Hi Team!
We're at a coastal resort in Dubrovnik after a few days at an Airbnb in Kotor Old Town and a quick pit stop in Bosnia to mark #42 off my list.
A trip with the two little brats is more of a change of scenery than vacation, but we’ll take what we can get.
For the points people: the cash price was around $1,500 for three nights. We booked with a 65,000-point boost and a $250 Chase Edit credit. $0 out of pocket.
Being away has me thinking about hospitality, and the part of CX I’d actually want to spend my days doing.
If AI handles 90-95% of CX, the job I'd want is the rainmaker: the maitre d' who can comp the meal or bring out the chef when things really go to sh!t.
You don't touch every table, but you have the levers to pull when someone needs you.
Let’s get into it.
This week’s newsie is brought to you by my friends at Horatio!
If you're planning your holiday support around last year's numbers alone, it's worth taking a second look.
BFCM ticket volume doesn't rise neatly with sales. It tends to spike suddenly, often triggered by the same few culprits: shipping delays, stockouts, checkout issues, or promos that confuse customers.
When response times slip during those surges, the impact shows up quickly in abandoned carts, rising refund requests, and loyal customers losing patience at the exact moment you most need to keep them.
The teams that handle peak season well, without burning out their agents, are usually the ones that spotted their weak points before the rush began.
Horatio put together a quick BFCM Readiness Quiz to help with exactly that.
In just a few minutes, it walks you through your holiday support setup and highlights operational risks that are easy to overlook.
Afterward, you can book a call with a Horatio expert to review your results and fine-tune your plan.
The maitre d' of CX
Think about a maitre d' who doesn't touch every table, or a restaurant manager who isn't carrying every plate out of the kitchen.
When something goes wrong, they can step in to fix it. They can comp the meal or bring out the chef, depending on what would actually help.
The rainmaker would take over when the normal process has stopped helping. For someone who loves hospitality, there's real beauty in getting to be that person.
This is more hospitality and creative thinking, with less of the BS that comes with general CX work. For those of us who like hospitality (me) , it's the 1% most fun part of the job.
Let them comp the meal
Say an order is missing, and it’s for a wedding this weekend. The customer probably understands that they can get their money back, but they’d also quite like to have the thing they bought for the wedding.
The rainmaker could check whether a replacement is available, speak to the warehouse, and find out whether faster shipping would actually get it there in time.
They could call the customer to work through the options, including being honest when the deadline can’t be met rather than sending another optimistic tracking link and hoping for the best.
Maybe the fix costs more than the original order, or maybe a refund and a straightforward explanation are the best available outcome.
Give someone the authority to weigh those options and make a decision they're comfortable explaining afterward. That means clear spending limits, access to the relevant systems, and someone who can quickly approve an exception when the situation calls for it.
This might be a small share of your tickets, but these are the situations where someone's judgment can change how a customer feels about the entire brand. It's the part I'd actually want to spend my day on.
(Caveat: if you’ve not yet shared tickets with your AI overlords, this is way too expensive of a role to hire on top of a full human team. I think the rainmaker role exists when 80+% of your tickets are being handled or assisted by AI.)
Your rainmaker might already be on the team
You could hire someone from hospitality, but you might also find this person on your existing CX team, secretly losing their mind because they know how to help and keep being told they can’t.
This role is definitely not for people who view CX as punching out tickets. Look for someone who wants to understand what matters to the customer and can stay steady when a conversation gets uncomfortable. They need to know what the business can actually deliver before they promise it.
Sending a discount to someone who wants an explanation can feel like we're trying to get them to go away, even if we've spent money trying to make them happy. Having permission to comp the meal doesn't mean that's always what the person needs.
Give a candidate a messy customer situation and ask them to talk you through it. What do they need to check before deciding what to offer?
Listen to how they think about the person and what happens after the call. A beautifully written apology won't get the wedding order there.
If you've spent years measuring your team on how quickly they close tickets, that's the job you taught them to do. Give them room to work through a messy situation before deciding they aren't suited to it.
Give them time to actually help
Give this person time to get the wedding order sorted before you hand them the next escalation. They need someone who can cover for them when they're tied up with the warehouse or on a long call. Otherwise, you've given them a new title and the same queue.
Start the day with the cases that need attention. The wedding order needs an answer now; a replacement promised yesterday needs checking before you make another promise today. Then get on the phone or work with operations to get the fix moving.
On a quieter day, let them call someone back and find out whether the replacement actually arrived. Don't fill every gap with more tickets. Following through is part of the job you're paying them to do.
If the same delivery promise keeps causing problems, give this person access to whoever can change it.
They should be able to show the team the orders that missed the deadline and ask for the promise to be fixed. Comping the meal gets old if the kitchen keeps sending out the same problem.
That’s it for this week!
Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?
Just shoot me a DM or an email!
Cheers,
Eli 💛
