers who don’t.

That’s most of them, by the way. The majority of dissatisfied customers never open a ticket. They just stop buying, and maybe they tell a few thousand people why on the way out.

The brands winning retention in 2026 aren’t faster at support. They figured out how to listen everywhere. They treat social mentions, review sentiment, and community discussions as first-class inputs, not nice-to-haves.

They can spot a product issue in a Reddit thread before it becomes a return trend. They know when a TikTok creator’s review is about to drive a spike in new customer sentiment. They’re not reacting to problems after they hit the inbox. They’re seeing them form in real time and deciding whether to act, adjust, or ignore based on actual signal, not gut feel.

Your ticket volume is a lagging indicator. Everything happening outside your inbox is a leading one, and right now, most brands are flying blind to the signals that actually matter.

Start with one channel this week

This isn’t about hiring a social listening team or adding another dashboard to your stack. It’s about rethinking what “customer feedback” actually means in 2026. Support tickets are one input, a valuable one, but if that’s the only channel you’re watching, you’re optimizing a shrinking slice of the conversation.

Pick one place your customers talk about you that isn’t your inbox. Reddit, TikTok comments, Amazon reviews, whatever. Spend 30 minutes reading through it. Not to respond, just to see what they’re actually saying when you’re not in the room.

You’ll find something your team has been debating for months already solved in a comment thread, or a complaint you didn’t know existed showing up 50 times in slightly different words.

The brands that win will be the ones who can see the full picture: what customers say to them and what they say about them. That’s the job now. Everything else is just speed.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi Team!

As much as Vegas is a depraved, soulless city, Shoptalk was still fun as hell.

We spoke to hundreds of brand executives, vendors, and operators trying to figure out what the next two years will look like, and I walked away with a few things rattling around my head that I can’t stop thinking about.

I took a shot every time I saw “agentic” on a booth and was drunk at 9 am. Everyone’s talking about product discovery and shopping via LLMs. Loyalty programs are finally starting to look interesting and experiential.

And weirdly, even though there are a dozen players in the agentic CX space, almost nobody is thinking about what happens to the 10% when AI handles the other 90% of your tickets.

Let’s chat about the big themes.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Horatio and Mentors CX.

I often get asked how to upskill a CX team without sending everyone to a $3,000 conference or sitting through a webinar that could have been an email.

Horatio and Mentors CX put together something genuinely worth your time.

It’s a 12-module CX masterclass built for operators who actually run these teams. Valued at $950, they made it available for free.

It includes: journey mapping, VoC programs, AI, omnichannel strategy, team building, the whole thing.

Each module comes with real frameworks and downloadable guides so you can apply it immediately, not six months from now when you’ve forgotten everything.

I’ve seen a lot of “resources” come across my inbox, and most of them are lead gen dressed up as education.

This one is different. It’s hosted on the Mentors CX site, fully free to access, and built with the kind of depth that reflects what Horatio actually does day to day running CX operations for some of the best brands out there.

If you’re a CX leader trying to get your team sharper, or you’re building out a function for the first time and want a real framework to work from, this is worth a few hours of your time.

ACCESS THE FREE BOOTCAMP

AI Consulting & Implementation Services

Agentic AI isn’t just about cutting costs. It’s about transforming how your business supports customers.

Horatio helps companies deploy and optimize agentic AI tools while integrating high-touch human support where it matters most. The result: more efficient operations, smarter automation, and better customer experiences.

And once AI handles the repetitive 80–90%, what’s left is the 10% that actually defines your brand and drives loyalty: the complex, high-stakes conversations that require real human judgment. That’s where having the right support team in place matters most.

If you’re ready to implement AI, or need a partner to guide you in the right direction, book a call with the Horatio team.

Explore AI Consulting & Implementation

“Agentic” is the new “blockchain”

I lost count of how many vendors told me their product was “agentic.” The word showed up in pitch decks, booth signage, demo scripts, and LinkedIn posts written in real time at the conference. And when I asked what that actually meant for the customer experience, the answer was usually some version of “well, it can handle multi-step workflows autonomously.”

Cool. So can a Zapier flow from 2019.

Sure, some of the tech is real. MCPs, multi-agent orchestration, whatever the vendors are hawking this quarter. It’ll probably matter at some point. But most brands I talk to are still trying to get their basic ticket deflection above 40%. Building for the future is great, but I’d reckon that only 2-5% of your customers would actually use your MCP today.

One brand exec I talked to put it perfectly:

“We implemented the fanciest AI agent setup you’ve ever seen. Customers still email us asking where their package is, and half the time the agent can’t pull the tracking number because it’s in a different system.”

The tooling is racing ahead of what brands actually need, and most of the ones I talked to are drowning in sophisticated solutions to problems they don’t have yet, while the simple stuff still doesn’t work.

Shopping via LLMs is coming and nobody knows what to do about it yet

Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini are all racing to let people shop directly in the interface. Brands know it’s happening, they know they need to show up wherever their customers are, and almost nobody has a plan beyond “I guess we should make sure our product data is clean.”

I talked to a VP of Growth who said their team spent a month trying to figure out how to optimize for LLM-based product discovery, realized they had no idea what that even meant, and gave up. She’s not wrong to be confused because the playbook does not exist yet. SEO took a decade to standardize. This is month six.

The few brands I spoke with that are ahead of the game are obsessing over structured data, clean product feeds, and making sure their brand story doesn’t get mangled when some LLM scrapes it.

A few folks I spoke to are leveraging Shopify Knowledge Base to embed their product catalog so models actually show their stuff when someone searches for the best cruelty-free skincare for dry skin.

Will it pan out? Who knows. But they’re doing something instead of sitting around waiting for a Harvard case study in 2027.

(Shameless plug: Yotpo launched Yotpo Discover to tackle this, and we have a few hundred brands on the waitlist in the first few days. )

Loyalty programs are finally interesting again

I have spent years complaining that loyalty programs are just frequent flyer miles for people who buy deodorant. I still stand by that take for 90% of what I’ve seen. But I walked away from Shoptalk seeing a handful of programs that actually made me think, “Oh, that’s different.”

260 Sample Sale has a program where top-tier members get to skip the line at their physical sales. It sounds small, but if you have ever stood outside a sample sale in New York in February waiting to get in, you know that it is worth more than 500 points toward free shipping.

Fleur de Mal is letting top-tier loyalty members give input on product development, which turns your best customers into collaborators instead of just repeat purchasers.

Points are fine, discounts serve a purpose, but nobody ever felt special because they got 50 points for typing in their email. The brands that actually get it treat them like actual people with names who deserve better than a robotic birthday discount that got queued up at 2 am by some sad automation workflow. 🙃

Everyone’s fighting for AI CX, nobody’s building for the 10% that matters

There are at least 30 vendors right now, all fighting to be the AI-for-CX platform that wins the next five years. And most of them are building the same thing, automating password resets, order tracking, return labels, the stuff that should have been automated in 2018.

They will all do fine, some will win, some will get acquired, but the thing I could not stop thinking about is that almost nobody is building for what happens when that 90% goes away.

When AI handles the repetitive stuff, what is left is the 10% hard conversations.

The customer whose $400 order showed up damaged the morning of an event, or the angry email that is not really about the product, but the fact that someone feels ignored.

Those tickets require judgment, empathy, tone calibration, and the ability to make a call that is not in the playbook. Those edge cases that don’t inherently require a human, but would positively impact LTV and brand if you did get the right human response in the mix pretty quickly.

I talked to exactly zero folks focusing on this.

Everyone is still pitching “we can automate 80% of your tickets.”

The brands that win are going to be the ones who realize that AI is not the endgame, it is the thing that frees up your team to do the work that actually builds loyalty, even if it’s only 10-20% volume-wise.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi Team!

If you are reading this, you have almost made it to the end of Q1.

Will you be at Shoptalk next week??? If you are, please swing by booth 2670 and say hi.

I had three conversations there last year about hiring for CX, and every single one started the same way: we can’t find good people.

SORRY for the hot take, but I think the problem is you’re looking for the wrong people.

You’re still hiring people to answer tickets, and that part of the job is slowly going away.

This week, let’s talk about what the CX role actually turns into once AI swallows the grunt work, why your best hire probably doesn’t know Zendesk exists, and the one skill nobody bothers screening for.

Let’s get into it.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by KODIF AI.

As your brand scales, customer conversations explode across support, pre-purchase, and every corner of your site. The question becomes: do you build a larger team, or a smarter one?

The AI CX market is crowded, but here are a few reasons KODIF stands apart from what I’ve seen:

1️⃣ Built for complexity — not just basic FAQ.

From what I’ve seen other AI agents break when SOPs get multi-system and conditional. KODIF asks you to give them your most complex SOP, and automate that.

For example, I saw how KODIF chat agent handled Aura Frames complex troubleshooting product issues end-to-end — walking a customer through diagnostic steps and, if needed, triggering a replacement part order inside the same flow. I was impressed.

2️⃣ An AI CX team > one AI Agent

They build AI CX Team, purpose - specialized agents that mirror CX roles: an AI Support Agent for resolution, AI Concierge for pre-purchase and conversion, AI Analyst for insights, and AI Manager for continuous improvement. It’s a team model, not a catch-all model.

3️⃣ Deep ecommerce integrations (not surface-level)

They’ve built 178+ ecommerce integrations and shipped 88 new ones in 2025 alone.

You all know that matters because automation only works when the system can actually take action, not just answer questions.

Some recent cool reviews on the success stories:

Dollar Shave Club:

“The customizability of KODIF is what excites me most. I’m in there every day. Containment is great and all, but quality matters just as much or more. Our automation rate is above 70% but more importantly we are leveraging KODIF for retention.”

— Jack Dukesherer, Sr. Manager, Member Engagement Ops

Fellow Coffee:

“The Chat AI Agent can walk someone through calibrating their grinder — it’s super resourceful with the right inputs. Furthermore, address changes and cancellations? Completely automated. I haven’t thought about a cancellation in ages.”
— Cindy Rodriguez, Director of CX

Just Food For Dogs:

“We started with deflection as the goal, but it turned into more — now the AI helps customers discover products, understand ingredients, and convert. That’s real ROI.”

• Cristina Fucchi, Chief Customer Officer

Something that stood to me is their founders’ strong engineering background. Their CTO, Norm previously built Uber’s customer support automation platform, automating 150 million customer requests per month.

KODIF is trusted by top ecommerce brands such as True Classic, Ruggable, Dollar Shave Club, Liquid I.V., One Skin, Aura Frames, Fellow, Neuro, Who Gives a Crap, Million Dollar Baby, Ivy City, Helix Sleep and many others.

Many teams review their CX stack in Q1, and if your support workflows are complex, it might be worth a conversation with Chyngyz and the KODIF team to see if it’s a fit. They promise to go live in 3-5 days.

Also, they are offering my readers 3-months for free… Just hit up their team and drop my name, Eli Weiss. This offer is valid only through March 31, 2026.

Book a demo and meet the founders

The job posting is a lie

Pull up your last CX job posting. Does it ask for experience with Zendesk or Gorgias, strong written communication skills, and the ability to handle high ticket volume?

Congrats, you just described someone whose primary value is about to get automated into oblivion.

Sorry, but most CX job descriptions are written by someone in HR who last talked to a customer in 2019. They ask for platform experience and typing speed like they’re hiring a court stenographer.

Meanwhile, the actual job, six months from now, is going to be 60% emotional triage and 40% creative problem-solving a small amount of high-value tickets under pressure, and nothing in that posting screens for either.

I met someone last year who’d been managing a boutique hotel front desk for six years. Never touched a helpdesk platform. Never heard of CSAT. But they could read a room in four seconds, de-escalate a screaming guest while rebooking their suite, and remember that the couple in room 4B mentioned it was their anniversary.

That’s the person you want on your CX team when AI eats 80% of your inbound volume. The problem is most job postings would filter her out in round one because she doesn’t have two years of ecommerce support experience.

You know that hire who crushes tickets like a robot but goes silent when someone calls in tears? That worked yesterday. Now you need someone who stays calm when the building’s on fire, makes the call without checking Slack seventeen times, treats an angry customer like a real problem instead of ticket number 4,352. That old playbook from two years ago is gathering dust.

Screen for hospitality, not helpdesk

When AI handles password resets, shipping updates, return labels.. what’s left?

The disasters, the stuff that makes people pick up the phone or write an email in all caps at 2am.

Like a $400 order that showed up destroyed the day before a wedding. Someone who just discovered their subscription renewed after they’re sure they cancelled it three weeks ago. A customer whose 78-year-old mother accidentally ordered six months of product, and now they want to return it, but your policy says no refunds after 30 days.

Sure, tagging tickets correctly is nice. But what you actually need is someone who can take the emotional hit, make a call on the spot without running to a manager, and leave the customer feeling heard without lighting your margins on fire. That’s hospitality.

The best CX people I’ve ever hired came from hospitality. Four years managing a busy Brooklyn brunch spot, handling Karens mad about cold eggs, a kitchen 45 minutes behind, servers walking out mid-shift.

They can learn Gorgias in a week. But the instinct for matching tone to the situation, apologizing in a way that lands, breaking policy when it matters and holding the line when it doesn’t… You don’t get that from a PDF.

Front desk managers, restaurant hosts, school teachers, and retail folks. They’ve spent years absorbing customer chaos under pressure, just not in your ticketing system.

They can read what someone’s really upset about instead of taking their words at face value. They de-escalate without a script. They make calls when things explode, no permission slip required. But your current job posting doesn’t speak their language.

The one skill nobody screens for

The one skill very few people screen for is: can this person actually read a room instead of robotically following a script?

A customer whose $12 lip balm is two days late does not need the same response as someone whose $400 anniversary gift showed up shattered the morning of. One needs a quick acknowledgment and a tracking link. The other needs someone who can say oh god, that’s awful, let me fix this right now, and actually mean it.

Great CX people do this on instinct. Warm and casual one message, urgent and apologetic the next, whatever the customer actually needs right now. Good people catch tone shifts mid-conversation, adjust without breaking stride.

Most people can’t do this. They pick one tone and ride it into the ground. They’re either overly formal with everyone or way too casual when someone is genuinely pissed. They don’t calibrate.

And the problem is you can’t really test for this in an interview. You can role-play a scenario or two, but the person who nails a fake angry customer exercise might completely botch it when a real one comes through and the stakes actually matter.

The closest proxy I’ve found is to ask about a time they had to handle someone who was irrationally upset about something that wasn’t their fault, and how they handled it. Not what they said, but how they felt during it, and what they did after.

If they tell you a story about absorbing someone’s anger and then figuring out how to fix the underlying issue even though the person was being unreasonable, that’s your hire. If they tell you a story about how they followed the script and escalated to a manager, keep looking.

AI’s chewing through the boring tickets. The repetitive stuff, the no-brainer questions, the ones where you don’t need judgment or empathy or any ability to read a room. What’s sticking around is actual work. And the people who are killer at it are not scrolling LinkedIn for your Zendesk power user posting.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi Team!

The sun is finally shining on the East Coast. We are in the 70s this week?! Seasonal depression is gone. Everything feels possible.

Which makes this the perfect time to talk about something nobody wants to hear. You’re probably not operational enough to scale. I know you want to talk about brand positioning, creative, and market strategy.

You want to workshop your next campaign or debate packaging redesign. Nobody wakes up excited to audit their SKU catalog, renegotiate their 3PL contract, or document their return policy.

But this kills growth. Going from 20 to 50m, operations are often the bottleneck. Let’s get into it.

Global growth fails when checkout experience doesn’t match customer expectations.

International shoppers expect the same transparency they get domestically. When costs change late in checkout or at delivery, trust drops—and so does lifetime value.

Passport Global helps brands like Comfrt, HexClad, Ridge, Carpe and Ogee deliver a consistent, conversion-optimized global experience with:

• Accurate landed costs shown before purchase

• Flat-rate international shipping strategies

• Clear checkout price breakdowns (including new Shopify integrations)

• Localized storefront and payment experiences

• Guidance on navigating tariffs and recovering refunds

That means higher conversion today and stronger retention tomorrow.

