CX Champions

There are genuine operational nuggets - using Black Crow AI for replenishment cycle prediction, asking cancelling subscribers whether they've moved to retail (not truly lapsed), and melt rate as a product-specific KPI - but these are interspersed with considerable rambling, the Chewy anecdote, and a lengthy tangent on eyeglasses brands that yields nothing actionable. Insight-per-minute is moderate at best.

“We use a tool, it's called Black Crow AI and it sits in the background and Understands by product what the replenishment cycles are for those individual products.”

“one of the questions that we started asking that is really important...is, are you buying Ollie somewhere else? Is it Amazon? Is it Target?”

The regulatory constraint forcing AI use to the back-end only, and the churn-analysis reframe of 'retail switcher ≠ lapsed customer,' are genuinely non-obvious angles. However, the episode leans heavily on well-worn territory: Chewy as the CX gold standard, 'you are never your customer,' and personalization as the next frontier - all extremely common claims in this space.

“we're not using it to write product descriptions, we're not using it to write ads or make images or anything like that. But where it's really awesome for us is on the back end.”

“is this really what we would call a churned customer or are they just buying it at Publix now?”

Jennifer Peters is a working practitioner managing real martech stacks and subscription economics at a Unilever-owned CPG brand, not a career thought-leader. Her 13-year brick-and-mortar background gives her a concrete comparative lens. She is a director-level operator, credible and on-topic, though not an exceptionally senior or broadly influential figure in the field.

“I spent 13 years at Barnes and Noble putting books in people's hands.”

“we started as a startup in 2015. We were acquired by Unilever in 2019.”

Named tools (Black Crow AI, Content Square), specific retailers, a rough revenue split (70% brick-and-mortar), and product names (Love and Libido, Happy Hoo Ha, Women's Multi) lend texture. However, there are virtually no hard metrics - no conversion rates, no churn percentages, no A/B test results, no dollar figures - leaving most claims qualitative and unverifiable.

“we still do probably 70% of our businesses done in brick and mortar”

“in the summer we definitely do more of a merchandising emphasis on our non meltables, whereas like in the cooler months, you know, it's kind of like all gummies all the time”

The host asks a few structurally decent questions (on AI-human balance, repurchase triggering) but consistently fails to follow up when interesting threads emerge - the regulatory AI constraint, the identity-resolution problem, and the churn-reclassification logic all deserved harder follow-ups. The host also inserts personal anecdotes and self-deprecating asides that derail momentum rather than deepen the conversation.

“Hmm, this might be a silly question.”

“I mean, like, you mentioned you took off the sparkly sugar because the customers wanted it.”