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Episode 07

Building Brand Loyalty Through Frictionless Customer Support

In this episode, Adele Hedden, Head of Customer Experience at Faire, talks about how to build a proactive customer service model built on data, why companies need to be strategic around service modality, and how creating a unified customer view improves employee experience and customer experience.

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Guest speaker: Adele Hedden

Adele is the Head of Customer Experience at Faire, an online wholesale marketplace built on the belief that the future is local. Adele currently serves as an Expert for Primary Venture Partners and as an Advisor for Aneta Ed. Her previous CX roles include Director of Customer Operations at Rent the Runway, Director of Operations and CX at Great Jones, and Senior Program Manager of Community Operations at Uber.

Episode summary

This episode features an interview with Adele Hedden, Head of Customer Experience at Faire. With a decade of experience at publicly traded companies like Rent The Runway and Uber, Adele is focused on transforming customer journeys through brand loyalty and foundational metrics.

In this episode, Kailey and Adele discuss the service recovery paradox, upleveling your CX strategy, and how the employee and customer experience go hand-in-hand.

Key takeaways

  • The best customer experience is not having to contact customer support at all. Having robust data allows you to identify opportunities to provide proactive support to customers in need. 

  • The customer and employee journey go hand-in-hand. In order to deliver a frictionless customer experience, the same needs to be done for employees. Investing in a unified view of your customers for your employees is also an investment in your customer experience.

  • Brand loyalty hits an all-time high when a company recovers and corrects issues quickly. This is called the service recovery paradox. Customers feel more positive about a company after an issue is resolved than before there was an issue at all.

Speaker quotes

“I think that the best customer experience when you're engaging with a brand is generally one that is as frictionless as possible. I really subscribe to this belief that the best customer support you could possibly get is not needing customer support at all.” – Adele Hedden, Head of Customer Experience, Faire

Episode timestamps

‍*(02:10) - Adele’s customer journey background

*(06:04) - Adele’s role at Faire

*(07:11) - Trends in wholesale customer experience

*(13:57) - Foundational data points Faire is using to create customer profiles

*(18:06) - Biggest challenge in building customer experience journeys

‍*(22:49) - An example of another company doing it right with customer experience (hint: it’s Trader Joe’s, Netflix, and Delta)

*(32:42) - Adele’s recommendations for upleveling your customer strategy

Connect with Adele on LinkedIn

Connect with Kailey on LinkedIn