👉 Schedule a call to explore your global opportunity

Want a quick benchmark first?
Get your free, personalized International Growth Scorecard to see how your brand stacks up against global sellers, with actionable tips to improve the customer experience.

Schedule a Call

The $10M to $20M Death Zone

You hit $10M and things feel chaotic but manageable. You’re scrappy, you figure stuff out, and customer service is you and two part-timers in a shared inbox. Inventory planning is a spreadsheet you update when you remember. Your 3PL sends invoices and you pay them without really auditing the line items.

Then you push to $20M, and suddenly you’re drowning.

Customer service is underwater with a 48-hour response time. Inventory is a complete mess. You’re out of stock on your hero SKU while sitting on four months of a variant nobody wants. Your 3PL is charging you surprise fees you didn’t know existed. Returns are eating 6% margin and you have no idea why it jumped from 4%. You can’t launch the new product you’ve been planning because your systems genuinely cannot handle more complexity.

Most brands stall here. The operational foundation cracks under the weight. You’ve got demand. You’ve got a good product. But the infrastructure? Duct tape and a dose of hope. Every order stresses a system already breaking.

Your team is burned out. Same fires, different week. I’ve watched this happen a dozen times.

Nobody Wants To Do The Boring Work

I get it. You started this company with a vision for a brand, a point of view, and a product that should exist. You want to build, create, tell stories, and connect with customers. That’s the fun part. That’s why you started this.

SKU rationalization is not fun. Auditing your product data so every variant has clean attributes is not fun.

Building an actually functional inventory planning model is not fun. Documenting your return policy so it’s consistent across email and your site and your CX team is not fun. Negotiating better 3PL rates and understanding what a pick and pack fee actually includes is not fun.

Hitting $25M and having everything break is also not fun. Spending half your day putting out operational fires instead of building the business is not fun. Watching your unit economics erode because you’re getting nickel-and-dimed on fulfillment and hemorrhaging margin on returns you could’ve prevented is not fun.

Most founders would rather brainstorm a brand activation than fix their warehouse receiving process. Then they wonder why they can’t scale past $25M without the wheels coming off. The answer is sitting right there in their 3PL contract and their product catalog and their inventory spreadsheet. It’s just the answer they don’t want to hear.

The brands that break through do the boring work first. They know their COGS down to the penny. They’ve modeled out their fulfillment costs by SKU. Every process is documented, not trapped in someone’s head. They’ve invested in the systems and infrastructure that make speed possible without chaos.

The boring stuff is what scales brands.

What Operational Maturity Actually Looks Like

• Clean product data: This means every SKU has accurate dimensions, weight, and attributes. Your 3PL isn’t guessing. Your website filters actually work. Your inventory system knows what you have. Sounds basic, I know. I’ve seen $50M brands where the product dimensions in Shopify don’t match what’s in the warehouse, so every order is a surprise fee waiting to happen.

• Documented processes: Your CX team has a source of truth for how to handle every scenario. New hires can onboard without just shadowing someone for three weeks. You’re not reinventing the wheel every time. When someone asks how to handle a damaged item return, there’s a doc for that. When you need to explain your exchange policy, it’s written down somewhere other than Slack. (FYI today you can build SOPs like this in Claude in 5 min + a few tokens)

• Inventory planning that actually works: You have a model, you know your lead times, and you know your sell-through rates by SKU. You’re making purchase orders based on data, not vibes. You’re not sitting on dead stock while being out of stock on your best seller. You’ve built buffer stock targets that account for variability. You’ve negotiated payment terms that give you breathing room.

• Return policies that make sense start with actually analyzing why products come back. You’ve tightened your policy where it matters. You’ve made it easy where it builds loyalty. You’re not just eating costs because you’re afraid of upsetting someone. Maybe you’ve realized that one SKU has a 15% return rate because the size chart is wrong, and fixing the chart would save you $80K a year. Maybe you’ve learned that your most loyal customers never return anything, so you can afford to be generous with them.

• Customer service tools that don’t suck: You’re not still using a shared Gmail inbox at $15M. You have a real helpdesk. You have macros and reporting. Bottlenecks are visible. You know which types of inquiries take the longest to resolve. You know which agents are underwater. You can forecast headcount needs instead of hiring when you’re already drowning.

This stuff is boring. It’s also the difference between a brand that stalls at $20M and one that gets to $50M without imploding.

The Brands That Scale Are Operationally Obsessed

The founders who make it aren’t just good at brand. They’re operationally obsessed. They know their 3PL contract inside out. They’ve built inventory models that actually work. They’ve rationalized their SKU catalog so they’re not carrying 47 variants when 12 would do the job better.

They do the boring work because operations are the brand. Two-day shipping instead of five? Brand. One interaction to resolve an issue instead of four? Brand. Never running out of your hero product? Brand. That’s what operational excellence builds.

Your operations are customer-facing whether you think about them that way or not. Every fulfillment delay is a broken brand promise. Every out-of-stock is a moment where someone goes to your competitor. Every clunky return experience is a reason they don’t come back. You can have the best creative in the world and it won’t matter if your operations are a mess.

Brands that scale execute on creative because the foundation holds. New product launches don’t break systems. Spend increases don’t collapse customer service. Speed comes from infrastructure. You move fast when you’re not constantly firefighting.

Operational chaos doesn’t get fixed with branding. A broken fulfillment process doesn’t care about your creative strategy. Eventually, you build the boring infrastructure. It’s the only way to scale.

Yeah, the sun is shining. Everything feels possible. But to actually get there, you might need to audit your 3PL contract, fix your product data, and build a real inventory model.

Not sexy. Do it anyway.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi Team!

March is chaos. Wife is working 80-hour weeks and I’m solo for the best hours of the day with both kids. 6-8am and 6-8pm, twice a day, every day. Just me and them. It’s exhausting and also the best part of my week, which is a weird thing to say when you’re running on four hours of sleep.

Aside from that, my sister got married last night, and a ton of my friends and family are in a war zone. But we’re all good considering.

This week, I want to talk about something that’s been rattling around in my head since I left Jones Road. If AI handles 70-80% of CX chats in the next year or two, what does the job of a CX hire actually become? It won’t be the things we looked for back then, which were speed, macros, or tool fluency.

So what does the new CX perfect hire look like?

Let’s get into it.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Armin!

If you run an ecommerce brand, you know the pain: 60-80% of your support tickets are the same repetitive stuff. “Where’s my order?” “Can I get a copy of my invoice?” “I need to change my address.” Your team spends their day copy-pasting tracking links instead of solving complex inquiries.

ArminCX was built specifically to fix this.

1️⃣ Tickets that resolve themselves. ArminCX’s AI reads the customer’s message pulls the order number, checks shipping status in your backend, grabs the tracking link, and sends a complete reply. Brands are seeing 50-80% of tickets fully automated.

2️⃣ Deep integrations where it matters. Shopify, WooCommerce, Klaviyo, your local shipping carriers ... ArminCX connects natively to the systems your team actually uses. Agents can refund, cancel, or update an address without leaving the tool.

3️⃣ Every channel, one inbox. Email, WhatsApp, Instagram, live chat, phone, etc. All in one place with full order history in the sidebar. No more tab chaos.

If your support team is buried in repetitive tickets and held together by five different tools, ArminCX is worth a serious look.

Check them out!

Learn More

The Old CX Playbook Was Built for a Different World

For most of the last decade, CX hiring was optimization-driven.

You looked for people who could move fast, hit SLAs, manage a ticket queue without drowning, and know their way around Zendesk or Gorgias. If someone had seen a few different brands, had clean escalation instincts, and could churn through volume without making a mess, you felt safe.

That playbook made sense when every ticket required a human. When “support” meant a person reading and responding to everything, throughput mattered. Macros and process-following mattered. You could argue about tone later, but first, you had to survive the queue.

The problem is that we are hiring for that world while the ground is shifting under us.

If AI handles the repetitive layer, then speed and tool fluency stop being differentiators.

AI Takes the Volume, Humans Inherit the Weight

In an AI-first world, most of the ticket types that make up daily CX life get absorbed.

WISMO, address changes, invoice copies, subscription pauses, and clean refunds that fall neatly inside policy. The stuff that chews up an entire day and gives you nothing to show for it besides “we cleared the backlog.”

AI will do that faster than any team of humans, and it will do it consistently. That is not a scary statement, it is simply the direction everything is going.

So what is left for people?

The edge cases, emotional moments, weird situations, and conversations where the customer is not just asking for information, but making a decision about whether they still trust you.

Those are lower volume and much higher leverage.

This is where CX stops being a ticket function and starts being a relationship function.

A Small Story That Made Me Hate Myself

I had a moment recently that made this feel very real.

I have spent thousands of dollars with a brand over the years. I have recommended them to friends. I have been the kind of customer brands want, the one who keeps coming back without needing a promo every time.

A recent order arrived and an item broke after a few days of usage. I reached out, and I was five days outside their return window.

The responses I got were polite and technically correct. They referenced policy, they were structured, and yet they also felt cold in a way that is hard to unsee once you feel it.

I explained the situation, mentioned my history, tried to be reasonable. They told me, for the fourth time in the thread, that nothing could be done.

At some point, I realized something that surprised me.

As a VIP customer, I would have rather had AI let me down slowly than have a human read my email and then choose to be policy-first in such a blunt way. At least with AI, you can tell yourself it is a system limitation. When a human does it, you feel the message underneath the message, which is that you are not worth the exception.

The dollar amount did not matter as much as the interaction did.

It changed how I feel about the brand.

Hospitality and CX Are Going to Merge

Imagine you are a regular at a restaurant. You have eaten there for years, know the staff, bring friends, and tip well.

One night, the food comes out mediocre. You mention it calmly, not in a dramatic way, just honest feedback.

If the manager walks over and reads you the policy off the back of the menu, you are done. You might finish your meal. You might even pay without making a scene. You are not coming back.

That is the case in hospitality.

It is also CX.

The only difference is that ecommerce has gotten away with being colder because you cannot see the person on the other side of the screen. AI is about to remove even more of that human friction, which makes the moments where a human does show up even more important.

In 2026, the human agent is not primarily a problem solver. The human agent is the person who turns tension into trust when the automation does not.

That is the job.

What Hiring for CX in 2026 Actually Means

This is where I think a lot of traditional CX profiles will struggle.

Many support environments train for compliance, risk avoidance, and consistency. They reward sticking to macros, escalating quickly, and staying inside strict guardrails. Those instincts are not evil, and they exist for real reasons, but they are not the instincts that create loyalty when the only tickets humans see are the ones that matter.

If AI takes the 80 percent, humans own the 20 percent that drives retention.

That means you should hire for a different set of traits:

• Judgment under ambiguity, because the “right” answer will often be situational.

• Emotional intelligence, because the customer is rarely just asking for the literal thing they typed.

• Writing that sounds human and on-brand, because if your human sounds like a bot, then you should have just used a bot.

• Comfort operating without scripts, because the best high-touch interactions are contextual, not templated.

• A hospitality instinct, where the goal is protecting the relationship, not closing the ticket.

Tools can be taught quickly, and unfortunately, taste and EQ cannot.

What This Changes Inside the Team

If automation is doing the repetitive work, CX teams will not look the same.

They will likely be smaller. More senior. More brand-aligned. The work will sit closer to retention than to ops. The remaining humans will be handling fewer interactions, but each interaction will carry more weight.

The cost savings from automation should not disappear into the void.

If you are going to automate the volume, you should reinvest into the humans who remain. Pay them better. Train them differently. Give them the context that makes judgment possible, including customer segmentation, LTV, and what you are willing to do for a top customer versus a first-time buyer.

If your best people still feel like they are being graded on handle time while they are trying to save relationships, you are going to get the worst of both worlds.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hey team,

Happy Thursday. If you’re on the East Coast and want to strangle that groundhog, get in line.

We just finished digging out from the last snowstorm, and I was not exactly thrilled to pick up the damn shovel again.

It reminded me of a different kind of digging I’ve done more times than I’d like to admit. 🙃

The kind where you open your inbox and realize a campaign landed somewhere it absolutely should not have.

At some point in your retention career, you are going to send the wrong email to the wrong person. Not necessarily because you’re careless, but because your data has blind spots, your lists are never perfectly clean, and your customers are living lives your segments will never fully capture.

Like the win-back email that hits someone who just rage-canceled.
The re-engagement campaign that reaches a customer disputing a charge.
The promo that lands two days after someone paid full price.

You cannot eliminate those moments entirely.

What you can control is what happens next.

Today I want to talk about two things: how to reduce the odds before you hit send, and how to recover the relationship when you inevitably get it wrong.

Let’s jump in.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by KODIF AI.

As your brand scales, customer conversations explode across support, pre-purchase, and every corner of your site. The question becomes: do you build a larger team, or a smarter one?

The AI CX market is crowded, but here are a few reasons KODIF stands apart from what I’ve seen:

1️⃣ Built for complexity — not just basic FAQ.

From what I’ve seen other AI agents break when SOPs get multi-system and conditional. KODIF asks you to give them your most complex SOP, and automate that.

For example, I saw how KODIF chat agent handled Aura Frames complex troubleshooting product issues end-to-end — walking a customer through diagnostic steps and, if needed, triggering a replacement part order inside the same flow. I was impressed.

2️⃣ An AI CX team > one AI Agent

They build AI CX Team, purpose - specialized agents that mirror CX roles: an AI Support Agent for resolution, AI Concierge for pre-purchase and conversion, AI Analyst for insights, and AI Manager for continuous improvement. It’s a team model, not a catch-all model.

3️⃣ Deep ecommerce integrations (not surface-level)

They’ve built 178+ ecommerce integrations and shipped 88 new ones in 2025 alone.

You all know that matters because automation only works when the system can actually take action, not just answer questions.

Some recent cool reviews on the success stories:

Dollar Shave Club:

“The customizability of KODIF is what excites me most. I’m in there every day. Containment is great and all, but quality matters just as much or more. Our automation rate is above 70% but more importantly we are leveraging KODIF for retention.”

— Jack Dukesherer, Sr. Manager, Member Engagement Ops

Fellow Coffee:

“The Chat AI Agent can walk someone through calibrating their grinder — it’s super resourceful with the right inputs. Furthermore, address changes and cancellations? Completely automated. I haven’t thought about a cancellation in ages.”
— Cindy Rodriguez, Director of CX

Just Food For Dogs:

“We started with deflection as the goal, but it turned into more — now the AI helps customers discover products, understand ingredients, and convert. That’s real ROI.”

• Cristina Fucchi, Chief Customer Officer

Something that stood to me is their founders’ strong engineering background. Their CTO, Norm previously built Uber’s customer support automation platform, automating 150 million customer requests per month.

KODIF is trusted by top ecommerce brands such as True Classic, Ruggable, Dollar Shave Club, Liquid I.V., One Skin, Aura Frames, Fellow, Neuro, Who Gives a Crap, Million Dollar Baby, Ivy City, Helix Sleep and many others.

Many teams review their CX stack in Q1, and if your support workflows are complex, it might be worth a conversation with Chyngyz and the KODIF team to see if it’s a fit. They promise to go live in 3-5 days.

Also, they are offering my readers 3-months for free… Just hit up their team and drop my name, Eli Weiss.

This offer is valid only through March 31, 2026.

Book a demo and meet the founders

Part one: How to recover when it happens

I recently spoke to a pet brand that ran a pretty standard re-engagement campaign a few months ago. Lapsed customers plus some new prospects from a third-party list, which is the kind of thing retention teams run every quarter without lighting candles and reflecting on the meaning of life.

The problem was simple and brutal. The list had no idea whose dogs had passed away.

The emails went out, and within hours, their inbox popped off in the worst way. Some people were confused, some irritated, and a few were grieving. It was the kind of Monday where you open Slack, see the subject lines stacking up, and immediately understand how the rest of your day is going to go.

The part that made this story worth repeating came after that. The brand happened to be using KODIF when the fallout began, and the responses were handled in a way that felt steady.

