Dr. Bronner’s and TUSHY are two iconic brands with equally iconic leaders who happen to be real-life friends. In this joint episode, we sit down with Emily McEnany, Director of CX at Dr. Bronner’s, and Ren Fuller-Wasserman, VP of CX at TUSHY. Emily built CX from scratch at Dr. Bronner's, the family soap company whose founder, Emanuel Bronner, used his labels to spread a message of unity. Today, the company still speaks out for a better world, and Emily's team treats every customer conversation as another way to live those values. Meanwhile, Ren Fuller-Wasserman runs CX at TUSHY, the bidet brand reshaping how America thinks about clean. With a mission to cut toilet paper waste and a knack for making an awkward category approachable, Ren's team turns every customer interaction into a chance to win people over to a better way.

Same category, same conviction, two very different roads. This episode gets into what “values-led” leadership looks like, advice for CX folks doing things solo, and why both Emily and Ren are betting on voice-of-customer.

Two journeys to CX and the friendship that formed along the way

A common theme for CX leaders is a unique “unconventional” journey. In fact, most leaders I speak to ended up in CX as a happy accident. The same goes for Emily and Ren.

Emily started in luxury fashion at Christian Louboutin, answering calls and building the company's first CRM on Salesforce across 30+ boutiques. At Dr. Bronner's, she started from an Excel sheet, now runs a team of five, migrated off Salesforce Service Cloud to Gorgias, and automated about 30% of conversations out of the gate. Ren joined TUSHY as a longtime customer during the 2020 toilet paper crisis and wrote a 350-article knowledge base by the end of her first July.

They met through Gorgias Connect a few years ago and hit it off. Both leaders found that connecting and chatting through their struggles removed the feeling of isolation that many CX teams face.

Values that show up in the queue

Another similarity between these two brands is being values-led. Dr. Bronner's runs on six cosmic principles, and the third is "treat employees like family." For Emily that means career lanes inside CX, autonomy over surveillance, and treating transparency as a competitive standard customers carry to other brands.

TUSHY's principal value is to be “menschy", Yiddish for doing the right thing rather than following the rule. Ren's frames the human’s role as dealing with the messy elements of human life and customer experience that can’t be automated.

Treat the team well and the customer takes care of itself

As Ren puts it, “If I treat my team really well, I don't have to worry so much about the customer." Her team is based in the Philippines, hired as native water-cleaning experts who can educate North American audiences on bidet usage. Her first hire is about to hit six years, and no one has left the team voluntarily.

Emily's angle is protection. Automation is a way to care for her team, rather than a means of headcount reduction. As she puts it, asking burned-out reps to "show up with your heart" while they answer tier 1 inquiry after tier 1 inquiry is "an impossible ask." Dr. Bronner’s is in a unique position as a brand that runs several social justice campaigns on topics like psychedelic-assisted therapy, Pride, or Palestine. The CX team handles customer questions on these topics, so she builds SOPs with DEI, HR, and legal before launch.

Advice for the first or only CX person

Both Emily and Ren lead multi-person CX teams. But they also both have been in positions where they were teams of one. We asked each of them to share advice for CX folks who are in that position now.

Emily: Get out of ticket counts and name the value: customer insight for QC, feedback for product development, or simply telling the company who the customer is. You can resonate with upper management on insights alone.

Ren: CX is "the hub of the wheel," so learn to ask ‘What would you like me to reprioritize?’ Make your vendor rep audit your stack, because it's not just the software that we're paying for. And be kind to your Friday self on Monday.

Rethinking discount codes: The role in value perception

TUSHY no longer offers discount codes. With a year-long consideration process, the discount isn't what moves a buyer who has lived 50 years without a bidet. Ren focuses on education instead.

For Dr. Bronner’s, Emily is rethinking discounts as a post-purchase remedy. Once a 15% code is everywhere, "you start to question, what is enough?" Instead of offering a 15% discount code to please an unsatisfied customer, Emily prefers to offer a free bottle of soap.

What is the one thing you’d tell every CEO about CX

We asked Emily and Ren t what advice they’d give to every CEO:

Emily: Trust your experts. Empower your experts. It’s not the CEO’s job to fully understand CX, just like they can't be expected to understand every single department. And that’s okay; it doesn’t mean they don’t understand their customer. If your experts tell you you need more resources to deliver the experience customers expect, then you have to listen.

Ren: Who's buying your products? People. So if you’re not investing in your customers, you can have the coolest product, but no one will ever care about it. I think that's the biggest thing that is overlooked. Customer experience is bigger than just customer support. It's thinking about every facet of the customer journey. Customer experience is usually the last department that’s added and seen as a necessary evil. But people want to feel supported, and your earliest customers are the most important ones who will build your brand and tell all their friends. The product doesn’t have to be perfect, but if you invest in your people who support you from the beginning, that’s okay.