Leader Spotlight: Leveraging CX as a decision filter, with Aurelia Pollet

Aurelia Pollet is VP of Customer Experience at CarParts.com. She began her career as a B2B sales engineer at SNECI, a consulting firm specializing in industrial performance improvement. Aurelia later joined Louis Vuitton, where she first worked in new product development client services roles. Prior to her current role at CarParts, she served in CX leadership positions at Quest Nutrition, Exemplis LLC, and Alder.

In our conversation, Aurelia describes how the customer experience function is an intentional discipline that acts as a decision filter. She talks about how CX has a 360-degree, end-to-end view of the customer’s experience, and how that helps inform product decisions. Aurelia also shares the importance of framing ideas or concerns in a way that’s appealing to leadership.

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Creating value and identifying friction

You’ve mentioned that you are not a ‘fixer’ or a service desk. Could you share how you define customer experience and how you articulate that definition internally?

I say I’m not a “fixer” because I think of “fixing” as being a reactive function, and CX is anything but reactive. For me, it’s more like a discipline, and it’s very intentional. Customer experience is all about designing journeys and aligning teams around different touchpoints that will deliver on brand promise and, ultimately, customer expectations.

CX creates that value for both the customer and the organization. It’s not that the customer experience team doesn’t fix things sometimes, but that it’s not its core function. I see CX as an internal decision filter. When we’re making a decision about a process, experience, or even a product, I ask the same two questions: is it good for the customer, and is it good for the company? If the answer isn’t yes to both, then something’s not right. CX needs to bring value every time for both the customer and the company; it cannot be detrimental to one or the other.

Thinking about customer experience across discovery, purchase, and post-purchase, how do you help leaders from different disciplines distinguish between what qualifies as a growth lever vs. a support problem?

First, I look to identify friction and see where it’s coming from. What is it? How often does it happen, and what behavior does it affect? If you are talking about discovery or pre-purchase, this clearly might impact conversion. In this case, CX is a growth lever — you are affecting demand and conversion, and all this good stuff!

For me, CX is about identifying those patterns, quantifying them, and deciding on the right response. You don’t have to treat each problem the same way, but every problem is an opportunity. If the situation is an edge case, it’s a support problem. You don’t want to send in the whole cavalry for a one-off issue — you want to help the customer, but you also need to define and prioritize where to spend your time.

Looking at the end-to-end experience

Where do the boundaries between CX blur relative to product, marketing, and ops — or, do you feel they are completely distinct?

This is a very interesting question — the boundary exists, but CX lives in that “messy middle” area. Customer experience is the dot connector, we don’t own a distinct function like marketing — instead, we look at the end-to-end experience. CX has a 360-degree view of both the company and the customer. Because of that unique viewpoint, customer experience is positioned to say whether something meets the requirement for the brand promise.

CX also deals with escalation when customers are affected by something significant. It’s really about the whole vision, not just one function. This is the main difference between customer experience and functions like marketing, product, and ops — there’s a clear boundary, but CX operates in the entirety of those functions as well.

You mentioned that CX influences the end-to-end experience. How do you leverage data to pinpoint friction in ways that go beyond surface-level voice of customer sentiment?

Sentiment is great to better understand the pain a user is feeling, but it doesn’t necessarily connect those findings to any action. The customer felt something, but what are we doing about it? I usually use three different approaches to understand what’s going on.

The first one is really easy — take a test drive of your own experience. This involves things like mystery shopping and other actions that help you understand what customers actually experience, not what you think they experience. There’s often a gap between what you think you’re giving them and what they’re actually experiencing.

Second, look at data. This includes operational behaviors like clicks, conversions, sales, visits, and more. These are useful for understanding where friction exists and where we have customers dropping off the experience.

Last, listen directly to customers, whether it be via calls or online reviews. When you hear directly from the customer, you can quickly identify emerging patterns — recurring friction points that people talk about. Of course, people may use different wording to describe what they’re frustrated by, but it all stems from the same pain point.