When someone wrote in saying their pet had passed, the reply acknowledged it directly and apologized without turning it into corporate theater. When someone was simply annoyed, they apologized and handled the opt-out cleanly without dragging the exchange out longer than necessary. It did not try to impress anyone. It just responded appropriately.

Their CX lead told me, “For the ones where the pet had passed, it was showing empathy. For the ones who just didn’t like it, it was saying sorry and passing along the feedback.”

Most teams would have fumbled that recovery, not because they are careless, but because their CX layer is usually optimized for speed. Close the ticket, hit the SLA, keep the queue moving.

That works when someone wants to know where their order is. It does not work when someone replies to your campaign with something personal that your segmentation logic could never have predicted.

Recovery is not complicated, but it does require discipline. You acknowledge what happened in plain language and you own it without turning the apology into a memo. You make the next step obvious. If someone wants to opt out, it should take seconds. If they need help, they should not have to explain their situation twice.

The reason this becomes difficult is scale. Doing this well requires context, and most teams do not have the capacity to craft nuanced replies consistently when a campaign misfires and hundreds of messages arrive at once.

Savings and deflection are useful metrics. They just are not the full story. The moments that matter most are the ones where the customer is reacting to something your brand did.

If a campaign goes sideways late at night and someone replies with something your team did not anticipate, that exchange often determines whether the relationship stabilizes or erodes.

Part two: How to limit the damage before it happens

You cannot fully prevent this, and anyone promising zero mistakes is selling fantasy. There is, however, a clear difference between brands that misfire once in a while and brands that seem to repeat the same avoidable mistake every quarter. That difference usually comes down to process.

Most of the time this is not a tooling issue. It is a coordination issue. Marketing pulls a list and hits send. CX finds out when the replies start landing. Now support is managing the emotional and reputational fallout for a campaign they did not know was going out.

That is less of a tech stack problem and more of a meeting problem.

The brands that handle this better usually build in one small pause before the send. Someone pressure-tests the list. Why are these people here? What do we actually know about them beyond purchase history? Where are the blind spots? If this lands badly, what is the most predictable reason it would?

That five-minute exercise catches more risk than another subject line brainstorm ever will.

Pre-send reviews tend to focus on creative and copy. Very few focus on the edges of the audience. The edges are where this goes wrong. Adding one deliberate “what are we missing?” check into your workflow costs almost nothing and prevents more damage than most teams expect.

Suppression logic is the other piece, and most brands build it reactively. You suppress recent purchasers because someone complains loudly enough. You suppress customers with open disputes because one campaign burned you. Over time the rules pile up, nobody maps them end to end, and the gaps sit there quietly until you trip over them again.

Once a year, it is worth auditing that logic intentionally. Are there customers in a transactional or financial situation where outreach right now is more likely to frustrate than help? You are not going to eliminate mistakes entirely, but you can meaningfully reduce the ones you cause yourself.

Third-party lists require a more honest internal conversation than most teams are willing to have. Your owned data is imperfect. Rented data is usually worse. When you email a list you did not build yourself, you are choosing higher variance on outcomes. That can be a rational tradeoff, but it should be explicit.

On paper, the campaign looked routine and the spreadsheet looked clean enough. What nobody paused to consider was what the file did not capture. That omission is usually where these situations begin, which is why it is worth naming the risk before you hit send

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi team,

A year ago, LLM sounded like an airport code. Now your mom is asking ChatGPT how to decorate her living room, and your dad is Claudemaxxing to plan vacations.

Commerce moved first.

According to Adobe, 55% of consumers now use AI for product research. No longer fringe behavior, it is a mainstream discovery.

At the same time, according to Yotpo data, traffic to brand websites is falling across segments. Brands doing over $100 million are down 10 to 25 percent. Mid-market brands are down 35-40%. Smaller brands are seeing declines as steep as 70%.

And yet purchases attributed to AI-powered search have increased 11x this year. Orders coming through that channel carry 30% higher AOV compared to other sources.

TL;DR: Fewer people are visiting your site. The ones who do are higher intent and spend more. Given all the legwork they did on LLMs before hitting your site, their decision is increasingly shaped before the site visit happens.

Which means:

If you are not trusted by the machine, you never make the shortlist.

And if you never make the shortlist, you never get the highest intent customers.

Today I want to break down how LLMs actually decide what to recommend, why most brands are underbuilding the trust layer that feeds those decisions, and what you can do this quarter to fix it.

Let’s dive in, shall we??

The 71% Statistic You Can’t Ignore

Whitelisting, Spark Ads, Partnership Ads—whatever you call them, one thing is certain: they are crushing it for 2026 and minisocial is our go-to partner.

Creator-led ads, whatever specific flavor you choose, are crushing. Meta reported that 71% of consumers say they make a purchase within a couple of days after seeing creator content, partnering with minisocial is the best way to partner with high-quality creators and streamline your UGC production.

Brands including Topicals, Ayoh!, MadeGood, and Rocksbox already trust minisocial for creator-made content that performs!

Here’s what brands working with minisocial say:

• “Ads made with minisocial content are performing better than anything we’ve made in-house.” - Michael, Growth Marketing Manager

• “minisocial’s cost per creator is cheaper than our in-house program.” - Andrea, Digital Campaigns Manager

• “The price for what you’re getting is just insane... minisocial handles every step of the influencer management process.” - Kaylee, Director of Marketing

Ready to See Results?

Work with the team behind the best Whitelisting assets:

Learn More Here

Before we dig into how this actually works, two things worth taking a peek at:

• Yotpo published research on what shoppers are actually asking LLMs. 53 million shopping prompts every single day. If you want to see what people are searching and who shows up when they do, it’s worth reviewing.

• Second, if you want to know where you actually rank on LLMs right now and quick fixes you can deploy, there’s a free tool that shows you.

Your customers are choosing before they ever visit your site

For years we optimized what happens after the click. Stronger PDPs, faster load times, tighter checkout, better copy. That still matters.

But more of the decision now happens before the click.

When someone asks ChatGPT, “What is the best prenatal supplement for conception?” a shortlist gets assembled before your site is even in play. If your brand does not appear in that answer, your beautiful PDP might as well not exist for that buyer.

The frustrating part is that these customers convert better and spend more when they do show up, because they have already done the research.

If you are invisible at the LLM layer, you are missing your highest-intent customers.

How LLMs actually evaluate your brand

LLMs are not reading your page like a human or reacting to your hero banner the way a person would. They evaluate signal drawn from across the web.

That signal usually comes from three areas: user sentiment, independent validation, and structured product data.

User sentiment reflects what real customers say in reviews, Reddit threads, Q&A sections, and community forums, including the specifics, the complaints, and the details that show how a product performs in real life. Independent validation includes media coverage, expert commentary, and third-party reviews that exist outside your owned channels.

Structured product data means your information is clear and consistent enough that a machine can match you to a query without guessing, including ingredient breakdowns, certifications, pricing tiers, compatibility notes, and clearly defined use cases presented in a structured way.

When those layers are strong and aligned, you are easier to recommend. When they are thin or inconsistent across sources, you gradually fall out of answers and most brands do not notice until the damage is done.

The funnel did not disappear. It moved earlier.

At the top, the model builds a shortlist from broad awareness questions like “What are the best running shoes for flat feet?” It relies on review depth, clear use-case language, and category clarity. If your reviews never mention overpronation, you are giving the model little reason to connect you to that query.

In the consideration phase, buyers narrow down with prompts like “Brand X vs Brand Y.” The model gathers ingredients, pricing tiers, policy details, recurring themes from reviews, and how third parties describe each option, then forms a summary based on the weight of that evidence. If a competitor has clearer attributes and stronger off-site coverage, the comparison will tend to lean in their direction.

At the decision phase, buyers want reassurance. Prompts like “Is Brand X worth it?” or “Do people like their customer service?” draw heavily from recent reviews, shipping feedback, and real-world outcomes. If that signal is generic or outdated, confidence erodes and recommendations shift.

Most brands assume comparison and final decision happen on their PDP. Increasingly, much of that work happens before the first visit.

A decent chunk of trust signal lives somewhere you don’t (easily) control

A significant portion of what shapes whether an LLM recommends you comes from outside your domain, including forums, Reddit, independent review platforms, and media coverage. The trust calculation is happening whether you are actively managing those surfaces or not.

Authentic, specific, and recent reviews used to feel like retention hygiene. In an AI-mediated discovery world, they function more like infra. When review banks become generic or overly polished, the signal weakens because the model has less real-world evidence to rely on.

The audit is simple. Use the same tools your customers are using. Ask ChatGPT or Claude the questions buyers ask at each stage. See who appears and which sources are cited. Then look inward. Are your reviews recent and detailed? Do customers describe real use cases and outcomes? Is your product data structured clearly and consistently? Are independent sources discussing your brand?

If those answers are uncomfortable, adjusting a flow will not fix it.

Your trust layer needs attention, and right now that layer determines whether you are even in the conversation.

If you want deep dives on topics like these + actionable ways to show up in LLMs, check out Tomer’s (CEO Yotpo) newsletter here.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hey team,

This newsletter comes to you from a quiet corner of the Moxy in Williamsburg after a hectic but really special week at Yotpo’s revenue kickoff. So excited about what the future holds.

3 coffees too many from Devoción, snacks from Mesiba, it's really all I need to feel something

This week’s topic is a hot one that no one is talking about.

Most brands spend way too much time on people who don’t care about them in the first place.

They (rightfully) pour a ton of energy into pushing order number one to order number two. They build increasingly complex programs to re-engage customers who bought once, maybe twice, and disappeared.

At the same time, they do so at the cost of customers who have bought 4+ times.

This week, I want to talk about how to spot when your best customers are starting to drift and what you can do to keep them close.

Let’s dive in.

This week’s newsletter is brought to you by DigitalGenius.

The problem with most AI Agents for CX is that they don’t actually solve customers’ real and pressing problems. They are OK at answering surface-level questions (when they’re not hallucinating or pulling from the wrong data source), but most can’t perform the actions that your customers actually need them to.

Take order queries, for example. It’s easy for AI Agents to share a tracking link – but that’s not enough for a customer whose order is delayed. To be relevant, the AI Agent needs to be able to retrieve order status, compare it against SLAs, and even authorize a replacement or refund – just as your human agents would.

This is the challenge that DigitalGenius is solving for brands like Caraway, Everlane, and On Running. Through deep integrations to ecommerce tech stacks, AI Agents can take real actions to fully resolve queries, not just deflect them.

Plus, with a unique hybrid approach that combines LLMs and workflows, answers are consistent, hallucinations are minimized, and conversations result in genuine resolutions. DigitalGenius has ready-made workflows built on 10+ years’ experience automating for ecommerce brands, so you can get started quickly and drive meaningful change for your business.

If you want your AI to actually resolve queries, and not just reply, then speak to DigitalGenius today.

Use Code Eli2026 and receive a $100 gift card when you book a demo.

BOOK A DEMO

What you’re missing about your best customers

There’s a difference between how casual customers leave and how your best customers leave, and most brands don’t notice it until it’s already too late.

Customers who buy once and disappear tend to make noise. They unsubscribe, stop opening emails, and generally announce they’re leaving. You can point to price, timing, or competition and feel like you understand what happened.

Your best customers behave differently. They stay subscribed, keep opening emails, and sometimes continue engaging with content. What changes is how often they buy, and that shift happens slowly enough that by the time it shows up in reports, they’ve already mentally moved on.

You see this most clearly when something small goes wrong, and the customer doesn’t bother telling you.

I saw this on X this week and wanted to share it as an example.

This is exactly the type of customer most brands never hear from when something breaks.

Ross didn’t wait for Carson to say anything. He emailed directly, explained what happened, took responsibility, refunded the order, and shipped replacements without Carson needing to ask. That single email turned what could have been a quiet fade-out into Carson posting publicly about why he plans to keep buying from Cadence.

The important part here is that Carson wasn’t showing the usual signals people look for when someone is about to leave. He wasn’t angry, posting on social, or opening support tickets. He was simply going to buy less over time and eventually stop without ever explaining why.

Brands miss this constantly because their systems are designed to respond to noise rather than silence. Companies build elaborate processes for angry first-time buyers who blast them publicly, while long-time customers quietly assume someone will notice and fix the issue.

When that doesn’t happen, they change their behavior and move on. Interpreting that silence as satisfaction is how those customers end up with a templated response or no response at all.

Carson was on track to buy less and eventually stop, and Cadence wouldn’t have known why until much later. Ross catching it early and dealing with it directly changed the outcome, not because the fix was complex, but because the brand noticed before being forced to.

Why power users drift away

Power users judge you by a different standard than new customers.

First-time buyers compare you to whatever brand they tried most recently.

Tenth-time buyers compare you to the version of your brand they fell in love with in the first place.

That’s a much harder bar, because standing still looks like moving backward.

Long-time customers notice things newer customers don’t. Packaging that feels cheaper than before. Support responses that take longer or feel more automated. Product launches that feel designed to hit quarterly targets rather than solve real problems. Emails that sound like they could have been sent to anyone.

They also notice when loyalty is treated like a line item. When someone who has placed a dozen orders receives the same emails and promotions as someone who bought once during a flash sale months ago, the message is clear.

Someone who’s been buying from you for three years doesn’t want to be treated the same as someone who found you last month. You don’t need an elaborate rewards program to acknowledge that. It shows up in faster responses, more relevant access, and communication that reflects an actual relationship with the brand.

When that recognition isn’t there, customers don’t usually get upset. They become indifferent, which is soooo much harder to reverse.

What actually works

You don’t need to rebuild your retention strategy from scratch to keep your best customers engaged. You need to consistently show that you’re still paying attention.

That shows up in small, meaningful improvements shipped regularly, even when they’re not flashy. It shows up in communication that sounds like a real person wrote it with context. It shows up in access or content that reflects an understanding of who these customers are and why they’ve stayed.

It also means having real conversations with them from time to time. Not pathetic surveys or mass NPS blasts, but actual back-and-forth discussions about what would make the brand feel better six months from now and then doing something with that feedback.

Most brands end up spending most of their time chasing people who never really cared much to begin with. Investing in the people who already care often feels less urgent because they aren’t complaining.

That priority order is usually backwards.

Your best customers are paying attention. They’re watching to see whether you’re still earning it.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hey team,

Over the last few weeks, an open-source project called OpenClaw blew up, hitting millions of downloads. It is an AI agent you run 24x7 on your computer that writes code, books flights, handles email, and plugs into WhatsApp, Slack, and Telegram.

Folks are running their life through it. Building websites from their phones, fixing bugs overnight, and letting it operate continuously without being prompted for each task.

The future is coming really quickly, but what does it mean for CX?

It’s likely that in a near-future state, most customer interactions will be handled by automation. Your customer’s AI assistant talks to your brand’s AI assistant. Orders are placed, shipments are tracked, and issues are resolved without a human involved.

When that becomes the default, the moments when a human steps in become the entire experience.

Right now, brands think premium CX is about polished unboxing and a handwritten note, but customers judge you on whether someone stepped in at the right moment and fixed their issue without friction.

And ironically, automation is not the risk. Blind automation is.

I learned this at Jones Road. A customer ordered the wrong foundation shade and emailed us immediately to request a change before it shipped. The email came in on Friday at 6 pm.

By Monday, when support saw it and offered the right shade, the customer had waited all weekend for a 30-second fix.

This could have been solved in a second with the right automation, but not everything should be automated.

And when you do automate, you need a partner that truly gets how to build your AI teammates, not slop.

This week, let’s talk about building proper automation (this week’s partner truly gets it) and when (and where) human touch will actually deeply matter.

Excited for you to read this one, I wrote it from the heart with a bit of sass. 😏

This week’s newsie is brought to you by KODIF AI.

As your brand scales, customer conversations explode across support, pre-purchase, and every corner of your site. The question becomes: do you build a larger team, or a smarter one?

The AI CX market is crowded, but here are a few reasons KODIF stands apart from what I’ve seen:

1️⃣ Built for complexity — not just basic FAQ.

From what I’ve seen other AI agents break when SOPs get multi-system and conditional. KODIF asks you to give them your most complex SOP, and automate that.

