How to Turn Customer Experience from a Support Function into a Growth Lever #588

Customer experience has been living in the wrong part of the business. It has been treated as reactive. Operational. Something you scale after growth, not something you design for growth. But a decent number of high-performing brands are quietly flipping that thinking. They are treating customer experience not as a clean-up crew, but as infrastructure. Something that compounds over time. Something that directly shapes retention, lifetime value, and profitability.

In this Playbook:

• The difference between customer service and customer experience, and why confusing the two limits growth
• Why CX should be treated as an operating system that runs the business, not a single department
• How removing everyday support friction can reduce costs and unlock new revenue
• Why the refund and returns experience is one of the strongest predictors of repeat purchase
• How community feedback and discomfort signal trust, not failure
• When slowing down product launches and drops actually improves customer loyalty and long-term performance

Connect with Emily
Explore Emily Elvey Consulting
Emily Elvey's main episode
Order Editing's main episode
Refundid's main episode
BlackMilk's main episode

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

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SPEAKER_00: 2:46

Yeah, I still see it as a buzz term. And I think that's because there's a lot of misconception between the difference of customer experience and customer service. I often, when I get to a client and we go through our first like kickoff workshop day, I have a big section where we talk about customer experience versus customer service. And for anyone that doesn't know what that difference is, in my opinion, customer service is that one-on-one interaction you have, whether it's physical, whether it's digital. The customer experience is every other element that your customer touches. So that could be your returns portal. It could be your loyalty program, it could be your social media, it could be the Australia Postman that drops off, you know, the post to your house every single week and you know his name. All those things collectively go towards creating your customer experience and what you deem the customer experience of X brand to be. Gets a bit complicated because we have to layer in consumer psychology in there. And every customer is going to experience that experience slightly differently because we all have our own sets of bias and we all go through different reasons for purchasing something. So that experience is individualized. Yes, we work on it at a scale and plug gaps in those departments at scale, but it's very individual. And that's that big difference. I still don't see a lot of true, you know, CX manager roles, head of customer. Like if I look at a CX manager role, that's really a customer service manager, but we're just titling it differently. And I think there's still a lot of work to do there. And I think that's why I'm so passionate about this. Because until we look at that psychology and we look at those customers as individual, I don't think my work in this space can be done.

SPEAKER_01: 4:26

Then what about user experience? Where does that sit? Does that sit alongside or is that part of it?

SPEAKER_00: 4:32

I would say that sits alongside it. It's that's the digital version of that or your physical version, you know, for the ability to get through a store, you know, how wide are the racks, you know, is that friendly for multiple abilities, physical, you know, mental abilities? That's to me as a side of that.

SPEAKER_01: 4:48

Okay. All right. I think that's clear in my head. That's good. Then when you talk about you being a dog with a bone, I could imagine that you have a lot of conversations with CEOs and founders trying to convince them that they need to invest more in customer experience and customer service. How do you tie it to commercial outcomes? Because they've already got the customer.

SPEAKER_00: 5:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 5:11

How do you convince them that they'll get a commercial outcome from further investment?

SPEAKER_00: 5:16

It's tricky because things like this can take a period of time to see the results for. And I guess that's probably one of the first things I talk about. There is going to be a period of time where we need to wait to test effectively and then see the results. So things like your customer lifetime value should go up. The frequency in the purchasing of orders should go down. The CSAT results should stay stable, if not increase if they were low previously. And then even things like your employee satisfaction should increase and your retention of your customer service team should increase if you do invest in this area. We see really closely linked employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. It's sort of like they layer down into each other. And when everyone in your brand feels like they are successfully contributing to a good customer experience, then their experience as an employee is rated higher because they feel like they're doing a great job.

SPEAKER_01: 6:12

And you're talking about employee satisfaction, not just for the customer service team, but the overall team?

SPEAKER_00: 6:17

Yeah, the whole team.

SPEAKER_01: 6:18

That's pretty impressive.

SPEAKER_00: 6:19

Because inevitably, we all should be working towards customer experience satisfaction. We should all be looking at the customer experience, every single department that touches a customer. Effectively, the finance and HR teams are maybe the only two that don't really. Everyone else does.

SPEAKER_01: 6:35

Why are retailers not prioritizing it?

SPEAKER_00: 6:37

To be honest, it's because sometimes the information we find is not all sunshine and rainbows. It can be hard, you know. As human beings, feedback can be challenging, especially when it's not nice. You know, it's not nice. You know, what if you said, like, oh, this is shit, you make it in China, and you've just spent hours, days, weeks, months of your life preparing this thing, building this thing. You think it's the coolest thing you've ever made. Like, especially as a founder, you've invested your whole life, you know, potentially remortgaged your home, all those things into this product and this brand, and someone doesn't like it. Or someone thinks you did a bad job. Like that's gonna sting. It's like all feedback. We get that fight or flight, and you have that feeling in your chest where something is bad, something is wrong. And that's what you're dealing with when you look at the bad elements of customer service. So sometimes we just like to bury our head in the sand because it's easier.

SPEAKER_01: 7:33

Especially if we feel we've got no control on the outcome. So, for example, where the product's made. There's a hell of a lot of teams that have no control over where products made.