Translating signals into priorities

Once you have all that data, how do you translate it to the broader organization?

When you connect all those signals, it’s easier to translate them into clear priorities and decide if you want to redesign the journey or go through an ops change, for example. Looking at customer impact and frequency, you can decide if you want to take action or leave it alone.

Then, when it comes to business value, how does it impact the business? Are we losing sales? Are we losing retention? How much effort and time will it take to address those issues? How do you match the company’s priorities with the friction points you have identified? It’s important to always put these in the same frame as the company’s priorities and roadmap.

Essentially, the role of CX is to identify those friction points and then frame them in such a way that leaders can understand the implications of either addressing or delaying addressing the situation. We can make those intentional decisions so that they’re no longer reactive.

The leaders you’re presenting to certainly have their own perspective based on the area they’re running. What’s your approach to framing what needs to be addressed so that they can’t ignore it?

That’s where some of my sales background comes into play — you have to frame it in a way that’s appealing to the leaders. It has to resonate both financially and operationally. For example, you might ask, “What is it going to cost if we don’t move forward? What is the opportunity cost?” Or perhaps, “We’ve already put so much resourcing into this opportunity, why don’t we finish it?”

There are many different ways of framing the situation around churn, wasted spend, or missed growth. That way, the conversation is not about whether we should fix this, but rather how fast we can fix it. A leader on the receiving end of the conversation will need to understand how the recommendation is going to impact the bottom line.

In your experience scaling loyalty programs, what early signals tell you that solving a friction point will also unlock a new growth loop?

You can always go back to the basics, which, in the case of a loyalty program, are the customers. In the end, you want people to come back more often or spend more with you.

If those metrics keep growing, then you’re on the right track. But, if you see that they tend to stall, then there might be something you need to unlock. It might not be the program itself, it could be a friction point that you haven’t identified yet. Maybe the discount doesn’t apply correctly, for example. That’s why it’s always good to look at the data and then test your own experience. You can’t just say, “Oh, people don’t like this program anymore.” That’s probably not the case. Rather, there was a friction point that was preventing them from using the program.

The importance of intentional framing

Earlier, you mentioned the mystery shopper as a strategy to uncover or better understand friction points. Are there other methods that you leverage to help teams experience a particular friction themselves so that the priority becomes self-evident?

You have to be creative, which is not always easy. I’m fortunate that at CarParts, our CEO often takes a test drive on his own. It can be challenging to get busy executives to take the time to do this. I invite them to listening sessions that are catered for them. For example, we can create pre-create orders for them so they don’t have to go through every single part of the experience, just the one that we need them to care about.

Recently, I created two videos with AI — one showing the happy path and the other the not-so-happy path. I made it humorous because that’s often helpful for getting a point across. A large number of people experience the happy path, but there’s also a large number that experience the other path, and seeing that first-hand made an impact on the viewers. I believe they all remember that video because now, they’ve seen it with their own eyes. It’s really important to find different ways to put them in the customer’s shoes so they can understand what they feel when certain actions happen in the experience.

How do you escalate issues that may not look urgent on a dashboard, but are quietly eroding loyalty or repeat purchase, in a way that compels action?

Those situations can be difficult to handle, but it goes back to framing them in a way that reflects business impact. You need to translate those signals into a clear risk, and then show that there’s a decision to be made. My role is to frame the options and consequences clearly enough that a decision becomes unavoidable.

When I worked in sales, we were told not to present more than three products at a time to someone at a time or they would get confused. If you wanted to present a fourth, you had to take one out. The same thing applies here. You cannot just say, “Hey, this is broken, this doesn’t work. Oh, and the customer doesn’t like this and that,” and then just throw everything at them at once. You have to pick your battles carefully and frame your recommendations effectively.

You already worked through the prioritization, so when you present your recommendations, you’ve already landed on the friction point that you want to address. When you speak in terms of ROI, revenue, bottom line, AOV, or retention, all of a sudden, the doors swing wide open.

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