For example, I saw how KODIF chat agent handled Aura Frames complex troubleshooting product issues end-to-end — walking a customer through diagnostic steps and, if needed, triggering a replacement part order inside the same flow. I was impressed.

2️⃣ An AI CX team > one AI Agent

They build AI CX Team, purpose - specialized agents that mirror CX roles: an AI Support Agent for resolution, AI Concierge for pre-purchase and conversion, AI Analyst for insights, and AI Manager for continuous improvement. It’s a team model, not a catch-all model.

3️⃣ Deep ecommerce integrations (not surface-level)

They’ve built 178+ ecommerce integrations and shipped 88 new ones in 2025 alone.

You all know that matters because automation only works when the system can actually take action, not just answer questions.

Some recent cool reviews on the success stories:

Dollar Shave Club:

“The customizability of KODIF is what excites me most. I’m in there every day. Containment is great and all, but quality matters just as much or more. Our automation rate is above 70% but more importantly we are leveraging KODIF for retention.”

— Jack Dukesherer, Sr. Manager, Member Engagement Ops

Fellow Coffee:

“The Chat AI Agent can walk someone through calibrating their grinder — it’s super resourceful with the right inputs. Furthermore, address changes and cancellations? Completely automated. I haven’t thought about a cancellation in ages.”
— Cindy Rodriguez, Director of CX

Just Food For Dogs:

“We started with deflection as the goal, but it turned into more — now the AI helps customers discover products, understand ingredients, and convert. That’s real ROI.”

• Cristina Fucchi, Chief Customer Officer

Something that stood out to me is their founders’ strong engineering background. Their CTO, Norm, previously built Uber’s customer support automation platform, automating 150 million customer requests per month.

KODIF is trusted by top ecommerce brands such as True Classic, Ruggable, Dollar Shave Club, Liquid I.V., One Skin, Aura Frames, Fellow, Neuro, Who Gives a Crap, Million Dollar Baby, Ivy City, Helix Sleep and many others.

Many teams review their CX stack in Q1, and if your support workflows are complex, it might be worth a conversation with Chyngyz and the KODIF team to see if it’s a fit. They promise to go live in 3-5 days.

Also, they are offering my readers 3-months for free… Just hit up their team and drop my name, Eli Weiss. This offer is valid only through March 31, 2026.

Book a demo and meet the founders

When automation exposes what is missing

I checked into a Hyatt House in London last year. There was not a single human at the front desk. You scanned your ID at a machine, opted in or out of late checkout, and the machine printed a room key.

My introvert self appreciated the efficiency. But once I settled in, it became obvious that I could have stayed at a hostel for half the price if there was going to be zero hospitality. I paid Hyatt rates for a vending-machine experience.

The automation worked fine. What it did was make the missing piece impossible to ignore.

When everything gets handled by a machine, the absence of a human becomes the experience.

This is where a lot of brands are headed without fully thinking it through. They automate everything they can, which is often the right move, but they never stop to ask what happens in the rare moments when a human is still involved.

We are already seeing the backlash. OpenAI is reportedly working on a social network for humans only, where users would need to verify they are actually human, potentially through biometric checks.

We are moving so fast toward automation that we are already building walls to protect spaces for real human interaction.

That tells you everything you need to know about where this is going. Bots will be the default. Human interaction will become the premium feature.

At Jones Road, we automated a meaningful portion of customer support. Bots handled order tracking, basic product questions, and simple troubleshooting. That freed the team up to focus on harder problems.

The Power of Moments:

But we also built tripwires. Signals that told us when the bot was no longer helping and a human needed to step in. That’s the tactical version. The strategic version looks different.

Hotels like Ritz-Carlton have really nailed the idea of knowing where to step in.

I was talking to a friend, Izzy, CEO of Portless, about his recent trip to China and his stay at the Ritz there.

He had a mango every morning for breakfast, and one day he came down and asked for his daily mango.

They said that, unfortunately, all the local markets were out. He had a sad face. The next morning he came down and there was a beautiful mango sitting on the plate. They had traveled 45 minutes to get it.

What I love about this story is that if they just gave a random person this mango, it would mean nothing. They deeply understood the mango moment: what that moment meant for him and when they needed to jump in and do something special.

Every brand has a mango moment. The question is whether you’ve identified yours.

Five signals that a human needs to step in

1. When the conversation goes in circles

If someone asks the same question three different ways, the bot is not understanding. Premium brands catch that loop and route the conversation to a human before frustration sets in.

Most brands let the bot keep trying. The customer repeats themselves four or five times, gives up, and leaves believing your support is useless.

At OLIPOP, we had a simple rule. If the bot responded three times and the customer was still asking, a human took over. Not because the bot was bad, but because the customer clearly needed something it could not provide.

2. When emotion shows up in the message

All caps. Multiple question marks. Words like frustrated, disappointed, or angry. Bots can detect sentiment, and premium brands use that signal to escalate early.

Most brands either ignore the signal or train the bot to respond with canned empathy. That makes things worse. Nobody wants a bot apologizing for frustration when the bot is the source of it.

If someone is upset, get a human involved. A bot is not going to calm them down.

3. When someone explicitly asks for a human

This should be obvious, but most brands still make you work for it. They redirect you back to the bot. They ask if the bot can help first. They make you prove you deserve a person.

Premium brands just connect you. If someone asks for a human, give them one. Making customers justify that request is the opposite of premium.

4. When real money is involved

A $15 order issue can be handled by a bot. A $500 order that went missing should not be.

Most brands set automated thresholds based on cost savings, not customer impact. Bots handle refunds and replacements up to an arbitrary number that looks good on a spreadsheet and terrible in real life.

Premium brands understand that when someone is out real money, a human should be making judgment calls. Not because the bot would necessarily get it wrong, but because the customer deserves to feel like someone is actually evaluating their situation.

5. When someone has earned it

Your best customers should not have to prove they deserve human attention. Premium brands automatically route long-term or high-value customers to people.

If someone has been buying from you for three years, they should not be explaining a problem to a bot. They earned a shortcut.

Most brands treat everyone the same. That is efficient. It is also how you lose your best customers to a brand that recognizes them.

We are sprinting toward a future where bots handle most of the work. That is fine, and probably good.

The brands that win will be the ones that understand when to turn the bot off.

Premium is not about automating everything. It is about knowing when a human matters and never making people beg for one.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi Team,

What a week.

Over the weekend, I was driving with Noah to get some groceries before the storm, and five cops were chasing someone at 80mph. Guy slammed into us trying to escape. Side airbags deployed, my iPhone auto-called 911. The car called 911. The whole back wheel was ripped off, and the car was totaled.

Noah and I walked away seemingly without a scratch.

Modern cars are incredible.

And aside from the walloping we got from the snow on Sunday, we’re doing okay. Shaken but grateful.

Anyway. This week’s topic is fun, and one that a lot of you enjoyed last time I touched on it: returns.

Specifically, practical tips to make more money and improve CX from returns. Loop surveyed tens of millions of returns across 4,000+ Shopify merchants and put together a benchmark report.

I pulled together some of the most fascinating and practical bits from it.

Let’s dive in.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Loop!

Most brands settle for the average. Top brands don’t.

Too often, ecommerce benchmark reports tell you what the average brand is doing, then leave you guessing how to beat it.

Loop’s 2026 Global Ecommerce Retention Benchmarks Report was built to change that.

It analyzes tens of millions of post-purchase actions across 4,000+ global brands, giving you the context to better understand where your brand stands, which tradeoffs matter, and which levers actually drive retained revenue and loyalty.

What stood out:

• Brands with flexible exchanges retain 42-58% more revenue than store credit-only setups.

• Exchanges are now the norm. 73.6% of merchants offer them, and nearly half add incentives to shop immediately.

• Return fees are increasingly selective. 65.2% of brands use targeted fees to protect margin while preserving loyalty.

• Fraud is being addressed earlier. 11.4% of return value is flagged as high risk, pushing teams toward smarter controls instead of blanket restrictions.

This report shows the path to better retention, durable growth, and real-world playbooks from brands like LSKD and Piper & Scoot.

Download it today

1. More options at returns = more money retained

Brands that offer three return outcomes (variant exchange, store credit, and refund) see 25% higher revenue retention than brands offering just one option. Same data shows 36% higher repeat purchase rate.

I’ve been saying this for years but seeing it across 23 million returns makes it harder to argue with.

Most brands default to refund-only because it feels simpler. Fewer decisions, fewer edge cases, less to manage. But that simplicity is pushing customers toward the exit at the exact moment they’re deciding whether to stay.

The customer is raising their hand saying something didn’t work. You can either solve the problem or hand them their money back. One of those keeps them around.

I returned something last month from a brand I’d bought from a few times. The portal gave me one option: refund. No exchange, no store credit, no “want to try a different size?” Just money back. So I took the money. And I probably won’t think about them again.

That’s what a refund-only policy actually costs you. Not just the transaction. The relationship.

2. Variant exchanges beat store credit

This surprised me a little. Store credit alone gets you about 19% revenue retention. Variant exchanges alone (letting someone swap sizes or colors) gets you 27%.

Store credit feels like a compromise. Variant exchange actually solves the problem.

Someone ordered the wrong size. They don’t want credit to use later. They want the shirt in medium instead of large. Let them swap it without thinking about it.

When you layer store credit and Shop Now (exchanging for anything in your catalog) on top of variant exchanges, retention climbs to 32%. But the foundation is the size swap. That’s your baseline win.

For apparel and footwear, this matters a lot. Fit is the whole game. Make it easy to fix. Footwear brands that offer exchanges see only 5% of returns flagged as high risk. Customer-friendly policies and low fraud can coexist when you’re solving the right problem.

Most brands I talk to have this backwards. They lead with store credit because it feels generous but noncommittal. But store credit is a consolation prize. Variant exchange is problem-solving. Customers feel the difference.

3. Free returns quietly became free exchanges

65% of merchants now charge return fees. Average is about $9.

But here’s what’s actually happening: they charge on refunds and waive fees on exchanges.

This is targeted friction. You’re not making returns hard. You’re making one outcome slightly more attractive than another. Customer still has a choice. You’re just nudging.

Some brands pair this with bonus credit on exchanges. Average across Loop’s network is around $11. Swimwear brands go higher, closer to $16. The math works because you’re paying $11 to keep a $50+ order from walking out the door.

I talked to a brand last year that was terrified to charge any fees at all. They thought customers would revolt. They tested fees on refunds only, kept exchanges free, added a small bonus for store credit. Revenue retention went up. Complaints didn’t move.

The fear of fees is usually bigger than the reality. Customers understand that shipping stuff back costs money. They don’t want to feel punished for ordering the wrong size, but they get that refunds have a cost. Charging on refunds while keeping exchanges free threads that needle.

4. Your VIPs should have a different return experience

VIP shoppers at brands using personalized return policies had a 55% repeat purchase rate. Brands with one-size-fits-all policies? 21%.

That gap is driven entirely by how you treat your best customers when something goes wrong.

Black Sheep, an Australian apparel brand in the report, runs three VIP tiers with different return benefits. General customers get $5 bonus credit on exchanges. VIPs get $15. First-time buyers get fees waived entirely to build trust early. Their revenue retention is 72%.

Piper & Scoot charges $10.95 on refunds but waives all fees for VIP customers. They also exclude refunds on heavily discounted orders to protect margin. Revenue retention is 63.5%.

If you’re running a loyalty program and your return experience doesn’t change based on tier, you’re leaving an obvious win on the table. Your VIPs have already proven they’ll come back. Make the return experience feel like it.

5. Fraud risk varies wildly by vertical

• Electronics: 19% of return values flagged as high risk; average fraudulent return: $595.

• Footwear: 5% flagged, $230 average.

• Cosmetics: 8% flagged, $174 average.

• Jewelry: 16% flagged, $462 average.

Your vertical determines your risk profile more than almost anything else. Blanket fraud rules applied across all product types are either too tight for low-risk stuff or too loose for high-risk categories.

One interesting pattern in the data: brands with the most generous return policies often have the lowest fraud rates. They’ve built systems to tell good customers from bad actors, so they can stay flexible with everyone else.

Restricting everyone because of a few bad actors is the lazy approach. Segmenting based on actual risk lets you be generous where it’s safe to be generous.

If you sell electronics and you’re not thinking hard about return fraud, you’re probably bleeding money you don’t even see. If you sell footwear and you’re running tight restrictions across the board, you might be creating friction that doesn’t need to exist.

What to do Monday

• If you’re only offering refunds, add variant exchanges. Biggest lift for the least effort.

• If you already offer exchanges, consider charging fees on refunds only while keeping exchanges free. Add a small bonus credit if margins allow.

• If you have a loyalty program, make returns better for VIPs. Higher bonus credit, waived fees, faster processing.

• If you haven’t reviewed fraud rates by product category recently, do it. The variance is probably bigger than you think.

Returns are a retention moment. Design them like one.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Happy almost February?

Hope you are well so far. Before I jump in, one quick announcement.

I am hosting an ecom mission trip to Israel in June, and I’d love to have you. We will spend a few days meeting legendary founders, executives, and investors in the space, as well as attending exclusive briefings and eat our body’s weight in hummus.

Read more and register to join here.

Okkk, let’s jump in.

A while back, I sat with a team debating whether to kill a product that was selling okay.

The product lead thought it tasted worse than anything they’d shipped and suspected it was quietly dragging down LTV. CX said customers loved it. The founder was undecided. Marketing said the reviews looked okay, but admitted they hadn’t really looked at them in a while.

Someone pulled up a support ticket from months earlier. Someone else referenced a Reddit thread they couldn’t find. Everyone had something to point to. No one had enough confidence to actually move.

The meeting ended the way these meetings usually do. No decision or next steps, but of course, a loose agreement to keep an eye on it.

This plays out constantly. Feedback lives everywhere. Tickets, reviews, social, DMs, forums. But when a team actually needs to understand how customers feel about one specific thing, in a way that’s clear enough to act on, they can’t.

So teams stall. Or they wait for more data. Or the decision quietly follows whoever sounds most certain in the room, not whoever has the clearest view.

This week, I want to talk about why accessing customer feedback still breaks down inside most teams, how that gap quietly steers decisions, and what changes when feedback stops living in pieces and starts being treated like something you can actually rely on.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Syncly.

Syncly aggregates customer feedback from every corner (support tickets, product reviews, and social comments) to give you the single source of truth you have been missing.

Here is how it changes the workflow:

• Discover Insights with AI: Simply ask questions like you would with ChatGPT, and get answers backed by direct customer quotes.

• See Everything in One Place: Unify your internal support data with external social feedback (even video mentions!) for a truly comprehensive view of the customer journey.

• Organize Effortlessly: Syncly uses AI to auto-tag and classify feedback into granular topics, so you know exactly what drives customer sentiment without the manual lift.

• Act on What Matters: Get real-time alerts and automated dashboards to address critical issues before they churn customers.

You are in good company. From powerhouses like Fenty Beauty and Kosas to fast-growing disruptors like Neuro, Everyday Dose, and Hum Nutrition, brands are using Syncly to turn raw feedback into revenue.

Ready to scale your insights? Book a demo today and see exactly how Syncly can take your CX analytics to the next level.

BOOK A DEMO

The confidence problem

Most companies don’t struggle because they lack customer feedback. They struggle because they can’t get to what they already have quickly enough to feel confident making decisions.

When feedback is spread across tools and pulling it together takes real effort, decisions tend to drift toward whoever sounds most certain in the room. That certainty usually has little to do with having better information. It’s more about seniority, comfort, or simply being the person willing to speak first.

I’ve watched this show up in a few predictable ways that quietly cost more than people realize.

Product decisions get made by whoever tells the best story

A team is debating whether to build a feature. Someone says customers have been asking for it. Someone else says they’ve never heard it come up. Product says it’s doable but way too expensive. Marketing thinks it could help positioning, but no one is willing to say that with much confidence.

What nobody can answer is how often customers actually mention it. Or what language they use when they do. Or whether it shows up consistently across reviews, tickets, or social. The information exists somewhere. It’s just scattered enough that no one feels comfortable betting a decision on it.

