Your best customers are gathering evidence against you. They are doing it out of habit. They ask for something, get told no, and instead of arguing, they go test your organization somewhere else - a different rep, a different department, a different level of seniority. If they get a yes the second time, they now know something you don't: that your "no" was never really a company policy. It was just one person's answer. They won't tell you this. But they'll remember it. Here's

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

We've been solving the wrong problem in customer experience for decades. Customers said they hated waiting. So we took their word for it. We threw technology at the wait time. Self-help. Automated responses. Chatbots. Then AI arrived and gave us exactly what we thought customers wanted instant everything, and customers still asked for a human. Were customers being dishonest? Well, not really. What customers actually hated waiting for was not resolution, but reassurance. The 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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s nothing glamorous about showing up the same way every day. The discipline of doing the basics well. Again. And again. And again. Most people don’t fail because they lack talent. They fail because they chase intensity instead of consistency. Sprint for a week. Take on more responsibility for a couple of weeks at work. Overdeliver once. And then drift. Consistency looks dull from the outside. From the inside, it’s demanding. Because it asks for the same standard on good

Every company loves to say they are customer obsessed. But obsession ends at being a line. And it usually ends there. True customer obsession is culture. And culture does not start at the front-lines. It starts at the top. And no, this does not apply only to customer experience teams. Here is some translation for you: Leadership says "Push harder" Team hears "Say yes even if you don’t know how" Customer hears "We will get back to you" for the fifth time. Leadership says “Let’

Mental shortcuts help you act fast, but bias rides along quietly. What feels obvious to you can look random to everyone else. Speed is fine, until trust is lost. The fix isn’t slowing down. It’s showing your work so people see the reasoning behind the move.

Analysis paralysis isn't just overthinking. It's organizational cancer. It spreads through teams, destroys momentum, and kills companies that could have thrived. Your competition doesn't wait for perfect data. They move. And if they did wait for perfect data, they’d not be your competition, they’d be dead.

Why leadership is a dance between tough and gentle

Ugh, this again. Another Monday where I promise myself "this is the week I get fit" for the 47th time. Why is this so difficult? I've got...