Customer experience is a growth engine, not a cost center

Before working in growth and sales, I spent years in customer experience. Many people see that as a detour. I see it as the best commercial school I had.

At Linio, the marketplace, the problem was clear: sellers were unhappy and customers contacted support too often. A marketplace without happy sellers has no supply, and without supply there are no sales. So seller NPS wasn't a service metric; it was a business metric. We turned it positive in under a year.

On the end-customer side, the lever was self-service. Every contact a customer doesn't need to make is a cost that disappears and one less point of friction. We lowered the contact ratio, raised CSAT by 20%, and got 90% of requests resolved within 24 hours. None of that was magic: it was mapping the full customer journey, seeing where it broke, and fixing processes one by one. We also rolled out Salesforce and dashboards for service level, resolution time and first-contact resolution, because what you don't measure you can't argue about.

That work moved me from Linio Colombia to headquarters in Mexico. Later, at Grow, the group behind Grin, Yellow and Vbike, I led about 100 people in customer experience. The challenge there was different: three brands, several languages, and teams with very different profiles. We set shared goals for NPS, CSAT and first-contact resolution, and built a career plan for the team with goals, challenges and rewards.

Three lessons I still apply in sales and growth:

Retention is growth. A customer who stays and refers others is worth more than a new one who leaves in three months. Higher satisfaction means higher lifetime value.

The journey belongs to the business, not to one team. Once you map the whole path, product, marketing and operations decisions become data-driven decisions.

Efficiency scales. Processes that resolve fast let you grow without costs growing at the same pace.

If you run a company and see the service team as an expense, you're looking at the wrong dashboard. That's where the most honest information lives about why people buy from you and why they leave.