How to Love a Customer explores how great brands transform surprising customer moments into unforgettable experiences, with Chattermill CEO Mikhail Dubov interviewing the leaders who truly listen to their customers and understand the human behavior that drives loyalty.
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In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Victoria Weiss, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Smalls, shares the story of a loyal customer named Jill whose frozen food kept arriving warm, and how that single escalation exposed a delivery problem that was quietly driving subscribers away. After several layers of escalation got Jill nowhere, Victoria got on a call, fixed her immediate problem, then asked the question most companies skip: how many other customers are hitting this exact issue? Drawing on a decade in DTC customer experience, from agent work at Rent the Runway to leading CX a
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Olga Ivanova, Senior Director of Customer Experience at inDrive, shares what it actually takes to run CX for the world's second-most-downloaded ride-hailing app — operating across 48 markets, on a two-sided bidding platform, where drivers and riders set their own prices and cash is still how most payments work. The company started as a Facebook group in Yakutia, Russia, where ordinary people fought back against taxi drivers hiking prices in minus-42-degree weather. That founding obsession with fairness, Olga Ivanova explains, isn't just a values state
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Casper Overbeek — Chief Product & Experience Officer at CitizenM — shares how the boutique hotel brand scaled from 10 to nearly 40 properties without losing the thing guests actually come for: genuine human hospitality. He starts with an honest story about a product failure. CitizenM built an ambassador app, rolled it out with confidence, and watched almost no one use it. The fix came only after they did what they should have done first — talked to the frontline staff. One remote iPad restart feature changed everything. Casper unpacks what made Citize
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Jai Patel, Principal | EMEA Nike Store Partner Management : Retail Excellence & Consumer Experiences — a retail leader who started on the shop floor at 15 and has since worked across Next, Selfridges, Bicester Village, and Dyson — shares how the gap between boardroom strategy and in-store execution is the real CX problem most brands aren't solving. The moment that crystallised it for him: standing in a Nike store in Liverpool while customers shouted at his team because the receipt printer was broken, and realising the operational failure was only half
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Jordan Cousins, Director of Customer Experience Operations at Who Gives A Crap, shares how a single cancellation email — from the family of a long-time customer moving into aged care — turned into a company-wide moment of generosity. The customer happiness team spotted the signal, asked a couple of careful questions, and before long the internal Slack thread had exploded with ideas. Welcome gifts went out. The co-founder wrote a handwritten letter. No tracking, no referral code, no social post attached. Jordan explains how Who Gives A Crap's "random a
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Lisa Knowles, Strategic Program Manager at Miro, shares how she used an AI workflow she’d built inside Miro to prepare for a meeting with a Japanese customer she’d never spoken to. By pulling together CSM notes, scoping documents, annual reports, and competitor data, she walked into the room with tailored recommendations and a full presentation — in Japanese — ready in under an hour. The customer couldn’t believe it was their first conversation. Lisa explains how that moment crystallised something Miro had been building toward: a culture where custome
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Lennard Winters, Product Manager leading IKEA's global customer audience platform, reveals two quietly powerful stories about what happens when you truly listen to customers. The first: a customer discovery session where shoppers admitted they'd stopped saving wishlists — because they trusted retargeted ads to remember their browsing for them. The second: how a digital product team found that simplifying IKEA's paper receipt (removing lines no customer actually used) saved millions in costs and improved the experience — all through subtraction, not ad
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Domonique Brown—Head of Customer Experience at Liquid IV—shares how one frustrated customer completely changed her approach to building CX at scale. Early in her time at the company (when she was just employee #11), Domonique responded to a Facebook message with playful brand energy borrowed from her beauty industry background. Within minutes, that customer called—upset, frustrated, and feeling dismissed. They had a medical condition Domonique wasn't familiar with, and what she thought was engaging came across as generic and uncaring. That moment taug
