CX Heroes

How do you judge whether a technology deployment will last after the launch team moves on?

Learn in this episode:

• Why a rollout can perform well while executives are watching, then lag when attention drops
• How end-user feedback changes process design and adoption
• Why leaders should test sustainability and scalability from the start
• How a one-year or two-year lookback can reveal whether a deployment worked
  
  

Recommended resources in this episode:

• Sahil Bloom, The Curiosity Chronicle: https://www.sahilbloom.com/newsletter
• Simon Sinek: https://simonsinek.com/
• Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers' Hearts by Neil Hoyne: https://www.converted.us

Pinar Kucukyilmaz is Director of Continuous Improvement at FreshDirect. She leads transformation across supply chain operations, automation, customer feedback, and cross-functional execution. She brings more than 15 years of experience across business strategy, corporate development, product innovation, and operational transformation.

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Learn more: https://en.helpfeel.com

Tarah Nelson learned how to keep working through a period when stopping did not feel like an option. A decade later, she shares the importance of letting Slack wait until Monday.

In this episode, you will learn:

• How Tarah turned a $200-a-month side hustle into a career in customer experience
• Why a strength developed during crisis can become difficult to switch off
• How Tarah recognized that her crisis-era resilience had become hard to switch off
• How Tarah uses AI to find patterns across customer conversations while keeping people responsible for verification and root-cause work
• Why she would move support capacity into retention and win-back work as automation improves

Tarah Nelson is the founder of Nelson & Co Solutions and a fractional CX leader for DTC subscription brands. She has spent a decade working on customer experience operations at fast-growing brands. 

Check out Nelson & Co: https://www.nelsoncocx.com/

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Learn more: https://en.helpfeel.com

Nate Brown's customer experience career started in a Ford Taurus with no air conditioning, cold calling strip malls in a territory nobody wanted. Today, he is the co-founder of CX Accelerator, a community with more than 5,000 members, and the author of The CX Primer.

In this episode, learn:

- How a difficult first sales job revealed Nate's love of customer service
- How one customer's reaction can reveal the work you want to do
- Why peer relationships are a powerful driver of service quality
- How support teams can move from ticket taking to proactive guidance
- Why knowledge curators and customer interaction leaders may shape the next era of CX

Nate has built and led customer experience and contact center functions across gaming, software, healthcare, and manufacturing, including work with Warner Brothers Games, UL, and Bosch. ICMI has named him a top CX thought leader.

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Want an AI support agent that's super reliable and easy to operate?

Helpfeel combines AI customer support with a managed service that keeps your knowledge improving as customer needs change.

Learn more: https://en.helpfeel.com

Learn in this episode:

• Why your team gets looked at as a cost center, and how to grow beyond that framing
• How presenting the same metrics in a new way drives action from the CFO, COO, or CRO
• Why you should never send an NPS survey right after a support ticket
• How to build internal trust from the bottom up before you pitch the executive suite
• Why the buyer moving upstream to the CFO is good news for CX leaders
  
  Sue Duris, MBA, CCXP, is founder and principal consultant at M4 Communications, a CX business transformation and marketing strategy consultancy. Across a 30-plus year career she has built CX programs from the ground up in telecom at WorldCom and professional services at Resources Global Professionals, and served as head of stakeholder experience at the Principles for Responsible Investment, a UN-backed responsible investment body, where she built a signatory experience program in the ESG space. She has been quoted in Forbes, The Times, and The Sun, and writes for CX Network.
  
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  Want an AI support agent that's insanely reliable without setup headaches?
  
  Save time and delight customers with Helpfeel's done-for-you deployment and seamless VoC-based optimization.
  
  Join 625 leading businesses using Helpfeel to boost margin.
  
  Learn more: https://en.helpfeel.com

Learn in this episode:

• Why packaging isn't your brand, and what actually earns customer trust
• The one broken promise that can cost you a B2B account
• How to turn a routine supplier meeting into a shared solution by asking for a challenge statement
• Why manufacturing put off connecting its CRM and ERP systems for years, and how AI is finally making the cleanup worth doing

Melanie Edwards Virreira is a brand and go-to-market strategist in the packaging industry. She has led marketing and strategy at Resource Label Group and at Ball Corporation across North and Central America, with earlier international roles at MCC Label. She describes herself as a strategist disguised as a marketer, a creative with a production brain.

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Want an AI support agent that's reliable without setup and tuning headaches?

Save time and delight customers with Helpfeel's done-for-you deployment and continuous VoC-based optimization.

Join 625+ businesses using Helpfeel, with a 99% renewal rate, to boost margins.