So the conversation drifts. Eventually, the decision lands wherever the room settles that day. Months later, when the feature either works or doesn’t, it’s hard to explain why the call was made in the first place.

It wasn’t documented because it wasn’t grounded in anything concrete.

CX decisions optimize for what’s visible, not what’s costly

Support volume starts climbing, and the team feels underwater. Leadership approves more headcount to keep up.

What often goes unexamined is whether the issues driving ticket volume are the same ones driving churn. Some problems generate many tickets but barely affect retention. Other problems rarely surface in support at all. Customers hit them once, get frustrated, and leave without ever writing in.

When feedback isn’t organized in a way that connects issues to outcomes, teams naturally focus on what they can see most clearly. You end up staffing for noise rather than solving the problems that are actually costing you customers.

Marketing decisions lean on gut instead of customer language

A team is preparing to launch something new and debating how to talk about it. Is the value convenience, quality, or sustainability? Every option sounds plausible and has someone advocating for it.

The discussion stretches on, and eventually a decision gets made based on what feels familiar or what worked on a previous launch. At the same time, customers have already explained why they bought, how they describe the product, and what mattered to them. That language lives in reviews, comments, and forums. It just isn’t accessible while the decision is being made.

So the team makes a guess and hopes it lands. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. You only really find out once the campaign is already running.

What changes when feedback becomes usable

There’s been a lot of conversation recently about promptable analytics, where teams can ask questions directly and get answers without waiting on reports.

The real change here shows up in how decisions get validated.

When feedback is hard to access, strong opinions tend to dominate discussions. When feedback is easier to explore, assumptions get tested earlier and more often. Leadership can pressure-test ideas in the moment. CX can spot patterns before they escalate. Product and marketing can ground decisions in actual customer language rather than internal interpretation.

This only works if feedback lives in one place and is organized well enough to be useful. Adding a chat interface on top of a fragmented system doesn’t create clarity. It just makes the mess more visible, faster.

How teams stop guessing

One place to start is by looking backward. Pick a few recent decisions that actually mattered and ask whether the information was accessible at the time, or whether the decision relied mostly on confidence and instinct.

From there, consolidation matters more than you might think. Centralizing a single feedback source and making it easy for multiple teams to explore often reveals where the real blind spots are. The questions people ask once access improves are usually more telling than any dashboard.

It also helps to pay attention to how feedback changes over time rather than how much of it exists. Volume shows what’s happening. The pace at which sentiment shifts is often a better signal of what’s coming next.

This shift has less to do with adopting new tools and more to do with whether internal systems reflect what customers are actually saying. When feedback is accessible and trusted, decisions rely less on who sounded most confident and more on shared understanding. That difference compounds faster than most teams expect.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi team,

Between the four emails a day from Wayfair, the third SMS this week about a sale I had already seen, and a push notification that appeared six hours after I had already bought the item, it’s hard not to notice how poorly coordinated retention has become.

None of this feels especially thoughtful. It mostly feels like systems talking past each other.

Somewhere along the way, retention turned into a damn performance. More messages, more schedules, and more systems layered on top of each other in the name of staying “top of mind,” without much interrogation of whether all this activity actually beats a quieter approach where systems respond to what customers are doing, rather than what a calendar says they should be doing.

The brands that seem most in control right now are rarely the ones doing the most. They are usually running simpler programs that hold up without constant babysitting, even when someone goes on vacation or priorities shift.

This week: how retention got this complicated, what campaign-heavy systems really cost, and why the most valuable thing you can build right now is boring enough that you forget it’s there.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Tapcart AI, which matters less as an “AI launch” and more for what it signals about where retention is heading.

For the last decade, retention tools have mostly pushed teams toward more. More campaigns to plan, more segments to maintain, more calendars to manage, and more decisions to revisit every time performance shifts. That approach can work, but it depends heavily on constant human involvement to keep everything running smoothly.

Tapcart is leaning into a different direction with how they think about mobile retention. The emphasis is on reducing how much manual effort it takes to keep an app performing as a retention channel. Execution that responds to customer behavior automatically. App experiences that don’t need constant weekly manual upkeep. The kind of infrastructure that just runs without you having to think about it.

That’s what “self-driving” actually means in practice. Not replacing the team. Removing the repetitive work that eats time without moving the needle.

What Tapcart AI looks like:

• Campaigns that trigger based on behavior, not calendar dates you have to set every week

• Personalization that adjusts to customer patterns without manual segmentation

• App performance that improves over time without constant tweaks

If you want to see how Tapcart is thinking about this shift, you can explore Tapcart AI here:

Learn More

How We Got Here

Ten years ago, retention was mostly email. Welcome series, win-back campaigns, and promotional sends tied to sales. The stack was small because the options were limited, and you could understand the whole system without needing a diagram.

Then the channels multiplied. SMS became standard. Push became accessible. In-app messaging showed up. Loyalty grew into its own operational lane. Personalization tools promised to make everything smarter and came with long onboarding cycles and ongoing maintenance that nobody mentioned in the demo.

Each addition was reasonable on its own, and for a while, the promise held.

I started noticing the cracks about two years ago while helping a home goods brand audit their retention setup. We found fourteen separate automations spread across four platforms. Half of them had been built by people no longer at the company. One flow had been running for eighteen months, and nobody could say with confidence whether it still made sense. Nobody wanted to turn it off in case it was load-bearing.

The channels still work. Managing them has become its own job. Retention teams went from running campaigns to managing infrastructure, and a lot of strategic time got absorbed by coordination and QA.

Here’s how it compounds.

Someone adds cart abandonment because it performs. Someone layers in browse abandonment because customers are dropping earlier than expected. Someone builds a post-purchase sequence to drive repeat orders. Each decision makes sense in isolation.

These systems never stay isolated. They run in parallel, with different triggers, timing rules, owners, and assumptions. A customer abandons a cart at 2pm. Your email flow fires immediately. Your SMS goes out at 4pm because that’s when batch sends were scheduled. Your push arrives at 6pm because the timing was set months ago and hasn’t been revisited.

None of these systems know what the others are doing. The customer just knows they got hit three times in four hours about the same cart and is now slightly less inclined to come back.

The Real Cost of Always-On Management

The obvious cost of a complex retention stack is time. Someone has to build flows, monitor dashboards, adjust timing, update creative, manage deliverability, and troubleshoot edge cases.

The less obvious cost is fragility.

A fashion brand I know had their entire retention program effectively held together by one person who had been there for three years. She knew which flows couldn’t be edited without breaking downstream triggers, why the win-back series had a random 36-hour delay, and which fields could not be touched without breaking a loyalty sync.

When she left, that knowledge left with her. The team inherited a Jenga tower of automations that nobody wanted to touch.

Change becomes expensive, so teams default to keeping things running. They tweak around the edges, but the underlying system stays the same because the risk of touching it feels higher than the upside of improving it.

A beverage brand described their retention program as “25% strategy, 75% not breaking what already works.” That ratio should be inverted.

The Quiet Shift Already Happening

I’ve been watching this shift over the last year in conversations with retention leaders who have started simplifying their stacks.

A DTC apparel brand cut push from twelve scheduled sends a month down to three. Everything else became event-driven, responding to browsing behavior and purchase patterns in real time. Push open rates went up 31%, and nobody on the team thinks about scheduling anymore.

A supplements company deleted their browse abandonment flow entirely. It was generating a tiny fraction of retention revenue and driving most of their unsubscribe volume. Performance held and complaints dropped.

A home goods brand told me their goal for 2026 is “systems we can ignore,” meaning infrastructure reliable enough that the team can focus on strategy instead of maintenance.

The pattern is consistent. Teams are moving away from campaign volume as a success metric and toward resilience as the standard. Fewer scheduled sends and more emphasis on systems that can run without constant attention.

Performance stays flat or improves.

Teams aren’t getting bigger, budgets aren’t expanding, and expectations keep rising.

What Good Looks Like

I spoke to someone last week who described their retention program as “me-proof,” meaning it was clearly documented and built simply enough that someone new could take it over without having to reverse-engineer years of decisions.

That should be the standard.

Every tool you add increases surface area for failure. Another login, 10 more integrations, another dependency that can break at the wrong time. The best retention setups in 2026 won’t be the most sophisticated. They’ll be the ones you can explain in five minutes to someone who just joined.

That also means prioritizing owned channels that compound over time, rather than paid re-engagement that resets every month.

Where Humans Still Matter

Even in a boring retention model, strategy still matters.

Humans decide what the experience should feel like, what trade-offs to make between frequency and relevance, and which behaviors actually deserve a response. Systems can execute rules reliably, but the rules still need judgment behind them.

Scheduling sends is not a great use of human time. Deciding whether your brand should feel calm or urgent is.

The goal is to spend less time maintaining execution and more time shaping the experience.

Why Boring Wins

The best retention programs are the ones you barely think about because they run consistently and free up time for work that actually moves the business forward.

I keep coming back to a retention director who told me their biggest win last year was not launching anything new. What they did instead was make the system more durable. Their retention became boring in the best possible way.

If your stack still feels like it requires full-time babysitting, it’s worth asking what would need to change for it to become quieter. Not because quiet is virtuous in itself, but because systems that operate without constant attention give teams room to do better work.

Boring retention is better retention. And in 2026, that’s the only model that scales.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi team,

Happy 2026. We’re back.

If you’ve been online over the last few weeks, you’ve seen the same things I have. Q4 was either described as incredible, disastrous, or the moment the recession everyone has been predicting since 2022 finally decided to arrive.

From where I sit, it looked maybe a tiny bit less dramatic than that?

Most brands I spoke with had a softer first half of 2025. Spending faced more scrutiny, growth felt harder to manufacture, and efficiency started to matter again. As the year went on, a surprising number of those brands finished stronger than expected. In nearly every case, it came down to the basics holding up when things felt tighter.

Which brings us back to retention.

I see this cycle every year. Acquisition gets harder. Retention becomes the answer. Next year is when everyone promises to get serious about it.

“IF we only increased retention by x, our business would change overnight.”

Maybe due to this newsletter, dozens of brands reached out to me this year with CX or retention emergencies. Some were simple: “I oversold and have no inventory to ship.” Others were deeper. Cohort retention, timing issues, stuff that doesn’t have an obvious answer.

As much as I love fielding them, I feel that it’d be 10 times more valuable to the class if I could share them and answer them here.

So this year, I’m going to start sharing those conversations in a new section called “Help Desk.”

Each issue will feature one real submission, anonymized for privacy, followed by my thoughts on how I’d approach it if it landed in my inbox.

You can submit here: https://forms.gle/wnbbWMuUvLGRpe9JA

This week, I want to discuss 5 things that might seem unserious but have transformed many brands I spoke to this year. And none of them are very complex.

Shall we???

I made a brief to help you get the best UGC and it’s with the OG UGC platform minsocial! I’ve heard from so many brands that they’ve loved partnering with minisocial to get content for their channels, so I created my own expert brief for you to follow to help guide your content. If you want to access my expert brief check that out here!

Why I love minisocial:

• High-quality, Fully-Licensed Content: Content that actually feels on-brand and it ready to use wherever you need it – ads, social media, emails, and your website.

• Expert Management: Their industry experts handle everything from creator booking, communication, and asset delivery, so you know you’re getting good quality each and ever time. They give you all the control you want without any of the busy work!

• No Long-Term Commitments: Pay per project, with no hidden fees. Perfect for scaling ad content and campaigns centered around timely activations like Back to School!

• Whitelisting/Partnership ads included: For minisocial projects you have the ability to put ad spend directly behind the creators posts for even more lift, at no additional cost!

What brands working with minisocial say:

• “Ads made with minisocial content are performing better than anything we’ve made in-house.” - Michael, Growth Marketing Manager

• “minisocial’s cost per creator is cheaper than our in-house program.” - Andrea, Digital Campaigns Manager

• “The price for what you’re getting is just insane... minisocial handles every step of the influencer management process.” - Kaylee, Director of Marketing

Ready to See Results? Work with the social proof experts!

Learn More Here

1. Time between order and fulfillment

I order from Dell more than I should. Partly the Amex Platinum Business credit. Partly because I keep convincing myself I need yet another eufy camera for another angle of my front yard.

(PSA: Eufy is made by Anker and has same quality devices as Ring or Nest without the monthly fees…)

Every time I place an order, I get the tracking within hours. The thing ships fast with consistent updates, from a boringly large company.

Most brands sit on orders for 24, 48, or sometimes 72 hours before anything moves.

To them, it’s processing time. To the customer, it’s dead space between paying and seeing progress. That gap is when buyer’s remorse sets in, or someone forgets why they bought it.

Brands that close that window fast feel like they have their sh!t together. Often the shipping is not even express, but they feel trustworthy when they act fast after you pay.

The only caveat is if you’re running pre-orders or delayed processing. Then you need to say that everywhere.

2. What happens when someone tries to cancel a subscription

Most brands either bury the cancel button or let people proceed without asking for confirmation.

The ones that get retention make it a conversation.

They don’t make it hard. They ask: What’s going on?

Sometimes the answer is “I don’t need this anymore.” Fine. But they can offer a skip instead of a cancel.

If it’s “I’m not seeing the value,” and it’s month one of a multivitamin subscription, you can push education in the flow. Then fix the post-purchase flow for everyone else.

Fixable problems. But only if you ask.

The brands I’ve seen handle this well use cancellation as a feedback loop. What appears there appears everywhere else later. Product gaps, messaging problems, timing you didn’t know was off.

3. Email tone after someone becomes a customer

Acquisition emails are polished. They’re selling, they’re working to earn attention, and they are very often “direct-response” offer testing.

Then someone buys, and the emails change. They get generic and templated, like circular slop, hoping something lands.

Your customers shouldn’t know if they’re in a flow or getting a campaign. They should feel like the messaging is resonating and speaking to them, regardless of the medium, message, or timing.

4. Whether you tell customers about problems before they notice

Most brands are reactive. Something breaks, customer reaches out, support fixes it.

By the time someone emails, they’ve decided you didn’t know. Or that you knew and didn’t care.

I’ve seen this dozens of times. Shipment delayed, no update until the customer asks. Item goes out of stock after purchase, confirmation still goes out. Payment fails, order still shows placed.

The issue was fixable. The customer thinking you had no idea wasn’t.

Brands that handle this well catch exceptions and communicate before being asked. “Your package is late, here’s why, here’s when it arrives.” Or “We’re out, we can send X instead or refund now.”

You can’t prevent every problem. You can prove you see them.

If you wait for the customer to tell you something’s wrong, you already lost.

Early in my career, I had a boss who always said “don’t wake a sleeping bear,” which I tend to agree with, but if the bear will likely wake up anyway and be 10x angry, I prefer to get ahead of it..?

5. Going back to customers after you fix the thing that broke

Most brands treat a bad experience as done. Someone had a problem and they churned.

A lot of those problems weren’t about the brand. The product didn’t work for their skin. Shipping to Canada took three weeks. They ordered the wrong size, and returning it sucked.

The thing they tried didn’t fit. No one came back to say anything had changed.

I’ve watched brands write off whole segments. Someone complains about slow shipping, gets refunded, and disappears. Six months later the brand switches carriers, cuts delivery time in half. No one follows up.

Same with product. Customer tries something, doesn’t work for them, moves on. Brand launches something new that would’ve been perfect. Silence.

Brands that get this right track why people left and reach out when it changes. Not generic win-back. Specific: “You said shipping took forever. We fixed it.”

Most churn isn’t permanent. But if you never go back, it becomes permanent.

Tag them. Use NPS with subscores. Track the reason code. FOLLOW UPPP!

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Team,

This week’s special edition newsletter comes to you from the little gelato shop at the Park Hyatt St. Kitts, which still feels mildly absurd to type out.

A few chairs from the water, Noah covered in something sticky, and me doing that thing where I tell myself I’m not working while absolutely working. 36k Chase/Bilt points per night transferred to Hyatt, plus a short United hop from EWR.

This is country number 38 for me. Noah’s ninth. I still have not paid cash for a hotel. 🙃

All you need are points and a passport.

I realized, sitting there with melting gelato, that there’s something I’ve strangely never tackled head-on in the 178 weeks I’ve been writing this newsletter:

How little most brands actually know about the people buying from them.