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Rufus Weston—insights leader with decades of experience at BBC, Nike, Just Eat, HarperCollins, and now running his own consultancy—shares how one powerful mantra from a CMO changed everything: "Love your customer like you love your wife." What started as a simple phrase became the foundation for how Rufus thinks about building customer-centric cultures, proving the value of insights, and turning CX into a business driver instead of a cost center. Rufus walks through the evolution of customer insights—from telephone surveys to AI—and explains why, desp
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Eli Weiss — longtime DTC operator and now a leader at Yotpo — shares how a single customer email at OLIPOP exposed a major production error: root beer accidentally canned as Vintage Cola. What could have been written off as a confusing complaint instead became a defining moment in how fast, empowered CX teams can protect a brand from disaster. Acting quickly prevented the wrong product from hitting shelves nationwide — and reinforced just how much customer insight matters long before dashboards detect a problem. Eli unpacks how that moment shaped his
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, James Villacci, Head of Global UX Research at HelloFresh, shares how one scrappy usability test—run on top of a New York City dumpster—uncovered a critical friction point in the signup flow and proved just how directly customer problems can impact revenue. James explains how that moment helped shift HelloFresh from seeing research as “nice to have” to building a company-wide culture where insights drive decisions. He describes his “research restaurant” model, where teams across the business become chefs of their own small studies, and insight “meal ki
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Olga Arsenii, Head of Customer Insights at Qonto, shares how one frustrated customer exposed a weakness in their onboarding experience—and sparked a company-wide movement to fix it. While analyzing feedback with her team, Olga discovered that many new users felt alone and overwhelmed during account setup. Support agents were reading scripts instead of solving real problems, and language barriers only made things worse. Within weeks, cross-functional teams—from frontline support to C-suite leaders—came together to redesign the process, proving that at
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, Anastasia Zdoroviak—former CX leader at DoorDash and Rappi, now Chief Customer Experience Officer at Snoonu—shares a personal story that perfectly captures what great CX really means. One night in Mexico City, her daughter couldn’t sleep because of mosquitoes. The stores were closed, delivery slots were full, and no quick fix seemed possible—until her own team unknowingly solved the same problem for thousands of users by analyzing failed search sessions and launching 10-minute deliveries from dark stores. Anastasia explains how this “mosquito moment”
In this episode of How to Love a Customer, David McDaid from END. Clothing shares the customer story that transformed his company's approach to quality - one where everything possible went wrong. Warehouse delays, customs issues, weather problems, a missing package, and finally the wrong item delivered after a week and a half. Instead of writing it off as bad luck, David's team created an internal "quality score" system that evaluates every order against six common failure points. Their score jumped from the mid-40s to the high-90s, customer complaints dropped dramatically, and the original cu
In this episode, Julia Zuber from Lime Home reveals how a seemingly minor guest complaint about sleep quality led to one of their most impactful customer experience improvements. What started as scattered feedback about uncomfortable nights turned into a company-wide pillow revolution that transformed guest satisfaction scores. Julia shares the detective work that uncovered the real culprit behind poor sleep experiences across 5,000 properties in Europe. It wasn't the beds, the rooms, or the booking process - it was something so basic that it almost slipped through the cracks entirely. By divi
In this episode, James McGhee from Foot Asylum shares the customer story that completely changed how he thinks about experience design, and it involves a whole butchered pig, a narrowboat, and a freezer that couldn't handle the cold. When James took an escalation call from a customer whose entire year's worth of pig meat had spoiled due to a faulty freezer, he discovered something crucial: the experience you design isn't always the experience customers receive. This self-sufficient customer living on a narrowboat had bought a chest freezer specifically to store his pig, but nobody had educated
In this episode, Abdul Khaled from E.O.N. Next reveals how they cracked the code on customer engagement in one of the world's most boring industries - energy. With customers only engaging once per month when they receive their bill, E.O.N. Next had to make that single touchpoint count, transforming complaints about high bills into opportunities for deeper customer relationships. Abdul shares the fascinating detective work that uncovered the real reason behind billing complaints: disconnected smart meters that customers didn't even know were broken. By digging beyond the obvious and creating si