Learn more: https://en.helpfeel.com

Learn in this episode:

• Why shipping the AI first draft quietly hands over your company's voice
• How a fiction writer's approach to revision applies to support content
• Why rereading and editing AI drafts is how you actually learn your business
• The skill-based routing decision that burned out her best agents in three months Which traditional CX metrics Elise thinks are fading, and what she watches instead
• Why she tests every AI model on her own agents before it ever reaches a customer

Elise Jeanmaire is a COPC-certified CX leader with 18 years of experience setting enterprise support strategy around retention, advocacy and lifetime value. She is Program Manager of Customer Experience, Loyalty Technology and Retention at SimpliSafe, and has built and scaled support organizations at Dutchie, SeatGeek, Sonos, Reebok and Nestle.

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Want an AI support agent that is insanely reliable without setup headaches?

Save time and delight customers with Helpfeel's done-for-you deployment and seamless VoC-based optimization.

Join 625 leading businesses using Helpfeel to boost margin.
Learn more: https://en.helpfeel.com

Learn in this episode:

• Why CX maturity means knowing your starting point instead of copying another company's playbook
• Why everything in support can be automated, and why that is the wrong goal to chase
• The one customer moment Tim says should never go to a chatbot
• How to decide which interactions earn a human before you automate the rest
• How Tim closed a feedback loop that had been trapped in a spreadsheet for years

Tim Thijsse (pronounced thigh suh) is a UX and customer experience strategist operating from the Digital Experience Collective and the author of Maturing in Customer Experience Optimization. A top 50 CX leader in 2025 and 2026, he has led digital optimization programs for brands like Heineken and E.ON, and today delivers CX trainings, talks, and workshops.

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Want an AI support agent that is insanely reliable without setup headaches?

Save time and delight customers with done-for-you deployment and VoC-driven knowledge updates.

Join 625 leading businesses using Helpfeel to boost margin.
Learn more: https://en.helpfeel.com

Learn in this episode:

• Why customers can't be fully honest with a sales rep who carries a quota, and who they open up to instead.
• How Brian built an entire chief customer officer program with ChatGPT before he ran a single meeting.
• The one rule that decides whether an executive ever gives you a second meeting.
• What 60 no-agenda conversations surfaced that three years of dinners and ballgames never did.
• Why a handwritten note still outperforms every digital follow-up at the executive level.

Brian Porter is the Chief Customer Officer at Ernest, where he has helped grow the company from around 65 employees to nearly 800 across a 30-plus year career. Before the C-suite he led client relations across 14-plus division offices, turning a people-first culture into a real competitive edge in a category most people write off as a commodity.

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Want AI support that's is insanely reliable without the setup headaches?

Save time and delight customers with Helpfeel's done-for-you deployment and seamless VoC-based optimization.

Join 625 leading businesses using Helpfeel to boost margin.
Learn more: https://en.helpfeel.com

Learn in this episode:
- How RJ Young structures three specialized support teams across 30 products to hit 95 NPS
- Why most AI vendor pitches fail Amanda's one-question filter
- How to build the internal case for AI adoption when your C-suite is getting pitched directly
- What Agent Assist looks like in practice at a 70-year-old company
- Amanda's 2028 prediction for the support agent role and why most teams are not preparing for it
- The career path from journalism to CX and why amplifying customer voices became the mission

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Amanda Carden-Chamberlain is the Director of Customer Success at RJ Young, a Southeast US business technology company that expanded from printers and copiers into full managed IT infrastructure during COVID. She has spent 17 years in CX across food service, e-commerce at 4Patriots, wine and spirits distribution at Saxco, and enterprise technology. In that time she has also been featured on leading CX blogs for her perspective on customer service as an incubator for future company leaders.

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Want an AI support agent that's actually reliable, without the never-ending setup steps?

Save time and delight customers with Helpfeel's done-for-you deployment and seamless VoC-based optimization.

Join 625 leading businesses using Helpfeel to boost margin.

Learn more: https://en.helpfeel.com

Learn in this episode:

• How a $0.50 problem on a transit card unlocked millions in customer loyalty.
• Why removing everyday friction compounds into retention faster than any new feature will.
• What intentional AI calibration looks like in practice and why most teams skip it entirely.
• How to tell the difference between a product that works and a "boardroom product" that only works in the meeting where it was designed.
• Why ESG and community investment at MasterCard translated directly into closed commercial deals.

Troy Dennis leads strategy for regional customers at Experian. His career spans JP Morgan Chase, TD Bank, Regions Bank, and MasterCard, where he led North American digital evolution, prepaid products, and community and belonging programs focused on bringing underserved populations into the digital economy.

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* What if you could pair AI self-service tools with unmatched reliability? *

Learn how you can with Helpfeel's AI support suite, including done-for-you deployment and self-service optimization. Over 800+ teams choose Helpfeel to serve customers with prepared AI that's saving costs and boosting retention.

Find out more: https://en.helpfeel.com