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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

Martin Brundle has a phrase he deploys with surgical precision during Formula 1 broadcasts: "a day late and a dollar short." He uses it when a driver attempts a defensive move too late, or commits to an overtake half-heartedly. The gap has closed. The opportunity has passed. And worse, the hesitation has telegraphed weakness to every other driver on the grid. Business is no different. The difference is that instead of losing a position on lap 34, we lose teams, opportunities,

The teacher was screaming from backstage, ”Linish, don't be an idiot. Do not invite the dignitaries back on stage. They're already on stage." I was in seventh grade, president of the Interact Club, a division of the Rotary Club. It was tradition for the president to deliver what was essentially a state of the club address. The entire high school would be in attendance, along with dignitaries from the local Rotary Club. The protocol was: the dignitaries would be seated in the

Leadership problems often disguise themselves in different ways. Too often, it’s a question of focal length. But, hardly anyone sees it that way. Get too close and you start solving problems your team should be solving. You add control, meetings, check-ins. You become to bottleneck for everything. Get too far and you rely on vision decks and town halls. You don’t find the right focal length by reading about it. You find it by testing the edges. Step in closer than feels comfo

A year ago, I wrote my first post on my website. I had no sense of where it would lead. I was simply trying to get thoughts out of my head and onto the page. It was not natural, I had to force it out. Why? I still don't understand why at that moment I thought this was something worth doing. Surprising still, I dont know how I stuck with it. What forcing myself to write and publish has since taught me is that many of my ideas stand tall when they live in my mind, but the momen

When I was 19, I met someone I knew only for a few months. We weren’t especially close. But we spoke about the most obscure things: About what it would be like if everyone had 3 hands, what if everyone in the world spoke the same language. You get the idea. In these conversations, I realised that they saw the world differently from me. Not dramatically different, but enough to wonder. There were two huge realisations in retrospect It was unsettling because I couldn’t agree wi

A useful rule of thumb. Not every question deserves an answer. Not every invitation to explain is made in good faith. Some are simply traps disguised as curiosity. Some people aren’t confused. They’re invested. Invested in missing the point.Invested in circling the same argument until you’re tired enough to surrender.Invested in turning explanation into a tax you keep paying. They don’t want clarity.They want leverage.They want you busy proving what they’ve already decided to