Customer Service as a Lagging Indicator
Why most customer experience problems don’t start with customers—and what culture has to do with fixing them
I’ve spent most of my career in relationship-driven work. I understand the value of people. I understand how trust is built, how partnerships form, and how much of business success comes down to how well you treat others when there’s nothing contractual forcing you to do so. None of that is new to me.
What I didn’t fully appreciate until recently is just how much a company’s culture can determine whether those values actually survive at scale.
It’s one thing to believe in human connection. It’s another thing entirely to build an organization where that belief consistently shows up in how people communicate, how they handle stress, and how they treat customers when no one’s coaching them in real time. That gap, it seems, is where a lot of customer experience problems begin to emerge.
Like most, I think the assumption was that customer service issues were primarily frontline problems. If something broke down, the fix seemed obvious: better scripts, better tools—better people—another channel layered on top. Those things help, but only temporarily. What I’ve come to understand is that customer service is rarely the root issue. It’s a lagging indicator of internal health.
When service feels inconsistent or impersonal, it’s often not because someone forgot how to be polite. It may be because something upstream isn’t working. Culture, trust, clarity, accountability—those forces don’t stay neatly inside the organization. They leak. And when they do, customers feel it immediately.
This is why so many attempts to “fix” customer experience fall flat. You can’t automate your way out of internal dysfunction. You can’t script around disengagement. And you can’t use technology to compensate for teams that don’t feel aligned or supported.
Internal friction always shows up externally.
You see it in how teams talk to each other under pressure. Gossip, quiet resentment, unclear ownership, people talking sideways instead of directly—none of that feels dramatic in isolation. But over time, it erodes patience and trust. Tone changes, attention slips, and eventually, those shifts reach the customer.
Customers don’t hear internal conversations, but they experience their results.
This is also where a lot of enthusiasm around AI and automation misses the point. These tools can improve efficiency and coverage, but they don’t create great service on their own. In fact, when internal systems are weak, automation often just scales the problem faster. Technology doesn’t fix culture. It amplifies it.
Good customer service isn’t something you design once and install. It’s something your organization produces over time—through who you hire, what behavior you tolerate, and whether your systems evolve as the company grows. What works at five people breaks at fifty. What feels obvious early becomes invisible later unless leaders are paying attention.
That’s why my conversation with Eggs! The Podcast guest, Nathan Strum, co-founder of Abby Connect, was so compelling. Nathan has spent more than two decades building a company where customer service isn’t treated as a department or a talking point, but as the natural output of culture, enforcement, and operational discipline. We talked about what it takes to sustain real service quality at scale—and why so many companies underestimate the role internal culture plays in the experience customers ultimately receive.
When Customer Service Is the Business
Nathan Strum is the co-founder and CEO of Abby Connect, a company he started more than twenty years ago after an unlikely beginning in a family-run executive office business. What began as answering phones for tenants inside a single building eventually became a full-scale reception service supporting thousands of small and mid-sized businesses across the country.
From the start, Abby Connect was built around a simple idea: if you can’t outspend or outscale bigger competitors, you win on service. That philosophy traces back even earlier for Nathan, who grew up in family businesses where customer relationships—not branding or technology—were the primary differentiator. As Abby scaled from a tight-knit family operation into a multi-hundred-person organization, that same service-first mindset forced Nathan to confront a harder challenge: how to preserve trust, tone, and accountability as headcount grows and systems strain.
Today, Abby Connect operates at the intersection of people, process, and technology. Nathan has spent years navigating the uncomfortable realities of scaling culture—enforcing standards, addressing internal friction, and reworking systems that no longer serve the customer. More recently, that work has extended into thoughtfully integrating AI as a support layer for service delivery, not a replacement for human judgment. The result is a company that treats customer service not as a department, but as the output of internal health.
Culture Is the System That Produces Service
In our conversation, Nathan shared hard-earned lessons from building a service business over two decades—lessons that cut through buzzwords and focus on what actually sustains customer experience at scale. The quotes below highlight how internal discipline, cultural enforcement, and realistic use of technology shape what customers ultimately feel.
“The way we beat bigger competitors was customer service. That lesson never changed.”