A few weeks ago, I bought vanilla matcha powder because it was November in New Jersey, everything was gray, and I was just trying to feel something.

A few days later, I began receiving emails about inner peace, chakras, and self-discovery, complete with photos of women meditating on cliffs in Bali.

Someone saw “bought matcha” and decided they understood me. They didn’t ask why or consider context. They just slapped a vibe on me and moved on.

Brands spend millions acquiring customers and then speak to them as if they were cardboard cutouts. The gap between who they think is buying and who actually is buying quietly bleeds revenue every single day.

This week, I want to talk about what changes when you finally close that gap, and a tool that can help you close it.

Welcome to a special edition of the newsie. Let’s jump in.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by one of the coolest new tools I’ve personally ever seen and one that explicitly solves the problem we’re talking about today. Meet OuterSignal.

OuterSignal helps brands transform basic order data into fully enriched, actionable customer profiles.

Right now, all you get is a name, email, and address. Imagine if every order also had age, gender, occupation, social following, property value, and 100+ other signals.

With OuterSignal, you can:

1. Identify VIP customers automatically (celebrities, athletes, investors, influencers, retail buyers).

2. Crate hyper-specific segments for unprecedented personalization.

3. Build customer persona-based workflows in your CRM, Meta, and direct mail tools.

Leading brands like Create, Jolie, Magic Mind, and Mizzen + Main trust OuterSignal to power their customer personalization and increase their ROAS by up to 160x.

OuterSignal is offering friends of Eli 1000 free VIP customer searches when they book a demo through me. Tell them Eli sent you!

With all that said, let’s explore what happens when you use a tool like OuterSignal to stop treating every customer the same.

LEARN MORE

1. STOP SENDING THE SAME MESSAGING TO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PEOPLE

A fashion brand I was talking to noticed that a significant share of customers were consistently buying multiples of the same shirt in a single order.

Once they took the time to understand who those customers actually were, the pattern made a lot more sense. They found via OuterSignal that a big chunk of these people turned out to be executives with real schedules and very little interest in thinking about what they wear beyond knowing it won’t create friction in their day.

Up until now, they’d been running a generic ad to all their customers via direct mail. They pulled the list of CEOs from OuterSignal, and the company sent that list a custom piece of creative geared towards CEOs and boardrooms.

ROAS is currently at 160X, and it’s their highest-performing campaign ever.

2. SEND GIFTS THAT ACTUALLY MAKE SENSE

During my early days at OLIPOP, we felt festive and decided to surprise and delight our top customers with a special campaign.

We selected about 20 people, spent real money on these exceptionally nice plants, and sent them out feeling pretty good about ourselves, because in our minds, this was thoughtful, unexpected, and exactly the kind of thing customers would appreciate.

And then nothing happened.

No emails, no messages, no subtle signal that anything had even arrived, which at first felt confusing and then, if I’m being honest, mildly annoying, because this wasn’t a cheap experiment and it wasn’t random.

Out of curiosity more than frustration, I did some light internet sleuthing to understand who we had actually sent these to, and the picture clarified quickly. A meaningful chunk of them were extremely wealthy, the kind that does not need our damn plant.

One of them turned out to be a billionaire VC, which, in hindsight, made the whole thing almost amusing. There’s a solid chance that the plant was unpacked by someone else, briefly assessed, and removed because it didn’t match the vibe of the house.

I heard from OuterSignal that one of their customers just discovered Kim K had been buying for 2 years. They sent her a custom card and care package, and she posted about it to her 370M followers that same week. (!)

3. BUILD SEGMENTS THAT AREN’T JUST ABOUT RECENCY AND SPEND

Most segmentation still stops at when someone made a purchase and how much they spent, which is useful context but a poor substitute for understanding motivation.

Those buckets tell you what happened, not why it happened, and they rarely reveal what would prompt someone to care again, which is how brands end up recycling the same messages and wondering why their performance plateaus.

When segmentation starts reflecting how people actually buy and live, the messaging gets quieter, clearer, and far more effective.

If you are running a pre- or post-purchase quiz and not leveraging it for segmentation, you will make me mad.

FYI: OuterSignal builds key brand personas based on the bios of every single customer. The segments are dynamic and can stream directly to Klaviyo. Brands use this to market to the person, not the purchase.

4. STOP RUNNING ADS TO PEOPLE WHO LOOK RIGHT BUT ARE WRONG

Lookalike audiences are built on shallow signals that appear scientific enough to trust and vague enough to conceal mistakes, grouping people together based on clicks, locations, and behaviors that don’t always accurately reflect their intent.

If your understanding of who buys from you is off, all you’re doing is scaling the wrong assumptions faster, and convincing yourself that performance issues are creative problems rather than input problems.

Better inputs make everything downstream work better. Everything else just gets more expensive.

I loved hearing that OS is helping brands return to the glory days of meta targeting when you could run an ad against “lawyers” with an ad for lawyers.

With OS, you CAN build a custom audience on essentially any attribute (gender, occupation, age, etc) and turn it into a hyper-specific lookalike audience in Meta so the right creative lands for the right customer.

5. FIX YOUR POSITIONING BEFORE YOU WASTE MORE MONEY ON IT

It’s easy to believe your core customer is whoever shows up the loudest in comments and DMs, especially when that feedback feels immediate and flattering.

The data often tells a quieter, more useful story about who’s actually converting and spending money, and when those two pictures don’t match, every optimization just reinforces the wrong narrative.

OuterSignal shared that they’ve had several brands tell them that the brand persona’s feature in OS saved them years of incorrect planning and totally changed their understanding of their customer base.

For example, a brand onboarded recently, thinking that the majority of their customers were young professionals in NYC, only to find out that Midwest moms were the most valuable (and prominent) cohort. That’s an entirely different avatar and persona.

6. CREATE RETENTION OFFERS THAT LAND INSTEAD OF ANNOY

Sending the same win-back offer to everyone who hasn’t purchased in 90 days is efficient in the sense that you technically reached everyone, even if you didn’t meaningfully connect with most of them.

Some customers need a discount because price is the real blocker. Others don’t care about saving a small amount because money was never the issue, they just forgot about you or need a reason that actually feels relevant to their life.

Treating those people the same way is why retention feels harder than it needs to be.

7. IDENTIFY THE PEOPLE WHO COULD ACTUALLY TALK ABOUT YOU BEFORE THEY MOVE ON

Some of the most valuable customers you’ll ever have place orders that look completely ordinary, using personal emails and different names, leaving no obvious signal that anything about the transaction is unusual.

When you can’t see beyond the order, those moments pass quietly, and the customer moves on without friction or complaint, often ending up talking about a competitor simply because someone there noticed the moment and treated it like the beginning of a relationship rather than the end of a transaction.

This is less about influencer marketing and more about recognizing when a purchase is also an intro to someone that can change your business.

8. CATCH THE RETAIL BUYER BEFORE THEY WRITE YOU OFF

Retail buyers rarely announce themselves, and the first interaction is often a small test order meant to answer basic questions about packaging, product quality, and fulfillment before any real conversation begins.

When that order is treated like every other one, the product might pass inspection, while the relationship never even begins, and by the time the brand realizes what the order represented, the buyer has already moved on.

You’d be shocked as to how many brands miss their time to get into Sprouts because they delivered a haphazard leaking can with a mediocre unboxing to the Sprouts buyer.

OuterSignal fixes this :)

That’s it for this week! Thanks again to my friends at OuterSignal for sponsoring this week’s newsie. I’m a big fan of their product and their team. If you’re not already using it, highly recommend giving it a try!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi Team!

I bought a pair of pants last month from a brand I actually like. Ordered a medium, which is what I always get. The size chart said “runs true to size,” so I didn’t think twice about it.

They arrived huge. Comically huge. I could fit another person in there with me.

Fine. Mistakes happen. I figured I would exchange them for a small.

Except they don’t offer exchanges. Only returns.

Okay, so I’ll return them and order a small one right away?

Except they don’t do refunds. Only store credit. And I have to wait weeks for them to receive the return and process it before I can use that credit. And when the credit finally appears, assuming it is still in stock, I will need to add an extra $10 due to the restocking fee charged on my return.

So let me get this straight. I bought from you once. I liked the product enough to want the right size. And instead of making the swap easy, you want me to wait weeks, pay a fee, and jump through hoops just to give you more money.

I didn’t reorder. I just moved on. And it reminded me how much retention gets decided in these small moments, which is the focus of this week’s newsletter.

Let’s jump in.

This week brought to you by Hire Horatio.

This week’s sponsor is Horatio — and they’ve officially done it again (how do they keep surprising me?).

Sure, a few brands have played with quick BFCM-themed mini-games this year (thanks to how easy coding tools have become). But Horatio? They didn’t just make a game — they built a cinematic universe around what every CX leader actually feels during the holiday rush.

Introducing Mission Scale, a four-part adventure where chaos meets CX strategy. You’ll navigate frantic workloads, asteroid-filled obstacles, angry squirrels, and — finally — the calm that comes when the Mr. and Mrs. Horatios arrive to help you scale smoothly.

Each level tackles a real BFCM pain point: overwhelm, disorganization, lack of agility, and underprepared scaling. Every one ends with a moral — and a reminder that scaling your team with Horatio turns stress into strategy.

🎮 Go play Mission Scale and immerse yourself in the fun story and quick time-based minigames (don’t worry, it’s not a time sink — just a few minutes of BFCM brilliance):
👉 Play the Game →

Or — if you’d rather skip the gameplay (we won’t judge, but you’ll miss the full story 😄) — you can jump straight into prepping for the other side of BFCM: returns season, January spikes, and the cleanup that never gets enough attention.

👉 Talk to the Horatio Team →

The peak has passed. The backlog is real. The next wave is coming.

Make sure you’re scaling with the partner who can turn all of it into control, not chaos.

Free Mentorship (Holiday Edition)

BFCM wasn’t just a busy season — it was a full-on stress test. And whether this was your first campaign or you’ve survived more holiday cycles than you can count, one truth stands: recovering from the chaos is easier when you have someone experienced guiding you through it.

That’s where Mentors CX comes in. It’s a curated platform connecting CX leaders and founders with world-class mentors who’ve weathered many holiday seasons and know exactly how to navigate the messy post-peak landscape. From clearing ticket piles to restoring SLAs to steadiness, Mentors CX gives you access to 1:1 calls, strategic guidance, and a community that genuinely gets what this season feels like.

Thanks to Horatio, I’m giving away 10 free Eclipse memberships (first come, first served). Use code ELI-BFCM to unlock full access to the mentor network.

Already survived enough peak seasons to help others through theirs? Mentors CX is always welcoming new mentors.

Apply to join →

THE EASIEST CUSTOMER TO KEEP

In my pants story, I had done all the hard things. I found a pair I liked, so I made the purchase. The heavy lift was done.

Then the product didn’t fit. This is not rare. Sizing varies, body types vary, and sometimes the size chart is simply wrong. This should have been an easy moment to fix. Make it easy for me to get the right size, and I leave with a positive story about how easy the exchange was.

Instead, every step made me less interested in staying with them. No exchanges, only store credit, wait weeks, and pay a restocking fee. It was friction layered on friction.

And the frustrating part is that they probably think this setup is clever. They keep my money as credit, charge a fee to cover their costs, and avoid the operational complexity of exchanges.

In reality, they saved a few dollars and lost a customer. These are the silly short-term games that cost LTV that very few people are tracking.

RETURNS SHOULD BE A RETENTION PLAY

Most brands think about returns as something to control. The return rate goes up, margins tighten, and the instinct is to clamp down. Make returns harder. Add fees. Slow things down. Limit refunds to credit. From a spreadsheet perspective, it appears to be progress. Fewer returns equal lower costs.

What the spreadsheet doesn’t show is how many people quietly leave.

The customer who wanted to switch from a medium to a small but found the process too annoying is gone.

The customer who paid the return shipping and restocking fee for a damaged product is no longer with us.

The shopper who waited three weeks for store credit and forgot why they wanted anything in the first place is gone.

You lowered the return rate. You also lowered your repeat purchase rate, and that part takes months to show up.

Acquiring a customer is expensive. CAC keeps climbing. You invest in ads, creators, content, and everything else that gets someone to trust you enough to buy for the first time. That is the hard part.

THE BRANDS THAT GET IT

A few weeks ago, I ordered a sweater set for my wife from Tommy John. I showed her the order confirmation. She told me she doesn’t need more sweaters.

Fine. I’ll return it.

I accessed their returns portal before the package even arrived and initiated the process. Already smoother than most. Then it got interesting.

They offered instant store credit through Loop if I chose credit over a refund. And if I used it right away, they added a 10% bonus.

They still collected a credit card in case I never sent the original back, which is fair. But the whole experience felt simple and respectful. I didn’t return the sweaters. I exchanged them for something my wife actually wanted, spent a little more (!), and walked away impressed.

Now compare that to the pants brand that made me wait weeks and pay a fee just to get store credit I never used.

These two experiences exist in the same ecommerce economy. One brand treats returns as an opportunity to retain me and potentially increase the order value. The other treats return as a problem to protect themselves from.

WHY BRANDS KEEP GETTING THIS WRONG

The core issue is that many founders and operators have never experienced their own return flow as customers.

They look at return rates and costs. They see the hit to margins. They see shipping, restocking, labor, and the operational pain. And from that perspective, the “logical” solution is to make returns harder.

So policies get layered on. Restocking fees. Customer-paid return shipping. Store credit only. Slow processing times. Requirements for original packaging. All of it makes sense in a vacuum. None of it makes sense if you care about keeping customers.

The customer who wanted a different size is a warm lead. They already decided they like your product. They’re one simple interaction away from being a repeat buyer. You already spent CAC to get them. And now you’re going to lose them because you won’t send the new size until the old one stops traveling through the postal system.

The economics are upside down. Saving a small amount on return costs while sacrificing long-term retention is not a real win.

WHAT GOOD RETURNS LOOK LIKE

If you want returns to support retention, the playbook is straightforward.

Free returns for normal issues or first-timers. If someone has to pay a hefty fee to return something that didn’t fit or arrived damaged, the frustration begins before the process even starts.

Instant exchanges. If the customer bought the wrong size, send the right one and trust that most people will return the original one. Hold a card to charge them if they do not.

Refunds to the original payment method as an option. Credit can be encouraged with bonuses or incentives, but forcing credit can break trust.

No restocking fees for first-time returners on unopened items. If you need to price products slightly higher to account for returns, do that. Charging annoyed customers more money at the end of a bad experience is not the place to solve your margin problems.

Fast processing times. Days, not weeks. The sooner the loop closes, the more likely the customer is to stay connected to your brand.

Yes, handling returns well costs money. It also drives significantly stronger repeat purchase rates. The brands that understand this will win over time.

YOU ALREADY WON THEM ONCE

Again, the hardest part of running an ecommerce business is getting someone to buy for the first time. You have to earn their attention, build trust, and convince them to take a chance on you. That is where all the effort and spend live.

Once they buy, they’re in your world. They have an account. They signed up for emails. They stored their card. The initial friction is gone.

If something goes wrong, that moment becomes a test of what your brand stands for. If your process tells them to wait three weeks, pay a fee, and accept store credit, you’re telling them everything they need to know.

If your process fixes the issue quickly and simply, you’re building a relationship that lasts.

If you work at a brand, try your own return process this week. Go through it like a customer. Count the steps. Feel the friction. Notice where you, personally, would lose patience. Then ask yourself if this is the moment you want customers to remember.

If the answer is no, you know where to start.

Returns are a retention lever. Treat them like one.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi Team!

I read something this week that should have made me sick, but somehow, it did the opposite…?

Cory Doctorow wrote about his experiences with customer service chatbots in his Pluralistic newsletter. Three attempts to get help that ended up in three different flavors of useless.

One chatbot refused to waive a $10 cancellation fee even though the situation obviously warranted it. Another kept insisting that a replacement suitcase was on its way, even though it hadn’t been shipped yet. The third accidentally helped by breaking its own rules and spitting out information it wasn’t supposed to share.

