We're creating a new home for Customer Support Leaders. Please bear with us while we're building.
Charlotte Ward •

295: Fearless CX; with Nate Brown

About this episode

Customers are talking about you where your VOC program rarely looks and it’s shaping revenue, retention, and trust. Nate Brown joins me to introduce Fearless CX, a bold and practical way to lead customer experience in a time when fear is high, teams are tempted to retreat into silos, and “insular thinking” makes cross-functional work painfully slow.

We dig into what Fearless CX looks like inside the organization: leaders acting as a beacon, building trust through character and conviction, and creating psychological safety without drifting into comfort or inertia. The goal is healthy tension where people can challenge ideas, learn fast, and collaborate across the enterprise to produce a consistent customer experience outcome.

Then we get tactical about modern voice of customer strategy. Nate explains “wild sentiment” the unstructured feedback living on Reddit, YouTube, third-party communities, and public reviews. We talk about how AI search is changing customer support behavior, why customers often solve problems without ever contacting the brand, and how AI-enabled customer experience management platforms can finally harmonize structured and unstructured feedback into real themes, tags, and actionable insights.

If you want a customer experience strategy that survives uncertainty and actually earns trust, press play. Subscribe, share this with a CX or support leader, and leave a review, then tell me: where do you think your customers are shaping your brand story today?

Nate Brown

Transcript

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode two hundred and ninety-five of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Nate Brown to talk about Fearless CX. Today, welcome back, Nate Brown. Nate, it's lovely to have you back on the show after what I think we established for several years. Welcome back.

Nate Brown: 0:41

Thank you so much, Charlotte. It has been several years and it's wonderful to see you.

Charlotte Ward: 0:45

Thank you so much for coming back. For the benefit of uh new listeners, would you please introduce yourself?

Nate Brown: 0:52

Sure. I am a student of this work of customer experience. I started in the world of selling postage meters in Jacksonville, Florida. Wasn't great at that, but uh moved into a customer service role and just jumped in with both feet. I just loved serving customers all day, 100 tickets a day kind of scenario. Eventually took ownership of that team, Charlotte, and started thinking about customer experience. How can we do more than just taking tickets in this reactive mode? And that really became the thing that I would study and learn about for the next 15 years. And now, as an analyst in the space of customer experience, working with the amazing organization of Betrick Sherpa, I get to do exactly that. I get to help elevate this conversation around customer experience with solution providers and practitioners and anybody that will listen, uh, ultimately just trying to serve our customers better.

Charlotte Ward: 1:48

That, oh man, you you always infuse so effusively about customer experience. Whenever I speak to you, Nate, it's just a pleasure just to hear you get kind of energized around it. So thanks for watching. Oh, thanks. Uh yeah. Um, yeah, wow. So beginning selling postage meter. I don't even know what a postage meter is. I know what those two words are, but I can't put them together into a thing. What is a postage meter?

Nate Brown: 2:14

It's this funky little device where

A little disclaimer about the podcast, blog interviews, and articles on this site: the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text and podcast belong solely to the author or interviewee, and not necessarily to any employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.
© 2026 Customer Support Leaders
Made with in the UK & AU