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.
That idea came into sharp focus in a recent Add To Cart chat with customer experience specialist Emily Elvey, and reinforced by lessons from operators including Hamish McKay (Order Editing), Brad Karney (Refundid) and Jackie Kruger (Blackmilk).
Together, their stories point to a simple but uncomfortable truth for ecommerce leaders: customer experience is not a department. It is an operating system.
Customer Experience As an Operating System
Emily Elvey is unusually clear on where most brands go wrong. Customer service, she explains, is the interaction. Customer experience is everything else.
Returns. Shipping communications. Policy pages. Delivery partners. Tone of voice. What happens when something breaks.
When brands treat CX as a single team rather than a system that touches the whole business, they only ever see the symptoms, never the cause. Tickets spike. Reviews dip. Retention suffers. And the instinctive response is to add more headcount or more tools.
Emily argues that by the time a ticket exists, the experience has already failed somewhere upstream. When CX is designed holistically, customer lifetime value increases, repeat purchase improves, and even internal team satisfaction lifts. Retention stops being something you chase and becomes something that happens naturally.
One of her strongest recommendations is also one of the simplest: leaders need to expose themselves to customer noise. Sit near the service team. Jump into tickets. Spend time packing orders or on the shop floor. When CX is hidden away, businesses slowly lose touch with reality.
Friction in Support Is a Growth Opportunity
Hamish McKay’s insight from building Order Editing reframes one of ecommerce’s most common pain points.
Support tickets are expensive. In many businesses, a single manual interaction can cost anywhere from three to seven dollars. But Hamish noticed something more important than the cost itself: many of those tickets exist purely because customers are blocked from fixing simple problems themselves.
Think address changes, Order edits, cancellations. These aren’t edge cases. They are everyday moments of friction.
By giving customers the ability to self-serve those changes, brands don’t just reduce ticket volume. They often unlock additional revenue. Customers who feel in control are more likely to add items, adjust orders confidently, and stay engaged.
Hamish frames this saving as cost per ticket, but the upside behaves more like ROAS. Remove friction, reduce cost, and increase order value at the same time. That is customer experience functioning as a growth lever, not a support expense.
The Refund Moment Decides the Relationship
Did you know that refunds are actually one of the most emotionally charged moments in the customer journey? And, usually, brands treat them as damage control.
Brad Karney from Refundid takes the opposite view. Refunds are not the end of the relationship: they are the moment when trust is either repaired or permanently lost.
Long delays create anxiety. Uncertainty erodes confidence. And weeks spent waiting for money back quietly kill the likelihood of a second purchase.
Instant refunds change the emotional arc completely. Relief replaces frustration, confidence returns and, in many cases, customers are willing to purchase again immediately because the experience itself felt fair and respectful.
This is something marketing cannot fix after the fact. Trust, once broken in the refund process, is hard to rebuild. But when handled well, refunds become one of the strongest predictors of repeat purchase.
Slowing Down Is Also Customer Experience
Jackie Kruger from Blackmilk brings a different but equally important lens to customer experience.
In ecommerce, the pressure to keep the machine moving is constant. More drops. More launches. More noise. But Jackie is unapologetic about the cost of relentless speed.
When products are rushed, communication suffers. When communication gets messy, communities feel ignored. And when communities feel ignored, trust erodes.
Jackie speaks openly about community as a double-edged sword. Passionate customers will challenge decisions: they will push back and force uncomfortable conversations. That friction is not a failure of experience. It is evidence of it.
Choosing to slow down, focus on fewer releases, and invest in better storytelling is not just a brand decision. It is a customer experience decision. Working through discomfort rather than avoiding it is often the difference between short-term momentum and long-term loyalty.
The pattern is consistent: customer experience drives growth when it is designed intentionally, not when it is patched reactively. It shows up in systems, policies, empowerment, and decisions that prioritise trust over speed.
For ecommerce leaders under pressure from rising acquisition costs, thinner margins, and more demanding customers, CX is no longer optional infrastructure. It is the layer that determines whether growth compounds or quietly leaks away.
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
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