Actionable insight:
When you don’t have the advantage of scale, brand, or capital, service becomes strategy—not a support function. This mindset doesn’t disappear as companies grow; it becomes harder to protect, and more important to enforce..
“As you grow, the hardest part isn’t adding people — it’s maintaining the standards that used to happen naturally.”
Actionable insight:
Culture isn’t defined by perks or values statements. It’s defined by enforcement—especially when addressing behaviors that quietly undermine trust, alignment, and morale.
“Gossip is like a cancer. It tears organizations apart if you let it spread.”
Actionable insight:
Internal communication patterns directly affect external experience. When teams normalize gossip or indirect communication, confusion and frustration eventually surface in customer interactions.
“Every time we hit a ceiling, we had to throw out the rulebook and rebuild the company.”
Actionable insight:
What works at one stage of growth often becomes the very thing that breaks service quality at the next. Scaling customer experience requires leaders to let go of systems they’re proud of before those systems fail customers.
“You can’t automate your way out of edge cases.”
Actionable insight:
Great service lives in the margins—accents, emotions, misunderstandings, and moments of friction. Technology can support coverage, but human judgment is what preserves trust when things don’t go as planned.
“We hire for personality and train for skill.”
Actionable insight:
Customer service quality is shaped long before the first customer interaction. Hiring for openness, critical thinking, and coachability creates teams that adapt under pressure instead of defaulting to scripts.
“Technology doesn’t fix culture. It amplifies it.”
Actionable insight:
AI and automation don’t improve service on their own. They magnify whatever already exists inside the organization—good or bad—making internal health more important, not less.
Customer Service Is the Outcome, Not the Fix
What stayed with me after this conversation wasn’t a new framework or a clever tactic. It was the reminder that customer service is rarely improved by focusing on the customer alone. The companies that deliver consistently good experiences tend to do so almost indirectly—by paying attention to the internal conditions that make good service possible in the first place.
Culture, in that sense, isn’t abstract. It’s practical. It shows up in how teams talk to each other, how standards are enforced as companies grow, and how leaders respond when the easy fixes stop working. When those internal systems are healthy, customer service feels natural. When they’re not, no amount of tooling, scripting, or automation can fully compensate.
Technology will continue to change how businesses interact with customers, and AI will undoubtedly play a larger role in that future. But the core lesson remains the same: tools don’t create trust—people and systems do. The organizations that understand this will use technology to extend their culture, not replace it. And the ones that don’t will keep chasing customer experience problems that were never customer-facing to begin with.
If customer service feels harder than it should, the answer probably isn’t another feature or platform. It’s a closer look at what’s happening upstream—and whether the culture behind the service is actually being protected.
Thanks for reading,
—Ryan
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Ready for more?
Catch Nathan Strum’s interview in its entirety on Eggs! The Podcast.
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Reading list
If you're looking to go deeper on the themes from this week's newsletter, here are a few books that pair well with the conversation and offer a broader perspective:
Never Eat Alone — Keith Ferrazzi
A foundational book on relationship-driven work. Ferrazzi’s core idea—that long-term success is built through trust, generosity, and consistent human connection—maps directly to the idea that customer service is an outcome of how people are treated internally.The Culture Code — Daniel Coyle
One of the clearest explanations of how high-performing cultures are actually built. Not through perks or slogans, but through shared behaviors, signals, and enforcement. A great companion to the idea that customer service is downstream of internal health.The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz
A brutally honest look at leadership when the easy answers stop working. Horowitz does a good job of articulating why culture decisions—especially uncomfortable ones—matter most when companies start to scale.Setting the Table — Danny Meyer
A classic for anyone thinking about service as a strategic advantage. Meyer’s philosophy reinforces the idea that great customer experience starts with how teams are treated and empowered behind the scenes.
More to explore
Abby Connect: Abby.com
Contact Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanstrum/
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Ryan Roghaar - Fractional CMO/Creative Director/Art Director: https://rogha.ar/portfolio
RŌG Health - A commercial readiness and strategy firm for medtech companies, helping CEOs identify what’s blocking growth and make clear, de-risked decisions around commercialization, partnerships, and fundraising. https://roghealth.com
Eggs! The Podcast: https://www.eggscast.com
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