He refers to these bots as “accountability sinks.” They exist to absorb blame without solving problems. Companies surveyed customers after switching to chatbots during COVID. The feedback was overwhelming: people hated it.

And the companies’ response was basically, “What I hear you saying is that you hate this, but you’ll tolerate it.”

The piece is about how customer service has been deliberately designed to make you give up. The offshore call centers with terrible phone quality. The hold queues that drop you back to the start. The policies are written specifically to exhaust your patience until you just eat the loss and move on.

Class, we’re still in the very early innings of CX.

Zappos was decades before its time. As CAC continues to climb, brands with “media buying savants” are learning that this only works for the first purchase. And product + CX really does matter.

So this week, I’m writing a love letter to CX. Not because everything is great. Because the bar is still so low that there’s never been a better time to give a sh!t.

This week brought to you by Hire Horatio.

If you’re still telling yourself “we’ll figure out BFCM later,” here’s your wake-up call: later is already too late.

Horatio just launched their new BFCM campaign, and it’s worth a look. The whole concept is a split screen: one side shows the chaos of brands trying to survive the holiday rush without Horatio, the other shows the calm of CX leaders who planned ahead with Horatio’s teams. (Guess which side you want to be on.)

👉 Watch the short animated video here → BFCM Campaign
Stick around ‘til the end — there’s a launch credit waiting for you:

• Teams of 5–9 → $2,500 off

• Teams of 10+ → $5,000 off

Horatio isn’t just another outsourcer. They’re the boutique CX partner trusted by fast-growing e-comm brands to keep support steady when the volume spikes. With Horatio, BFCM doesn’t have to mean burnout — it can mean smooth scaling, happy customers, and margins intact.

Prep now. Or brace for chaos. Your choice.

👉 Get overwhelmed | Scale with Horatio

Free Mentorship (Holiday Edition)

BFCM is tough — whether it’s your first rodeo or your tenth, the season always finds new ways to test you. The truth? It’s a lot easier when you’ve got someone in your corner who’s been there before.

That’s where Mentors CX comes in: a curated platform connecting CX leaders and founders with world-class mentors. From prepping for BFCM ticket spikes to keeping customers happy through the holidays, Mentors CX gives you access to 1:1 calls, strategic guidance, and a community that gets it.

Thanks to Horatio, I’m giving away 10 free Eclipse memberships (first-come, first-served) — unlocking full access to the mentor network. Use code ELI-BFCM to claim yours.

Already been through the fire and want to help others survive it? Mentors CX is always welcoming new mentors.

Apply to join →

THE BAR IS SO LOW IT’S PRACTICALLY UNDERGROUND

I can’t tell you how many times a week I’m anxiously typing into a chatbot, getting nowhere closer to a resolution, and then just ending the chat because what else am I supposed to do???

And this is by design.

Companies discovered they could make customer service so terrible that people simply give up, and we’d all just tolerate it.

The chatbot that can’t help, the call center worker who’s punished for actually solving problems, the call on hold that mysteriously disconnects after 45 minutes.

It’s not broken, it’s working exactly as intended.

And instead of this making me depressed beyond belief, it invigorates me that the opportunity is still massive.

If you’re providing decent CX right now, you’re ahead of most brands. If you’re providing great CX, you’re basically in the top 1%.

The bar is so low that just being a functioning human who gives two sh!ts makes you exceptional.

If I were to share with you the stories I've personally had in the last few weeks alone, it would fill a short 150-page book.

We are still in the very early innings of CX. Zappos figured this out decades ago, and everyone looked at them as if they were insane for investing in god-tier customer service.

Now, CAC is climbing, and retention matters; brands are slowly realizing that media buying savants and dropshippers taught us we could get away with less.

It turns out that less is not actually fine.

CX GAVE ME EVERYTHING

If you had told 20-year-old me in the early 2010s, making ~$33k a year answering emails for a struggling ecommerce brand, that customer experience would become my entire career, I would have laughed at you.

I thought it was a stopgap. A job I’d do for a year or two while I figured out what I actually wanted to do with my life as a young 20-something degen without a college degree.

Ten-ish years later, here we are.

CX gave me everything. My career, my network, every opportunity I’ve had. I’ve built teams, launched programs, and worked with brands I actually respect. I’ve written short books and 175 newsletters, because apparently, I can’t stop thinking about this stuff.

And the thing that kept me going all those years was realizing something simple: you can make someone’s entire week just by being human and providing a great experience.

That’s it, that’s the whole job.

Someone’s frustrated; something went wrong. They contact you expecting the usual runaround, the chatbot that doesn’t help, the policy that makes no sense. And then you just solve it without making them beg and scream.

The fact that this is remarkable says everything about our current state.

HOSPITALITY ISN’T ALWAYS EXPENSIVE

There’s a story in “Unreasonable Hospitality” about Eleven Madison Park that stuck with me.

A guest mentioned they were rushing to make a show after dinner. The team noticed their parking meter was about to expire. So they sent a runner outside with quarters to feed the meter.

It costs maybe two bucks, and it bought them a customer for life.

That’s the thing about great CX: It’s not always expensive. It’s not about sending everyone a gift basket or offering 50% off refunds. Sometimes, it’s just about paying attention and deciding that someone’s problem is, perhaps, worth solving. (!)

The greatest restaurants have great food, obviously. However, it is the hospitality at Eleven Madison Park that people remember. The meal is excellent. The experience is what brings you back.

Same thing with brands.

Bombas has great socks. But I’d venture to say anyone who interfaces with their CX team increases their LTV significantly, because the experience is just as good as the product, if not better.

Same with Tommy John. Same with Figs. The product gets you in the door. The experience determines if you come back.

And right now, most brands have decided the experience doesn’t matter. They’ve outsourced it, automated it, or just made it so painful that you give up before you get help.

YOUR JOB ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE

Every few weeks, someone posts on LinkedIn about how AI replaced their entire CX team. I then make it my business to visit their website, ask a silly question, and receive an answer that is so far from reality, it makes me question my own existence.

I’ve been hearing this for YEARS. First, it was outsourcing. Then chatbots. Then, machine learning. Now it’s AI. Next year it’ll be AGI, and after that, I don’t know, sentient holograms that apologize for the inconvenience.

And every single time, the pitch is the same: this technology will handle 80% of tickets, freeing your team to focus on complex issues.

Here’s what actually happens: The bot handles maybe 40% of tickets if you’re being generous. It pisses off the other 60% so badly that by the time they reach a human, they’re already furious. And now your team is spending twice as long on each interaction because they have to undo whatever the bot said before they can actually help.

It’s like hiring someone to greet customers at the door by punching them in the face, and then wondering why your team is dealing with so many angry people.

The thing nobody wants to admit is that you can’t automate the part that matters.

You can automate information. You can automate routing. You can automate repetitive tasks.

But you can’t automate the decision to give a shit.

That’s the job. That’s what separates good CX from the chatbot that tells you to check the FAQ. Someone has to look at a situation and decide this person is worth helping, even if the policy says no. Someone has to read between the lines and realize the customer isn’t asking for a refund; they’re asking to feel heard.

A bot can’t do that. It can only enforce rules. It can only say, ‘Computer says no.’

And that’s why your job isn’t going anywhere. Because the companies that replace humans with bots end up with customer service that technically functions but feels like talking to a wall. And customers notice. And eventually, it catches up to you.

IF YOU’RE HERE, YOU’RE EARLY

I know how it feels right now. You’re reading articles about how AI is taking over. Your boss is asking if you really need that many agents. Every budget meeting turns into a conversation about how to do this cheaper.

And meanwhile, you’re just trying to help people. You’re trying to build something that actually works. You’re trying to prove that customer experience matters in a world that’s decided it doesn’t.

You’re not late. You’re early.

We’re still in the very early stages of brands figuring out that CX matters.

Zappos knew this decades ago. Now, the rest of the industry is slowly and painfully catching up.

If you’re providing decent customer experience right now, you’re ahead of most brands. If you’re providing great CX, you’re practically mythical. The bar is so low that just being a functioning human who cares makes you exceptional.

That’s the opportunity.

Most companies are still racing to the bottom. They’re still designing systems to make people give up before offering them a $10 refund.

The brands that actually invest in this, empower their teams to solve problems, and treat customers like people instead of just tickets to close, are the ones that are going to win.

And you’re the reason they win.

THE THING ABOUT THIS WORK

I can’t stop writing about it. I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t help but care about whether brands are doing this right.

Because this work gave me everything. It gave me a career I actually care about. It gave me a way to think about business that makes sense. It taught me that you can build something valuable just by deciding people are worth helping.

And I know that sounds dramatic. I know that customer service doesn’t often feel like world-changing work. You’re just answering emails. You’re just processing returns. You’re just trying to keep your head above water during peak season.

But every time you solve someone’s problem without making them beg for it, every time you stay on a case until it’s actually fixed, every time you decide this person matters even when the system says they don’t, you’re doing something that matters.

You’re proving that companies can choose to care. That business doesn’t have to be a race to the bottom. That customer experience is the thing that determines whether someone buys from you once or keeps coming back for years.

The world is full of chatbots that don’t work and call centers designed to make you give up. Be the person who breaks the pattern.

Your job isn’t going anywhere. The bar is still incredibly low. And if you’re here, you’re early.

Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

My very best,

Eli

Links:
Pluralistic: A tale of three customer service chatbots (12 Nov 2025)

Hi team,

It’s mid-November. Black Friday is two weeks out. If you’re reading this thinking, “Oh, sh!t, we should probably get our CX together,” congratulations on being realistic about how this actually works.

Most BFCM prep timelines assume you started planning in August. Most of us are just finishing up our prep now, which is fine. But the more I talk to brands, the more I learn that it’s the small, seemingly insignificant things they miss, which turn into big messes.

Here are eight things you can knock out this week that will actually matter when the chaos hits. None of them needs a developer or a budget meeting.

Let’s jump in.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Gorgias!

Join them as they kick off AI in CX — a tactical webinar series featuring ecommerce leaders who are making real strides with AI and automation.

Each session goes beyond best practices or high-level theory. Tune in to these 30-minute conversations to hear speakers candidly reflect on their AI journeys, from gaining internal buy-in to tracking progress with newly defined AI KPIs.

In this debut episode, Samantha Gagliardi will walk you through:

• Rhoback’s AI rollout, from idea to implementation

• How AI revealed documentation gaps (and how they addressed them)

• Why AI led to better cross-functional alignment between CX, marketing, and product

• Tips for building trust and confidence with their AI Agent

If you’re gearing up for an AI implementation of your own, you won’t want to miss this session.

Register now to save your seat and learn how AI can benefit the entire organization.

I will tune in and strongly recommend you do too!

👉 Save your spot now

1. CLEAN UP YOUR PROMO CODES BEFORE SOMEONE ROBS YOU

Sit down for two hours and pull every single active discount you’re running. Student discount through ID.me, Rakuten affiliate kickback, Shop App offers, influencer codes, that random 10% code your email team set up last month.

Now figure out what stacks and what doesn’t.

I’ve watched brands accidentally let customers combine a 15% id.me student discount, a 15% Rakuten cashback offer, and a full-site promo code because three different teams set them up without cross-referencing.

Customers aren’t dumb. They will find the loophole. And then you’re either eating a 40% discount you can’t afford or canceling orders and dealing with the fallout.

Map it all out. Fix the logic. Boring work, but it matters.

2. REWRITE YOUR MACROS SO THEY DON’T SOUND LIKE A ROBOT WROTE THEM

Open your five most-used canned responses. Read them out loud. If you cringe, rewrite them.

“We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience regarding your shipment inquiry,” sounds like nobody is home.

“Ugh, so sorry that your tracking hasn’t updated since last week. That seems super funky, and I know how annoying this can be. Let me look into that,” sounds like a human.

It takes an hour or two max. Your team will use these responses hundreds of times. Make them not suck.

3. UPDATE YOUR SHIPPING EMAILS SO YOU DON’T GET 300 “WHERE IS MY PACKAGE” TICKETS

Carriers are a disaster during the holidays. Packages get marked delivered when they’re sitting on a truck somewhere. You know this. Your customers don’t.

Go into your “order shipped” and “order delivered” email templates right now and add something like:

“Shipping is busy this time of year. If your tracking indicates ‘delivered’ but you don’t see it, check with your neighbors or the building management. Most packages show up within 24 hours. If yours doesn’t, reach out.”

One template update saves you from typing the same response 300 times in December.

4. PUT SHIP-BY DATES ON YOUR SITE

Add a banner today. “Order by December 18th for standard shipping to arrive by Christmas. December 20th for expedited.”

I promise you, half the angry emails you’ll receive the week before Christmas are from people who ordered on the 22nd and are shocked it hasn’t arrived yet.

Tell them now. Some will still ignore it, but at least you made an effort.

5. DECIDE WHO OWNS WHAT WHEN THINGS GO SIDEWAYS

Shipping delays, promo problems, product defects, returns. You already know what’s going to break. Assign one person to own each category.

Not “keep an eye on it.” Own it. They sit in fulfillment calls, they know what marketing is launching, and when CX needs help, they know exactly who to ping.

The problem during BFCM is never just volume. It’s that nobody knows whose job it is to fix anything, so nothing gets fixed until it’s already spiraling.

Write it down and share amongst the team.

6. OPEN YOUR SITE ON YOUR PHONE AND TRY TO BUY SOMETHING

Pull out your phone, go to your site, and try to check out.

Does it work? Can you tap the buttons without zooming? Does Apple Pay actually fire? Are the form fields broken? Can you x out the silly popup that takes over your entire site??

If you are like most, 80% of your traffic is mobile. If checkout is annoying on a phone, you’re losing sales and you’ll never know why because nobody tells you they gave up.

This takes ten minutes. Just do it.

7. ADD A BLACK FRIDAY SECTION TO YOUR FAQ

Open your FAQ page. Add a new section.

“When will my BFCM order ship?” “Can I stack promo codes?” “What’s your return policy on sale items?”

You’re going to get asked these 500 times. Answer them once, where people can find them. Then train your team to link to the page instead of retyping the same answer all day.

8. START WEEKLY SYNCS NOW, SWITCH TO DAILY ONCE YOU’RE CLOSE

Block 20 minutes every week starting Monday. CX, Ops, Marketing in a room or on a call. No slides, nothing too fancy, just focus on what needs to get done in the current sprint.

Then, once BFCM hits, switch to daily and focus on the top 5 things customers are saying, as well as what’s being done about them.

You’re not trying to micromanage. You’re trying to catch problems before they turn into disasters. If promo codes are breaking or the warehouse is backed up, you want to know at 10 AM, not 10 PM.

Do these 8 things. They won’t prevent every issue, but they’ll prevent enough to keep the weekend from turning into a total nightmare.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi Team!

I’ve been in CX for about a decade now. It started as a way into the workforce and turned into the thing that built my entire career. But for all the growth the industry’s had, there’s still one problem that never goes away.

Every company that invests in CX eventually hits a point where someone upstairs decides it’s a cost center. They’d rather put the budget into growth marketing or brand. And somehow, it’s always on the CX team to prove their value. Around 30-40% of the messages I get come down to the same question:

“How do I prove CX is actually driving meaningful business outcomes?”

This week, I handed the newsletter over to Michael Bair, one of the sharpest CX operators I know. He’s spent 20 years leading teams across B2C, SaaS, and ecommerce, including a run at FIGS as SVP of Customer Experience. He’s seen this fight from every angle, and he’s got a framework that actually makes sense.

The floor is yours, Michael.

This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Peak Support.

Peak Support is a leading BPO that is turning CX into a competitive advantage.

Pro Tip: Turn Your CX Agents into Revenue Reps

You want your contact center to become an RIO center. And that starts with turning your CX agents into revenue reps. Here are six tips for making that happen.

1. Know Your Audience

Your agents need to know everything about your customers. And this involves a deep dive into psychographic characteristics and behavioral insights. How do you do your customers think, feel, and act? And what motivates them to spend more?

2. Earn the Right to Sell

You don’t want your reps to jump in and start selling. Instead, you want them to solve your customer’s problem first. By providing value, your reps can start earning trust. And that’s when they can start thinking about sales.

