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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Return on Experience Beats Return on Investment

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...