How To Love a Customer Podcast: Episode with Jordan, Who Gives A Crap
When a long-time subscriber cancels, most companies log the churn and move on. The number ticks up by one. The next lead comes in.
At Who Gives A Crap, the internal Slack thread blew up instead.
In the latest episode of How to Love a Customer, Jordan Cousins, Director of Customer Experience Operations at Who Gives A Crap, joined our CEO and Co-Founder Mikhail Dubov from Melbourne. They got into kindness with no referral code on the end of it, where AI fits and where it really doesn't, and what a profit-for-purpose toilet paper company can teach the rest of us about CX.
👉 Subscribe & listen to the latest episode here
🔑 Key takeaways from the episode
1. The story of a customer they lost, in a good way
A long-time Who Gives A Crap subscriber was moving into an aged care home. A family member wrote in to cancel the subscription. The email mentioned a few details about what was going on, and the customer happiness team picked up on the context. They asked a couple of careful questions.
Then the Slack thread spiralled. Welcome gifts went out. The CEO wrote a letter thanking him for being a customer that long. No tracking, no referral code, nothing went on the company socials.
"From other company's perspective, we've lost the customer. Just move on to the next one. But we wanted to do something a little bit nice." — Jordan
2. "Random acts of crappiness" work because they aren't measured
The internal name does a lot of work. Who Gives A Crap took the random-act-of-kindness idea and rebranded it into something that fits how they talk, and they don't try to attach a number to it.
Jordan was direct. Can he prove anything good came out of sending the letter? No. That isn't the point. These moments aren't there to generate a brand story or a LinkedIn post. They exist to reconnect the team to why the company was founded, and to give the customer happiness agents (who spend most of their day on problems) something genuine to celebrate.
"It's genuinely just to connect our team back to what we stand for as a company. There's no payback, there's no benefit. There's no tracking." — Jordan
There is business logic underneath, just not the kind you can put on a dashboard. Good CX people are hard to hire and harder to keep. Giving them the room to do something genuinely kind is one of the ways Who Gives A Crap holds onto the team who actually deliver the experience.
3. Customer happiness and customer experience: same team, different jobs
A lot of companies use the terms interchangeably. At Who Gives A Crap, they're deliberately split. Customer happiness handles the frontline conversations: emails, questions, cancellations. The CX side of the same department listens across those conversations with tools like Chattermill, looking for patterns and turning them into something the rest of the business can act on.
The split matters because the two jobs need different skills. Frontline work is reactive and personal. Insight work is analytical. Same team, different specialisations.
4. "There is no delight if you cannot deliver"
When Mikhail asked which CX trend is overhyped, Jordan didn't hesitate. It was a line from a former boss that has stuck with him.
"There is no delight if you cannot deliver. If you buy a thing to do a thing, you just want it to do the thing. If you let the customer down from what their expectation was to what you deliver upon, it doesn't matter if you've got a really cool brand or a nicely worded email that goes along with it." — Jordan
He's calling out the scramble for shareable surprise-and-delight moments that photograph well and paper over broken basics. The random acts of crappiness work at Who Gives A Crap because the product, the subscription, and the logistics underneath already work.
5. The chatbot that failed because customers didn't know it was there
Around four years ago, Jordan's team built a chat widget for the quick, low-emotion requests: address changes, subscription swaps, that kind of thing. It was aimed mostly at US and UK customers who couldn't reach the APAC support team in their own time zone. The tool was well-built. It could do a lot.
Almost nobody used it.
Looking back, the reason was straightforward. Every customer touchpoint at Who Gives A Crap was email: billing reminders, tracking links, subscription notifications. So when a customer had a question, they hit reply. The widget on the website was invisible because the relationship had never happened there.
"It was a really cool tool. It was doing a whole lot of cool things, just people didn't know about it." — Jordan
The team has since switched providers and put the new AI-assisted flow inside the email queue. Same job. The channel customers were already in.
6. Where AI belongs, and where it doesn't
Jordan's framing on AI is clear. One of the co-founders puts it simply: if it's a choice between a robot and a human, the human wins. AI still has a place in the tool belt, especially for the fast, transactional requests where the customer just wants the thing done.
The test he uses: does this moment need a human to read it and think "I've got an idea, I can do this differently"? If yes, it's a human moment. If it's an address change, AI earns its keep.
"AI's got a really important place to play in our CX world going forward, but it's a part of the world. It is not the entire world." — Jordan
💬 Bonus hot takes
🎯 Overhyped trends: Deliver-and-delight without the deliver. And framing AI as the solution rather than part of the toolkit.
🧠 CX mindset: If a robot tries to tell you a funny joke in the middle of your complaint, you're not going to find it charming. Humans still make the world go round.
📱 Brand shout-out: Canva. Good taste, fast, and the thing just works.
🧳 Why this episode matters
The most interesting CX stories rarely come from the companies with the biggest CX budgets. They come from teams who have thought hard about why they're doing the work in the first place.
What Jordan describes isn't a framework. It's a set of conditions: the right people, a company that stands behind them, and enough slack in the day for someone to spot a moment and act on it.
🎧 Listen to How to Love a Customer
If you work in CX, Insights, or Product at a consumer brand, this episode is worth your commute.
👉 Catch the latest episode here
Episode notes:
00:00 — Meet Jordan, Director of CX Operations at Who Gives A CrapJoining from Melbourne, Jordan introduces the profit-for-purpose paper products business taking on the big toilet paper incumbents.
04:30 — Jordan's path into CXFrom a part-time customer service job at university, to launching Deliveroo in Australia, to almost seven years at Who Gives A Crap.
08:45 — Competing in a crowded categoryHow brand, purpose, and the mission to fund clean water and sanitation projects give customers a reason to switch from the brand they grew up with.
12:15 — The feedback Who Gives A Crap actually getsWhy customers write in to help the company get better, not to complain, and how the personal nature of the product shapes the conversations.
14:30 — Moving from DTC to retailWhat the company loses in visibility, what it keeps from its DTC data, and why every employee is expected to be their own customer in-store.
19:15 — The customer they lost in a good wayThe aged care story: a family email, a Slack thread, a CEO letter, and no tracking attached.
23:15 — Customer happiness vs. customer experienceOne team, two specialisations, and why the split matters.
28:30 — Why random acts of crappiness aren't measuredThe case for doing kind things with no referral code on the end.
33:15 — AI: tool belt, not toolboxWhere it helps, where it fails, and the co-founder mantra on humans vs. robots.
35:30 — The chatbot experiment that didn't workGood tool, wrong channel, and what the team learned when customers kept replying by email anyway.
42:15 — Hot takes: deliver before you delightThe overhyped trends Jordan would happily retire.