3. Listen Carefully

Ensure your agents are listening for upselling clues from every customer. With customer-driven insights, your reps are better equipped to recommend new products or higher subscription tiers that solve a specific problem.

4. Plant Seeds Strategically

Plant seeds throughout the call to create interest​. Don’t leave the first reference to an upsell to the end of the call​.

5. Ask for the Sale

By providing recommendations based on what’s learned in the call, your agents can ask for the sale naturally.

6. Align Incentives

Align your incentive program to upsells and cross-selling opportunities. But you don’t want your agents overly aggressive. Instead, you reward your agents on both customer happiness and new selling opportunities. After all, the best sales persons don’t operate in a vacuum, and neither should your reps.

Follow these six tips—and you’ll be on your way for empowering your agents to become revenue reps. And that’s always good for the bottom line.

Do you want to learn about how Peak Support can turn your call center into an ROI center, please click here.

LEARN MORE

Hello Eli’s Newsletter!

I was so flattered when Eli asked me to guest-write his newsletter. He’s one of my favorite people, this newsletter has been a favorite of mine for years, and this topic, proving the value of Customer Experience, is one I’m passionate about.

First, a little about myself. I’m Michael. I’m a father, husband, die-hard Philly sports fan, and I love Customer Experience.

I’ve spent 20 years working across Customer Support, Customer Experience, Customer Success, and Sales. I’m currently a fractional CX executive and consultant across B2C subscription, ecommerce, and SaaS.

Before striking out on my own, I was the SVP of Customer Experience for publicly traded FIGS, where I led CX and B2B Sales. Prior to that, I was Senior Director of Customer Success for ServiceTitan and VP of Member Experience at Inspire. My “claim to fame”? The last four startups I joined all exited—two acquisitions and two IPOs.

So Mike, you’re rich, right? Not quite. (Startup equity is a topic for another newsletter.) I share this to say: I’ve seen what makes businesses succeed—and CX is always part of that story.

I’m going to spend the next few paragraphs making the case that you can prove the value of CX by explaining how NOT investing in CX is disingenuous, disrespectful, and detrimental. I know, strong words, but that’s what we’re here for, right? A little spice on your Thursday.

My hope is, by the end of this, if you’re a founder getting ready to outsource your whole CX team, turn the whole thing over to AI, or some other cost-saving measure, I will cause you to pause and rethink.

1. Not investing in CX is disingenuous.

If you’re a founder, CEO, or senior leader, my guess is you have a bit of pride about the business you run. You’re proud to tell people where you work, what you do, and the products/services you sell. Shouldn’t you also be proud of the people your customers interact with?

One of my favorite things, when I worked at FIGS, was meeting customers in the wild. I would ask someone what they do, they would say ‘oh, I’m a nurse, doctor, etc’ and I would reply ‘Oh, I work at FIGS. I run the Customer Experience team’. And not one time did I fear a negative reaction because I knew my team cared. We were the personification of the brand to our millions of customers and the tens of thousands that contacted us monthly.

Not investing in Customer Experience is disingenuous because you care about Customer Experience. I know you do. EVERYONE does. No one wants to call their cell phone company and wait on hold for 40 minutes. No one wants to email your favorite athleisurewear company about a return just to be told you need to send pictures, pay for your own return, and print your own label. No one wants to chat with their favorite skincare brand, wait 9 minutes between each returned chat, and be told about some buried, final sale policy.

Customer Experience is valuable and deserves investment because customers care about it. If you think customers don’t, you are being disingenuous.

2. Not investing in CX is disrespectful.

Businesses are inherently about human relationships. People don’t buy products from companies; they buy them from humans. FIGS did not grow to a half-billion-dollar revenue company because customers solely loved our products. The brand was for healthcare professionals.

We would say ‘we get you, we got you’. We, the humans. We got you. It’s the people in the business, connecting with and understanding customers, that drove its success. How could we say ‘we get you, we got you’ and not invest in the people these Awesome Humans (what we called our customers) were interacting with?

Similarly, when I was leading Customer Success at vertical SaaS behemoth ServiceTitan, human relationships were essential to our success. Our customers were well networked. They talked and they shared the vendors they used, so ServiceTitan had to be more than just the best software. It had to deeply understand our customers (home services professionals), their customers, and recognize the face-to-face nature of their business. They built their livelihoods on trust and personal relationships. It would have been disrespectful to their work to give them a faceless chatbot or an endless help center loop.

It would be disrespectful to the essential work that plumbers, electricians, and HVAC professionals do every day not to invest in our Support, Success, and Professional Services teams. If you respect customers, you will respect their time and invest in ensuring they have the best experience.

3. Not investing in CX is detrimental.

I spent the first two points appealing to your heart. This last point is for your wallet. If you are disingenuous and disrespectful to customers, it will be to your detriment.

Companies that invest in Customer Experience consistently outperform their peers. This is true for large, publicly traded companies down to small businesses. In the recent Watermark survey, “Customer Experience Leaders outperformed the broader market, generating a total return that was over 260 points higher than the S&P 500 Index.” For small businesses, studies show that a one-star increase on Yelp can boost revenue by 5% to 9%. Creating happy customers does not happen by accident and is essential to your business’s long-term viability.

I’ve seen this personally. When I was at clean energy startup Inspire, one metric we would look at was the LTV of customers who had contacted our Member Experience team vs. those who had not. Consistently, regardless of channel or the reason for their contact, LTVs increased after that interaction.

Why? Because we reconnected the customer to the mission of the company and re-enrolled them in the value they received as a subscriber. Keeping a well-trained, well-staffed, well-paid CX team will pay dividends to your bottom line. It will ensure customers feel valued, build loyalty, and communicate that you are a brand that cares.

4. How to prove it:

If you’re reading this thinking, “Yes, I agree, but how do I prove this?”, here’s what I want you to do.

First, I want you to list out 5-10 experiences or touchpoints your customers have with your business. Examples could be customers who call in, chat in, leave a product review, return a product, go through self onboarding vs. human, have a welcome call, etc.

Second, I want you to find someone on your Data team (if you have one) or someone on your Finance team.

Third, you are going to ask them to help you analyze the LTVs of customers who have these experiences vs. those that do not, with as similar product purchase experiences as possible. IE, Give me every customer with 6 months on book on XYZ subscription who HAS contacted my CX team vs. customers with 6 months on book on XYZ subscription who have NOT contacted my CX team. If your CX is as good as you say, you should see the LTVs prove that point. If you need help with that analysis, I’ll help you.

Alright, it’s time for me to step off my soapbox. I hope I’ve convinced you all that you can prove the value of CX. I love customers, I love Customer Experience, and I’d love to help you.

Interested in chatting more?

Get in touch at michael@bairconsulting.com or visit my website www.bairconsulting.co.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi Team!

I’ve spent the last decade watching brands gear up for BFCM like it’s the Super Bowl of ecommerce. War rooms, prep decks, flowcharts that look like subway maps. And then the weekend hits, and it all falls apart in the exact same way it did last year.

Funny enough, it’s rarely the volume of tickets that breaks you. Volume is generally predictable. You can staff for volume. What breaks teams is losing the thread. By day two, nobody knows what’s actually happening.

Marketing launched a new promo that CX didn’t hear about. Ops is fighting fulfillment fires that CX only learns about when the tickets flood in. Everyone’s working hard, but nobody’s looking at the same picture.

I’ve seen this play out enough times to know what actually makes it easier the next time around. It’s not doing more. It’s doing the boring work earlier.

This week, a quick one: a few ways to make sure you are prepped and ready from a CX pov.

Before I jump in: if you want to learn from one of the sharpest ecom minds, someone we worked with at JRB and someone I recommend to other folks often, check out No Best Practices from Alex G!

Now let’s get into it.

This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Syncly.

BFCM season is near, and we all know it’s about to bury your CX team in tickets. Is your CX team ready to survive the chaos and turn the season into the biggest growth opportunity of the year?

Syncly aggregates customer feedback from multiple sources, including support tickets, product reviews, and social comments, to provide actionable insights that help brands grow faster.

With Syncly, you can:

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• Organize Effortlessly: Use AI-powered auto-tagging to classify feedback into granular topics, so you know exactly what matters to your customers.

• Discover Insights with AI: Simply ask questions like you would with ChatGPT and get answers backed by direct quotes from your customers.

• Act on What Matters: Get real-time alerts and automated dashboards to take timely action on the most critical issues.

From top brands like Kosas and Burberry to fast-growing brands like Neuro, Everyday Dose, and Hum Nutrition, all are using Syncly to turn insights into action.

Want to see how Syncly helps brands scale their CX insights and streamline workflow?

Book a demo today to meet the founders and get a free demo.

LEARN MORE

P.S. What about the TikTok conversations you can’t even see?

The Syncly team has recently launched Syncly Social, a social listening tool built specifically for videos, including TikTok. You’ll be able to see what customers really think about your brand from untagged brand mentions, or get an unfiltered look at your competitor’s playbook. Ask about it in the demo.

The Same Problems, Every Year

Last year, I talked to a brand that did $4M over BFCM weekend. Great numbers. Their CX team wanted to quit by Tuesday.

The issues weren’t new. Shipping delays piled up because the warehouse got slammed. A promo code glitched and let people stack discounts that weren’t supposed to stack. A product that was supposed to be excluded from the sale kept showing up at 40% off. Customers were confused, support was scrambling, and nobody could get a straight answer about what was actually happening.

The worst part is that all three of those issues happened the year before. Same promo code bug. Same warehouse crunch. Same product exclusion problem. They knew it was coming, and it still crushed them.

When I asked why they didn’t fix it, the answer was honest: “We meant to. We just ran out of time.”

That’s the trap. BFCM prep always feels urgent until it doesn’t, and then suddenly it’s November and you’re back in the same mess.

The teams that survive aren’t doing anything fancy. They’re just dealing with last year’s chaos before this year’s chaos shows up.

What Actually Helps

The quietest CX operations I’ve seen during BFCM are the ones that spent August and September cleaning up the stuff that broke last time. They’re not working harder during the sale. They already did the work.

Here’s how that looks in real life:

1. Audit last year’s chaos:

   Pull everything from mid-November through Cyber Monday. Sort it into buckets: shipping delays, promo errors, product issues, returns. If something shows up two years in a row, it’s waiting to bite you again.

2. Assign owners before the storm:

   • Shipping and ops go to one CX lead who sits in fulfillment updates and reports back daily.

   • Product issues go to whoever’s closest to QC or packaging.

   • Discounts and promotions belong to someone who’s looped in on marketing sends.

   • Returns, loyalty, or subscription questions sit with a separate owner. One person per lane if you can.

3. Rewrite the canned replies:

   Take your five most-used macros and start fresh. Use real customer phrasing. The small tweaks make a difference. “My tracking hasn’t moved” lands better than “We appreciate your patience.”

4. Keep a live dashboard:
   It doesn’t have to be fancy. Just something that shows ticket trends, sentiment, and response times in real time. Anything that helps you see before it snowballs.

5. Run a short morning sync:
   Ten minutes with CX, Ops, and Marketing. No slides or recap decks, just focus on the top three things customers are saying and what’s being done about them.

6. Track the quick wins:
   Keep a shared doc open all week:

   • Added banner with ship-by dates → 200 fewer tickets overnight

   • Rewrote discount FAQ → cut confusion by a third

   • Updated packaging insert → fewer complaints next day

   • Next year, this becomes your first prep checklist.

7. Clean up your tags:
   Agree on clear labels: “shipping_delay,” “promo_error,” “defect_report.” It sounds boring, but it makes the post-mortem usable instead of painful.

The more you prep like this, the more predictable BFCM gets. That’s the difference between panic and pattern recognition.

Make it Repeatable

Every BFCM is a stress test. It shows you exactly where your operation cracks under pressure.

The move is to block an hour the week after and actually debrief. What caused the most pain? What worked better than you expected? What should be automated or fixed before next time? Write it down. Make it specific.

That’s how a chaotic weekend turns into a system. The chaos doesn’t disappear, but it gets more predictable. And once it’s predictable, you can actually plan for it.

Most teams treat BFCM like a one-time event. The ones that win treat it like data collection for next year.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.

Hi team,

If you’ve worked a Black Friday before, you know the vibe. Record traffic, massive orders, everyone high-fiving in Slack. And then something breaks, and no one notices until someone tweets at you.

I’ve watched enough BFCM campaigns implode to know that most of the damage happens in real time while everyone’s too busy refreshing dashboards to catch it.

So here are 10 things that will go wrong BFCM weekend, and what you can actually do about them before they cost you a few hundred grand.

Let’s get into it.

This week brought to you by Checkout Pulse.

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1. Your discount codes will break and you won’t know until someone tweets at you

What happens:

Codes stop working, expired promos slip through. Your “20OFF” offer never applies. High-intent shoppers hit checkout, get confused, and bail.

Fix it:

Check your failed discount table daily with Checkout Pulse. Run test orders with every active code before Thursday. If codes break, patch them immediately and message affected customers with a make-good offer before they write you off.

2. Abandonment will spike and you’ll have no idea why

What happens:

Traffic doubles, but conversion rate mysteriously drops from 2.8% to 2.1%. Most teams won’t spot it until the campaign’s over.

Fix it:

Set up Slack alerts for sudden abandonment increases so you can react in minutes, not hours. Check form errors, shipping load times, and express checkout performance right after each alert.

3. A checkout extension will fail silently

What happens:

One third-party app in checkout errors out, but Shopify doesn’t show it. Every broken add-on can silently kill conversions for hours.

Fix it:

Use event-level monitoring to detect extension errors and alert your devs instantly. Disable anything non-essential before Friday. Have a rollback plan ready.

4. Your forms will fight people

What happens:

Shoppers rage-quit when your phone or ZIP code field rejects valid inputs. Input fatigue equals lost carts.

Fix it:

Simplify or auto-fill high-friction fields and track where drop-offs happen. Test your checkout on mobile with edge cases like international phone formats and military addresses.

5. Shipping rates will vanish for random zip codes

What happens:

Some addresses mysteriously return “no rates available.” That’s revenue trapped in checkout limbo.

Fix it:

Flag and adjust rules for failed address lookups before the weekend. Spot-check international regions where errors spike. Set up fallback flat-rate options for problem zones.

6. Express checkout won’t be as fast as you think

What happens:

Apple Pay or Shop Pay flow errors start climbing quietly. Your “fast lane” will not be nearly as fast as anyone expected…

Fix it:

Benchmark express versus standard checkout completion rates in real time. If one tanks, remove or reorder buttons immediately.

7. Expensive shipping options will scare people off

What happens:

That $19.99 overnight method is likely killing conversion. I find this as one of my personal biggest pet peeves. If I see super high shipping cost, I disappear. High-abandonment methods drag down total conversion.

Fix it:

Reorder or hide underperforming options. You’re not required to show every carrier rate just because it exists.

8. Everything will work fine in the US and break everywhere else

What happens:

Canada’s checkout blows up. UK customers can’t get past payment. Australia gets stuck on shipping.

Fix it:

Segment abandonment data by region. Then tailor fixes to the top offending countries: shipping rules, payment methods, or taxes. What works in New York doesn’t work in Toronto.

9. Promo stacking will quietly destroy your margins

What happens:

Everyone’s using codes. AOV looks great. Then you realize half your orders are stacking discounts you didn’t account for, and your best weekend just became your least profitable.

Fix it:

Track discount usage cohorts to identify where promo volume costs more than it earns. Turn off combinations you don’t want. Set maximum discount caps per order.

10. You won’t know what broke until it’s too late

What happens:

Everyone’s busy firefighting, and post-mortems come too late. You can’t fix what you didn’t see in time.

Fix it:

Run real-time checkout monitoring through a tool like Checkout Pulse. Get Slack alerts when conversion, abandonment, or extensions misbehave, and stay ahead of issues during the weekend’s chaos.

👉 Use code eli-X3-1YK to get it free for 3 months.

Get Checkout Pulse →

Stay sharp out there.

And may all your discount codes work on the first try.

Eli