Don’t Wait for Things to Break: Zertashia Awan on Proactive CX at Scale
How do you make service feel personal when your organisation supports millions—or billions—of customers? Zertashia Awan draws on her journey from taking customer calls to leading global CX teams at Amazon to argue that standards must be defined before the next crisis, not after it.
The episode at a glance
- Define customer-experience principles before the next period of rapid growth or operational pressure.
- Frontline customer conversations reveal friction that management dashboards can miss.
- Build everyday habits that keep the customer present in leadership decisions, even at huge scale.
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Four ideas worth taking from this conversation
A career that started on the phones
Zertashia traces her customer-experience perspective back to handling complaints about deliveries, refunds and other stressful interactions directly. The frontline work taught her to listen closely, see the situation from the customer’s perspective and distinguish the reported problem from what the person truly needs.
Customer obsession has to survive hypergrowth
In environments that launch services across geographies and serve huge audiences, teams can easily optimise for volume alone. Zertashia explains why simplicity, dependable fundamentals and clear experience principles allow an organisation to scale without making people feel like a ticket number.
Bring the actual customer into the boardroom
Rather than opening every business review with aggregate metrics, Zertashia suggests using a real customer contact or short recording to set the tone. A few minutes of lived experience can illuminate what is at stake behind operational charts and help teams focus on fixing the underlying journey.
Standards matter most when there is pressure
Tighter budgets, urgent launches and escalations test whether customer promises are genuine. Her message to startups and mature brands is to establish decision rules, feedback loops and ownership early—before a failure forces an expensive, reactive response.
A practical takeaway
At your next operations meeting, begin with a real customer interaction and name one design or policy change it suggests. Assign an owner, record the impact on customer effort and revisit the result next month.
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