Restaurants keep crowds waiting because it makes the place look popular. I’ve seen this at play. Rameshwaram Cafe is doing the same thing. Or so I thought. But after visiting the newly opened Rameshwaram Cafe in Bommasandra, I changed my perception. Let me start with what confused me first. Rameshwaram Cafe has the staff, the tech, and the systems to move orders fast. But they don't and this is true even at 5 AM, when there's barely anyone inside. Other South Indian restauran

The funny thing about truly elite people is that they're the last ones who think they've figured it out. The ones who are genuinely the best at what they do - the top 1%, the top 0.1%, they're always hungry to learn more. They're the most restless people in the room. Always convinced there's another level they haven't reached yet. And they're right. So here's the question I had to answer recently - what do I actually give someone like that? It's not talent. Everyone at that l

The wrong people will convince you that wanting more is something to be ashamed of. Here’s why I say this: In college, after scoring among the highest in my semester, a group I used to call friends walked into my hostel room and spent an hour calling me a nerd and laughing at me. I don't call them friends anymore. In fact, I haven’t seen or spoken to them since I graduated college. I've had the pleasure of genuinely great company and the displeasure of really poor ones. The d

I've worked across Fintech, Healthcare, HR Tech and SaaS. A poorly handled customer query costs you differently in every single one. They all underestimate the emotional weight of the problem they're solving. The fundamentals of great CX never change, regardless of where you are: - Clear communication - Predictable response times - Fair resolutions - Keeping your word - Consistency - across product, operations, communications, and support Simple in theory. Brutally hard in pr

The first time a Wakefit mattress arrived at my home, I didn't know what to expect. Except that there was a 100-night return policy, which I found hard to believe. But it helped build trust, and it worked. What I got was a tightly rolled, vacuum-sealed package that looked nothing like a mattress. Then you cut the wrap open with the custom blade that came with it. Slowly, it begins to unfurl. It expands, takes shape, fills the bed. It's oddly theatrical - the product performin

Every hiring manager has said it. "Skills can be trained. Hire for attitude." I've hired for attitude. It works - until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, it's not a small problem. Here's something experience taught me that no hiring framework will: Attitude gets you in the door. But attitude without the foundational skill to back it - creates a very specific kind of mess. The person works hard. Wants it badly. But can't execute. And because they care so much, feedback becomes

Team A doubles their customer base in 12 months. They celebrate. Hires more sales reps. Team B doubles their customer base in 12 months. Then asks - can our experience handle this? One of these teams will be fighting churn in Q3. You already know which one. Here's what ends up getting skipped in all the celebrations: Growth exposes you. Every crack in your process, every gap in your handoff, every promise your sales team made that your ops team can't keep - scale just makes i

What if you could just... ask? Just open WhatsApp and type - "I left my charger at the office, can you get it?" and someone would do that for you? In CX, we talk endlessly about reducing friction. Dunzo, in 2014, had eliminated it entirely. I've spent years studying what makes customers come back, what makes an experience stick and what Dunzo had built, almost accidentally, was the answer. They just didn't have a name for it yet! It should have been called a conversational co

The customer who never complains is the one you are about to lose. Anger is manageable. It shows up, makes noise, gets escalated, gets resolved. Someone closes the ticket and calls it a win. The expensive emotions don't make noise. Confusion. Embarrassment. That anxiety of not knowing if you're doing it right. The slow loss of control mid-transaction that makes someone close the tab and never come back. These don't generate complaints. They generate silence and silence, in a

If your reviews are split between people who love you and people who hate you, your problem is not your product. It is that you are selling it to the wrong people. Polarised reviews are not a reputation problem. They are a targeting problem wearing a reputation problem's clothes. What that split tells you: Somewhere inside your customer base there are two completely different personas. One of them finds your product obvious, intuitive, exactly what they needed. The other find

Founders hire their first CX leader in one of two moments.  Either the reviews are bad, the churn is visible, and the founder is getting tagged in angry tweets - meaning the damage is already done and whoever walks in is inheriting a fire.  Or the product is still finding its feet, the customer base is too small to generate real signal, and the hire ends up building processes for problems that do not exist yet. Both are expensive mistakes. One costs you money. The other costs

The companies with the best CX frameworks I have ever seen also had the worst customer experience. Not despite the framework. Because of it. There is a certain kind of consultant who walks into a broken CX situation and immediately reaches for a model. A journey map. A tiered escalation structure. A feedback loop borrowed from a company three times your size operating in a completely different market.  It gets presented in a clean deck.  The founder nods. The team gets traine

The most confident decision I ever watched a leader make was a coin flip. Not literally, but from the outside, it looked exactly like one. He had two options on the table. No data clearly favouring either one and a room full of people who needed someone to just pick a direction and mean it. He picked one and when he did, he said it like he had known all along.  The team heard it, believed it, and got to work. What nobody in that room knew was that he had spent the previous th

The deal closed. The founder thinks they are the best salesperson. They might actually be the bottleneck. Here's what usually happens: The sales team made a decision they weren't allowed to make. A discount. A trade-off. A call on where to hold firm. So they did the only thing the process lets them do; they said, "let me get back to you." Went back to the founder. Went back to the customer. By then, the deal had cooled. The founder jumped on a call. Made the decision live. It

We redesigned a paediatric clinic by looking at everything from 3 to 4 feet off the ground. That is what a child sees. Not what the parent sees. Not what the doctor sees. The smell was the first thing we changed. Clinics smell like stress. You walk in and your shoulders go up. That is true for adults. For a child, it is worse, they do not have the vocabulary for it yet, but the body remembers. The layout followed. Adults notice the reception desk first. Children notice the fl

A founder once told me their CX team was slow and unresponsive. Customers were complaining. Support tickets were piling up. The team looked unmotivated. I asked how long it took the team to resolve a refund request. She said three days. I asked why. She said the ops lead had to approve it, then finance had to sign off, then she had to review anything above a certain amount. The support team had been hired to help customers. But they could not actually help anyone. They could

What I learned is that growth breaks companies in ways that look like an 𝗲𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺, 𝗮 𝗵𝗶𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺, 𝗼𝗿 𝗮 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗯𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘄𝗶𝗱𝘁𝗵 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺.

Dependency looks like value in the short term. Over time, it is just a very polite career ceiling.

2002 Nobel prize laureate Daniel Kahneman said "For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential." And then I thought about NPS. And I laughed. Then felt sad. It was hilarious and all too real at the same time. Nobody woke up one day and decided CSAT and NPS were the twin pillars of customer

Being known for great customer experience is fantastic. But, if it isn't adding revenue, then what’s the point? You can make the same argument for great branding, great marketing, also, great leadership. If it doesn't connect to a commercial outcome at some point, it's just an expensive hobby with a (maybe) good-looking dashboard. In one of my discovery calls for a consulting assignment, I was asked to come in and track a metric that would look good on paper and make the earl