Business

Your customers are lying to you. They don't even know they're doing it. They ask for a feature. What they mean is "make my pain go away." They ask for a discount. What they mean is "I don't feel like this is worth it." They ask for a policy change. What they mean is "something in this experience broke my trust." Most companies fulfill the request. The best companies decode the intent underneath it. The average businesses and great ones split by their ability to decode custome

Try this thought experiment with me for a minute. You're on a hiring panel. There's a candidate sitting across from you. Smart, sharp, clearly capable. But something's off. They don't laugh at the right moments. They challenge an assumption you didn't even know was an assumption. They don't feel like "one of us." So you pass. You tell yourself it's instinct. You call it culture fit. Now imagine the opposite scenario. Every single hire from here on out feels effortless. They g

In 2009, Domino's was the fastest pizza company in the world and customers hated the pizza. In their own taste tests, people rated identical pizza lower the moment they were told it came from Domino's. The brand itself had become a flavor and it tasted like punishment. Most companies bury feedback like that. You rework the recipe, keep the cameras off, and hope nobody remembers how bad it got. Admitting the product is broken feels like handing customers a reason to leave. Dom

The worst customer experience in Bengaluru built a 1,000-outlet empire. A man removed chairs from his restaurant in 1983. Bengaluru called him crazy. Municipal corporations eventually created a license category named after him. R. Prabhakar was a businessman from Basavanagudi who'd just returned from abroad. He'd watched McDonald's and fast-food chains operate at a scale that felt almost unfair - fast, cheap, packed, profitable. But he didn't want to sell burgers. He wondered

13 MILLION SELLERS in 2021. ₹0 STARTING CAPITAL. How Two IIT Graduates Built a Business Model So Hard to Copy, Shopsy by Flipkart Failed Trying. In 2015, Amazon and Flipkart were at war for urban India. But these two IIT graduates, Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal went the other direction. They went to the housewife in Nagpur reselling sarees on WhatsApp. The boutique owner in Surat with no supply chain access. The first-generation entrepreneur in Patna who wanted to start a

90% startups treat marketing and customer experience as separate departments. They're not. They're two sides of the same coin. Every rupee you spend on ads, campaigns, and brand building is essentially a promise. And every time a customer has a bad experience, that promise is broken. You can think of it like filling a bucket with a hole in it. You can keep pouring in more water, but if the leaks aren't fixed, you're just running faster to stay in the same place. A dissatisfie

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

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