Templated CX is Brand Rot

Hi folks,

Not going to lie—I’ve got a little ShopTalk FOMO this week. But after eTail, a London trip, and a week in Tel Aviv, I’m grateful not to travel too far away from home for a bit

The highlight of my week: my son Noah and I did a mini staycation at the Bellevue Hotel using some Hyatt points. Well worth it for the free toy they gave Noah at check-in.

In a conversation this week, while chatting about the current state of CX, I had a realization: we’re living in the era of customer sameness.

Brands across the board—beverages, skincare, supplements, even socks—are all running the same playbooks. Same flows. Same unboxing experience. Same CX scripts.

When one trick or gimmick works, it’s everywhere, and you CAN’T STOP SEEING IT. 

If everyone’s playing by the same rules, the only way to stand out… is to break them.

This week, I’m diving into why great CX isn’t templated, how short-term thinking is costing brands long-term loyalty, and a few simple ways to escape the noise.

Let’s get into it.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Siena AI!

Generic AI isn't enough for brands. Imagine if your AI automatically knew your customers' preferences, milestones, and favorite products—delivering personalized experiences effortlessly and at scale. 

This week, I’m spotlighting Siena AI, the Empathic AI Agent for customer-obsessed brands. Siena is purpose-built for commerce, trained like a human CX agent on your team that makes each engagement meaningful, accurate, and uniquely aligned to your brand.

Here are 3 things that make Siena stand out:

• AI That Build Relationships: Learns from your best agents to create genuine connections, not just close tickets.

• Agentic Architecture:   Multiple specialized AI agents work seamlessly together—each trained for specific tasks like product expertise, shopping assistance, or customer care—going far beyond basic customer service.

• One Brain For CX: Siena is unifying your CX stack - from pre-sales to support to sales to insights. No more fragmented customer journeys.

Some of their newest customer stories:

• Goody: “As someone who was against AI before, I see the need and the positive effects of AI. I think it gets a bad rap because we think AI is going to replace humans. But it can be used to actually organize humans."

— Kelsey Mead, Director of Sales Operations at Goody

• Coterie: “"The biggest unlock was when we integrated the workflows and Siena could immediately cancel an order in Shopify within the guardrails we set—60 minutes. Seeing that happen, I was just like, 'Holy crap.' That is going to be a huge unlock for our team and our business."

— Paige Zachs, VP  Supply Chain, Operations & Customer at Coterie

• Comfrt: "Brooke is one single AI and yet solving more tickets in a week than our human team. We have faster response times, faster resolution times, higher customer satisfaction, and that's huge to say." 

— Kristen McClure, Head of CX at Comfrt

The Problem with Templated CX

Somewhere along the way, customer experience became a checklist.

The same “Welcome to the family” emails. The same “We’re sorry to see you go” cancellations messages. The same support macros, loyalty tiers, and unboxing moments—down to the shredded kraft paper and 15% off WEMISSYOU coupon codes.

And look, I get it. These tactics became popular for a reason: they work. But only up to a point.

When every brand in your category is running the same playbook, customers stop noticing. The tactics blur together. What once felt personalized now feels expected. And what’s expected rarely surprises, delights, or earns loyalty.

The reality is templates are useful until they become a crutch.

I’ve seen this firsthand. At OLIPOP, we tested dozens of flows, tweaks, and tiny unexpected moments—some flopped, others became core to our retention strategy. What made them work wasn’t that they were perfectly crafted. It’s that they felt human. Unscripted. Honest.

Your customers aren’t dumb. They can spot copy-paste efforts from a mile away. And while AI and automation have made scaling easier than ever, the bar for emotional connection has gone up.

Most CX Teams Are Just Putting Out Fires

Too much CX still happens after something goes wrong. A ticket comes in, it gets solved. A delay happens, and someone tries to smooth it over. It's nonstop reactivity, and there’s rarely time to step back and fix the root cause.

This is part of why CX feels the same across so many brands.

It’s all symptoms vs systems.

The teams moving ahead are shifting their mindset. They’re using tags and ticket trends to identify friction points. They’re monitoring time-to-resolution to pinpoint where agent training is falling short. They’re in the room before a product launches, flagging what’s likely to confuse or frustrate customers.

