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Shut Up and Listen: The Path to CX Excellence ft. Eli Weiss
Have you ever opened your inbox only to face an avalanche of promotional emails from your favorite brands? (And ended up unsubscribing to everything in frustration?)
Today's digital-first economy has prompted most retailers and e-commerce brands to concentrate their communication efforts online. In our post-pandemic world, the average consumer now understands exactly what Vernon Dursley experienced when his house was flooded with Hogwarts letters in Harry Potter.
According to our LinkedIn poll, 23% of respondents said hearing from brands once a month is more than enough—that’s all they can handle!
Yes, consistent messaging is key to gaining the trust of an increasingly skeptical customer base. However,
- 76% of consumers report frustration when brand interactions aren't personalized
- 69% feel bombarded by too many emails.
Modern customer experience requires a delicate balance—showing care and personalization without appearing desperate or pushy about making a sale.
So how can brands achieve a unified customer experience? It begins with truly listening to consumers and understanding their problems before rushing to offer solutions. It starts with social listening, genuine understanding, and thoughtful communication.
Eli Weiss, fondly known as “The CX Guy,” recently joined Sprinklr's CX-WISE podcast to share his wisdom on achieving the right balance of communication while implementing marketing strategies that genuinely improve customer experience to stand out in today’s saturated market.
Let's dive in.
What does It take to really wow your customers?
Imagine dining at a Michelin-starred restaurant where they accommodate your personal preferences like preparing a pepper steak without pepper or crafting a special sauce without pine nuts because you have nut allergy. As much as we hate to be that friend who tells you not to settle, it's time consumers such as yourself realize they've been accepting the bare minimum and that it doesn't actually take much to wow anyone anymore.
This involves breaking free from scripted messaging like those template emails blasted to hundreds of people. Effective customer experience management should focus on what customers truly want to hear. It starts with:
- Social listening to understand customer conversations in public spaces and ensure all messaging aligns with actual customer desires. (If people are talking about your brand being unaffordable, perhaps it's time to throw a flash sale.)
- Personalizing the experience for each customer. Whether that's bundling an extra pair of socks with their Christmas purchase or sending a thoughtful thank-you note during the holidays. Customers want to be seen, heard, and understood.
However, this approach can be challenging for B2B audiences, where the playing field differs significantly:
"When you jump into a product purchase journey in B2B, your consideration phase is often much longer. Your contract is much larger. The cost to do business and the risk are higher. And the status quo is getting sold—or oversold—by a seller who doesn't really understand what you're looking for, being pushed into a longer contract than you want, getting upsold and cross-sold things you don't need, and being promised products that don't exist,." Eli adds.
To make an impression in the B2B space, brands simply need to deliver what they promise. Never overpromise and underdeliver to make a sale. Building this experience begins with aligning your goals across marketing and sales. While one department aims to promote product X, others might be focusing their social media efforts on product Y—and nobody wins.
This misalignment doesn’t just confuse your customers; it disrupts your ability to listen and respond effectively.
Here’s where social listening and personalization come in.
When marketing and sales teams aren’t aligned on messaging, it becomes impossible to understand customer sentiment holistically across channels. Social listening tools rely on cohesive messaging to accurately capture what your audience is saying and expecting from your brand. If your sales team is pushing one product while your social channels talk about another, your customer insights will be scattered, and personalization efforts will feel off-mark.
Similarly, aligning KPIs around fast, consistent response times—whether on the phone or social—shows customers you’re listening and that their time matters. Speed is a form of personalization: no one wants to feel like just another ticket in a queue. When response time targets are unified across channels, it creates a seamless customer experience where the person on Twitter gets the same care as the person calling your support line.
In short, true personalization starts with listening, but it’s only effective when every team speaks the same language—and responds with the same urgency.
(Psst: Sprinklr Social can help you level up your social insights.)
Marketing strategies and the CX connection
Everyone has a favorite brand—a product or service—they refuse to compromise on. One singular unique experience, or a series of experiences, has cemented this perception in their minds.
Take Apple users, so deeply ingrained in the product ecosystem that they're unwilling to experiment with alternatives. It's reached the point where many won't even tolerate the green text bubbles that come with Android messages.
The same level of loyalty can be observed among Tesla owners or devotees of luxury brands like LVMH and YSL.
These companies have accomplished something seemingly impossible in our era: creating a hyper-loyal customer base that's unwilling—some might say unable—to abandon them and their products.
This phenomenon can be attributed to brand value. Strategic marketing and intelligent placement have positioned these products as the ultimate solution for customers, who often overlook occasional poor service experiences.
The relationship between brand and customer experience is inherently symbiotic—they mutually benefit and reinforce each other. A well-crafted brand experience sets the stage for positive customer interactions, while exceptional customer experiences enhance brand perception.
A compelling brand establishes customer expectations and emotional connections. It involves consistent messaging, visual identity, and values that resonate with the target audience. Customers who encounter a cohesive and engaging brand are more likely to approach the company with positive expectations.
The marketing and branding tactics thus pave the way for a smoother customer experience and the building of a loyal customer base that stands by your brand through thick and thin.
"Great branding will get you to a place where your sales cycle is shorter, your consideration phase is shorter, and your CX feedback is less," Weiss affirms.