SPEAKER_00: 7:46

Because you don't pull those things out if everything else is working well. If you felt fully satisfied as a customer, you wouldn't be picking those sorts of holes.

SPEAKER_01: 7:54

So, what do we know about customer service? If we want to pull it out of the shadows and as an afterthought and into the driving seat of our e-commerce growth, here are three lessons that I've learned from some of our best guests on AdDeCar. Number one, CX is a system, not a team. What I love about Emily is how clear she is when it comes to separating customer service from customer experience. Customer service is the interaction. Customer experience is everything else. It's returns, it's shipping comms, its policy pages, its delivery partners, its tone of voice, it's what happens when something goes wrong. And the mistake a lot of brands make is treating customer experience like a department instead of treating it like an operating system that runs the whole business. Emily's point here is simple, but it's a little uncomfortable. If you only think about CX when a ticket comes in, when a phone call is made, when a complaint is made, you're already too late. So go ahead and sit yourself near that customer service team. The results will show in the numbers. Customer lifetime value goes up, repeat purchase goes up, employee satisfaction improves, no one likes dealing with angry customers, and retention becomes a byproduct, not a KPI you're desperately chasing. Because when customer experience is hidden away in the shadows, the business slowly loses touch with reality. And once that happens, growth starts to look a lot harder than it needs to be, and you start playing catch up on numbers that have already started running the wrong way. Number two, if you want to take your customer experience up a notch, you need to turn support friction into revenue. This one really challenged the way that I think about customer service tickets. Hamish McKay, the founder of app Order Editing, took a hard look at the most common support requests in e-commerce when he was working for a brand. Things like changing an address, editing an order, or canceling an item. And he asked a very simple question. Why are we forcing customers to ask us for permission? Every one of those tickets costs money, between three and seven dollars per interaction in most cases. But when Hamish helped brands turn those tickets into self-service moments, something interesting happened. Customers fixed the problem themselves, support costs dropped, and in a lot of cases, customers actually added more to their order while they were there. Hamish talks about this in terms of cost per ticket, but I love the way that he frames the upside potential. Every ticket you don't have to answer manually is basically ROAS. You're removing friction, saving money, and sometimes increasing AOV at the same time by asking customers to do it themselves, the way they'd like to do it. Another example of customer experience driving revenue, not just resolving problems. Another lesson is around returns. We know it's a key component of that customer experience. Refunds are probably the most emotionally charged moment in an entire customer journey. And unfortunately, most brands treat them like damage control. Customers hate returns, brands hate returns. How do we make this seamless? Brad Carney showed us way back on episode 152 how to flip that thinking completely. The co-founder and CEO of Refunded argues that refunds, they're the moment where trust is either rebuilt or permanently broken. Waiting weeks for a refund creates anxiety. Instant refunds create relief, and relief creates confidence. It also helps get stock in and out quickly. What Brad sees consistently is that when customers get their money back immediately, they're far more likely to purchase again straight away. And ideally, that's what we would like customers to be doing instead of waiting around for returns or refunds. And it's not just because the product was perfect, but because the experience was. This is one of those moments where customer experience does something marketing can't. It restores trust at the exact moment it's at risk. And lastly, the last lesson around creating customer experience that can actually grow your business is to slow down to build a better experience. And for this lesson, we're going to bring in Jackie Kruger from Black Milk. She's sharp, she's clear, and she's very unapologetic about this. The pressure to keep the business machine moving is very real. But relentless speed can quietly erode customer experience. At some point, you have to make a choice. When products get rushed, communication gets messy, when communication is all over the shop, communities start to feel ignored. If people care, they'll challenge you, they'll push back, they'll tell you when something isn't right. And in doing this, they'll often force you to slow down. This is actually a best case scenario. The worst thing is that communities stop telling you and go silent, in which case you've lost them completely. But that friction to slow down is uncomfortable. Working through that discomfort is a huge part of the customer experience journey. Sometimes you need to stop yourself and ask where is this broken for the customer? And fixing it might come at the cost of immediate growth. If it's one thing that this playbook should make clear, it's that customer experience isn't a department you staff up when things break. It's an operating system you build into the business. Emily showed us that when CX is treated holistically, not just as a ticket management, it lifts lifetime value, repeat purchase, and even team performance. Hamish proved that friction in support isn't just a cost problem, it's a growth opportunity when you remove barriers and give customers control. Brad reframed refunds and returns as trust-building moments that decide whether a customer comes back at all. And Jackie reminded us that sometimes the most important CX decision is slowing down, listening to discomfort, respecting community feedback, and choosing focus over constant motion. Different lessons, different operators, but the same truth underneath. When you design the experience properly, growth stops being something you chase and starts being something you own. If you got one or two tips out of this playbook for your e-commerce business, make sure you hit subscribe and we'll keep bringing you more playbooks for different parts of the e-commerce experience. And if you want to discuss any of this, come on over to the Ad to Cart community. It is free to join, and there are hundreds of e commerce professionals in there ready to share questions, share experiences so that you're not in it alone. You can join at ad to cart.com.au. It's free to join. Come over and discuss everything customer experience.