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 at Daily Harvest, Little Spoon, and now Smalls, Victoria explains why one escalated customer is usually a signal rather than an outlier. She breaks down how she quantifies a problem before leadership will act on it, why she refuses to wait on the analytics team, and how bringing both data and real customer stories to the table is what actually moves people.

Victoria also gets into how she builds and empowers a CX team, why agents should be trusted to make the right call even when it costs money, and where AI fits into modern customer experience. She’s deploying it carefully, starting with the easy stuff, with one rule she won’t bend: customers can always reach a human. Plus her take on the DTC industry’s stubborn habit of treating CX as a cost center, and why Amazon went from writing the book on service to a model of what not to become.

Tune in to learn how to turn a single frustrated customer into a company-wide fix, how to make leadership listen with scrappy data, and why great CX in DTC comes down to trust, empowerment, and actually listening.