A perfect example of exceptional branding? Patagonia.
The Patagonia Story
Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia's founder, has maintained the same message since the 1970s: "If you can create a company of honest messaging and truth, your customers will look to you for what's right."
The outdoor apparel brand focuses on creating sustainable, high-quality products while inspiring environmental stewardship. Its culture emphasizes honesty and transparency, believing that customer loyalty comes through doing what is right—not through marketing gimmicks.
Perhaps most surprisingly, one message it consistently communicates is: DON'T BUY OUR PRODUCTS.
This counterintuitive approach stems from Patagonia's belief that a product should be worn until it's truly unusable and beyond repair.
True to its messaging, Patagonia offers free or low-cost repairs for damaged gear, ensuring items remain functional for years. With 62 repair centers in the U.S. alone, it’s made it easiery for customers to repair rather than replace their gear.
In a world dominated by fast fashion, this approach resonates with environmentally conscious consumers. Sustainability Trends found that 25% of Patagonia's customers specifically chose the brand because of its repair services.
When brand messaging aligns perfectly with customer experience, something magical happens. Customers don't just buy products—they buy into a vision, a set of values, and a community. And the brand becomes part of their identity.
Hey marketers, start thinking like your customers
We can all probably agree that today every product, service, robot (and human) can be replicated, right? So how can you really stand out in this marketplace? Well, all you need to do is pay attention to these two things:
- Your messaging
- Your customer experience management
But finding the balance between what we offer as a brand and what we're willing to tolerate as customers is drastically different. As customers, we're unwilling to read through a plethora of newsletters, but as marketers, we swear by their validity and go by the numbers. When you and I happily scroll through hours of YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, why do we still bombard our customers with that PDF that drags on for 16 pages?
This gap stems from the misconception that segmentation is hard.
How very 2016 of you to assume so.
The key to building long-lasting relationships with customers is to understand what they want. To note how they respond to your communications, to listen to their conversations, and to provide answers to their questions. With the wealth of data available on every platform, the solution lies in streamlining conversations from social platforms, emails, and other outbound communications to gauge how to proceed.
Weiss shares a story of how a small, unique brand nailed this approach.
Being a matcha loyalist himself, Weiss had ordered several times from a newer brand. This company noticed his repeated purchases of the same product (vanilla matcha) and reached out with a simple email: "Hey! How would you like to try our strawberry flavor? Even our vanilla enthusiasts love it!" (followed by data to back it up).
The same company went a step further, sending Weiss a free matcha whisk and bowl for his home preparations.
This example shows how a brand went out of its way and tore up the script to delight one single customer. The result? They likely have a customer for life!
With AI-powered insights on social communications, it has become easier than ever for brands to streamline and personalize how they communicate with their target audiences. The data is available—the next step is figuring out how to make it work for you.
In that same vein, bombarding customers with countless emails won't necessarily lead to a sale. But understanding what an individual customer prefers and delivering it—perhaps targeting them with a video instead of a newsletter—might be the approach needed to nudge them toward a decision and make them choose you over your competitors.
The universal truth about customers... Are you listening?
We asked Weiss about the one universal truth concerning customers that applies across industries—something that B2B, DTC, or B2C brands can learn, understand, and apply. His answer was refreshingly straightforward:
"Nobody talks to their customers enough. Nobody. Across tech. Across consumer. I mean, across any industry I've spoken to—everyone guesses who their customers are, what their customers think, what their customers want."
In the movie "The Intern," Anne Hathaway plays the CEO of an e-commerce fashion brand who dedicates a significant portion of her day to taking customer calls. "This is why I take these calls—you get to learn so much about your own company," she says emphatically.
As marketers and brand advocates we communicate constantly. We send emailers, post on our social channels, and when we acquire a new customer, we celebrate the win, push them down the funnel, and move on. But rarely do we take the time to truly engage with our customers—to understand why they chose us over competitors, why they remain loyal to our brand, and why they continue their relationship with us.
True relationship building and effective customer experience management begin when you start listening to customers—when you actively engage in social care and leverage AI and the wealth of available data to target your message to your customer thoughtfully.
It's worth noting that 61% of businesses today employ social listening, with over 82% of marketers viewing it as a crucial planning component.
So in this age of endless noise, it's time to take a page from Anne Hathaway's fictional CX playbook and start listening more before we speak.
Conclusion: The art of listening in a noisy world
One recurring theme of this podcast episode was this: the power of genuine listening. In a marketplace saturated with messages, products, and services that often blur together, the brands that truly stand out are those that take the time to understand their customers at a deeper level.
Whether it's Patagonia's commitment to sustainability that creates lifelong advocates, or a small matcha company that pays attention to individual purchasing patterns, the common denominator is an authentic interest in customer needs, preferences, and feedback.
The accelerated digital transformation since the pandemic has given us unprecedented tools for understanding our customers—from social listening platforms to AI-powered analytics. But technology alone isn't enough. The most successful brands combine these powerful tools with genuine human connection, using data to inform conversations rather than replace them.
After all, in a world where everyone is talking, the brands that take the time to listen don't just stand out—they create connections that stand the test of time. And in today's experience economy, those connections might be the most valuable currency of all.
Want to hear more insights from Eli Weiss? Listen to the full conversation below:
