Culture of Convenience

What happens to a customer relationship when your biggest champion leaves the company?

Churn rarely starts the day a customer leaves. It starts earlier. A longtime contact leaves. Someone new takes over. Conversations that used to be about growth and partnership suddenly become about contracts, files, ownership, and timelines. The customer hasn’t left yet, but something in the relationship has shifted.

We learned this firsthand with a customer we’d worked closely with for years. There was trust, history, and a relationship that had survived lean times and grown into a genuine partnership. Then our champion left. The person who stepped in didn’t know us, and we didn’t know him. He brought his own relationships, experiences, and preferred solutions with him.

That experience taught Jeff something he's carried ever since: A strong customer relationship isn’t enough if it can’t survive a change in people.

Your relationship may be deep, but is it wide? If your primary champion at one of your most important accounts left tomorrow, who else could you call? Who else understands the value you provide and has a relationship with your team beyond a name in their inbox?

If you can’t name that person, you may have found friction in your customer retention strategy. The best time to build those additional relationships isn’t after a new decision-maker arrives. It’s while your champion is still in the room.

What does a broken promise actually cost your business?

The answer goes far beyond lost revenue.

In this episode of Where’s the Friction, Jeff Kahler explores what happens when a business makes a commitment—and then abandons it when a bigger opportunity comes along. Through the story of a manufacturer that broke an exclusivity promise to its smaller retail partners, Jeff shows how one decision can create friction that spreads far beyond the customers directly affected.

Because when leaders fail to uphold a standard, people notice.

Employees start questioning what the company’s values really mean. Salespeople become less confident in the promises they make to customers. Partners and vendors become more cautious. And customers who once trusted your word start hedging their bets.

That’s the hidden cost of broken promises in business. It may never appear as a line item on a balance sheet, but it can have a lasting impact on customer trust, employee culture, business relationships, and leadership credibility.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why broken commitments create hidden business costs that extend well beyond the immediate financial impact.
• How leadership decisions shape company culture, especially when employees see stated values abandoned under pressure.
• How to protect trust before a difficult decision arrives by making commitments you’re prepared to defend—and naming those commitments when the pressure is on.

The real test of integrity isn’t whether you keep a promise when it’s convenient. It’s what happens when keeping that promise costs you something.

Before making a commitment to a customer, employee, vendor, or business partner, ask yourself: Have we already decided what we’ll do when honoring this commitment becomes difficult?

Because if you haven’t made that decision yet, you haven’t really made a commitment. You’ve made a plan to decide later.

And that gap between the promise and the decision?

That’s where the friction lives.

Trust isn’t built by what your company says. It’s built by what your team and customers experience every day.

In the first episode of Where’s the Friction?, Culture of Convenience founder Jeff Kahler explores what it really takes to build trust in business, and why the biggest gaps between leadership’s intentions and the customer experience often go unnoticed.

Drawing on lessons from building businesses in the restaurant and e-learning industries, Jeff shares why declaring a standard is only the beginning. The real test is whether that standard makes it all the way through your organization to the frontline employees and customers you serve.

You’ll learn:

• Why trust is built in the gap between what you promise and what you actually deliver

• How leaders can get closer to the honest feedback they rarely hear in meetings

• Why reducing friction starts with personally living the standards you expect from your team

Great company culture isn’t a mission statement on the wall. Customer experience isn’t something you can simply delegate. And trust isn’t something a business gets to declare for itself.

You have to earn it... one interaction at a time.

The Culture of Convenience podcast that has been exploring the balance between people and performance since 2020. Same mission. Sharper focus. Every episode digs into where multi-unit leaders are stuck, what is causing it, and what to actually do about it.

RTO is turning 20! Jeff and Kelly go through the history books to remember some of RTO's biggest moments, what was happening in the world during that time, and how the company became what it is today.

There's a lot going on under your feet! On this episode, Jeff and Kelly talk to Ben Thomas from UST Training to find out just what's going on with underground storage tanks: how they've changed over the years, Ben's evolving role in the industry, and what happens when things go wrong.

About Ben: Ben Thomas brings to the UST industry over three decades of experience, networking and ideas to help owners and inspectors solve complex technical problems in the management of UST systems. Ben's experience goes back to 1986, when he supervised UST removals in Vermont. Between 1989 and 1995, Ben oversaw cleanup of leaking UST sites in northern Alaska. From 1995 to 2002, he ran Alaska's UST leak prevention program. Ben gained national attention for his innovative work in web page development, outreach material, financial responsibility compliance, and most notably the Alaska third party inspection program. Since leaving Alaska in 2002, Ben's principal focus has been education, training, and outreach to the nation's UST owners, operators, inspectors and technicians.

How can a company use today's digital world to their advantage? Luckily for Jeff and Kelly, they have just the expert to ask: Abbey Karel from Bounteous! In their chat with Abbey, they talk digital strategies, automation, AI and more. Plus, just how long until the tucked in sweater goes out of fashion? Listen to find out!

About Abbey: As VP of Growth at Bounteous, Abbey Karel helps Consumer Brands drive digital transformation and create meaningful customer experiences that maximize growth and ROI. By aligning business goals with digital innovation, she enables brands to unlock new opportunities through strategic partnerships and co-innovation while optimizing spend.

With a background in global client leadership, digital strategy, and in-store innovation, Abbey has worked with some of the world's most recognized brands to elevate customer engagement and drive measurable business impact. Prior to Bounteous, she led high-impact client relationships at Ogilvy, earning recognition as a Top-25 Global Client Leader, and played a key role in pioneering native apps and in-store digital experiences for Kohl's and JCPenney. Abbey is also a frequent speaker and thought leader, sharing insights on digital transformation, customer experience, and data-driven growth at industry events.

Do you know who the 'Missing 33%' are? In this episode, Kelly finds out in a conversation with a committee co-chair within C-Store Women and RTO's own Client Success Manager, Breeze Savage. They also discuss empowering women in the convenience industry, the secret sauce to client support and how she inspires her team on the daily. Are there any jokes made at Jeff's expense during his absence? Listen to find out!

Jeff and Kelly step into the CoC studio for one final podcast in 2024. Together, they wax nostalgic about all the great topics they've covered this year, such as AI, job perks, foodservice, coupons, and more. They also touch on what sort of convenience trends they see on the horizon in 2025.

On the latest Culture of Convenience episode, Jeff and Kelly talk with Mason Cowan, Chief Customer Officer at BandyWorks Solutions. Mason discusses how BandyWorks combines real-time data with store operations to provide feedback and recommendations to improve c-stores. Together, they discuss the who, what, why, and how of that process!