Strong CX gets built before things go sideways. It’s in the plain-text delay email that preempts a flood of WISMO tickets. It’s in the survey that flags buyer confusion before it becomes a return. It's in cross-functional workflows where CX is actually part of the decision-making process.

Inbox chaos is a sign that something upstream needs fixing.

The Shift Toward Intentional CX

The strongest CX orgs today are the ones that aren’t just reacting all darn day. They’re finding the quiet signals and doing something about them before they snowball into support chaos. That’s how they earn trust and loyalty without constantly handing out refunds and discount codes.

Some ways brands are getting ahead of the mess:

• Pre-write your top few customer headaches: Delays, order edits, damaged shipments—whatever tends to go wrong, have your messages ready before they’re needed. A well-timed plain-text note does more than any polished apology ever could.
  

• Use your tags to fix upstream problems: Don’t just tag for reporting. Make sure those tags inform product, ops, and even marketing. If 12 people complain about a product leaking, there’s probably a packaging flaw. Get in the habit of digging for root causes instead of just logging issues.
  

• Track what people avoid: If a subscription product is constantly skipped or if customers keep dropping a particular item from their carts, ask why. There’s usually a clear reason hiding in the data—timing, pricing, confusion on PDPs.
  

• Bring CX into earlier convos: Smart brands have CX review product launches, PDPs, and even shipping policies before they go live. It’s not about blocking the process—it’s about tightening it up before customers get frustrated. We saw a ton of value from CX folks reviewing pdp’s before they went live at JRB.
  

• Build a delay/oversell playbook: Don’t wait until something is overdue to email your customer. A cadence of updates—day 1, day 5, day 12—builds trust and prevents ticket spikes especially when you use real language and don’t bury the lede.
  

• Rewrite your macros quarterly: If your macros sound like everyone else’s, they probably are. Review your top five each quarter and make sure they reflect your tone and values. Even better if they’re written like a real person would talk.
  

• Be deliberate about where AI lives: AI is great at scaling repetitive work. But in moments of confusion, emotion, or urgency, customers still want a human. The brands doing this best are clearing out the low-lift stuff with AI so their team has time to handle the moments that matter.

This kind of work is what makes great CX feel effortless. When customers get clear answers before they even ask, when they feel heard without needing to escalate, they come back. Not because they were wowed but because it felt easy and thoughtful. That’s what sticks.

And as brands look to create these effortless, thoughtful experiences at scale, new technologies can help. One exciting development I've seen recently is Siena AI's upcoming launch of Customer Memory, designed exactly for this purpose.

To help brands make this shift from reactive to proactive, Siena AI has introduced a new concept called Customer Memory—a feature that remembers individual customer details from conversations, making truly personalized interactions possible at scale.

• Remember What Matters to Your Customers:
  Every day, your customers share invaluable insights—preferences, life milestones, and subtle hints about their interests. Traditionally, these insights are forgotten, and buried in ticket logs. Siena's Customer Memory automatically captures and stores these moments, enabling your brand to personalize future interactions effortlessly—without asking customers to repeat themselves.
  

• Create Deeper, Personalized Relationships:
  With customizable memory categories, Siena allows your brand to remember hyper-specific details unique to your business. Whether it’s skin sensitivities, fitness goals, or gift-shopping patterns, Siena uses this memory to trigger proactive, thoughtful interactions at exactly the right moment, enhancing customer loyalty and satisfaction.
  

• Turn Insights Into Actions:
  Siena integrates these memories across all your customer touchpoints, turning conversations into structured, actionable data. Marketers use these insights to power hyper-personalized campaigns via tools like Klaviyo, product teams identify emerging trends instantly, and customer service teams deliver genuine, memorable experiences.

Early Access Opportunity:
As part of my collab with Siena AI, my readers have the opportunity to become early access partners for Siena's Customer Memory. Just sign up for a demo with their team mentioning Eli’s newsie. Also, if you reach out within the next 30 days, you get a 1:1 60-minute workshop with the Siena AI founding team, including their AI Starter Kit playbook designed to make orgs 100x more efficient with the latest AI tools that go beyond just CX. 

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. Looking for inspo on your next email/sms campaign?

I know you will love this.