Why outages might actually be your biggest CX opportunity

Drew Candres built support organizations where a single tweet on a Saturday night could move a market 10% and flood your queues while the rest of the world slept. Now as VP of Customer Experience at GameChanger, he's applying those same instincts to a completely different emotional context: parents trying to capture their kids' first home run. The contrast makes for one of the more grounded and honest conversations about what it actually takes to build CX operations that hold up when things go sideways.

One of the sharpest observations in this episode: some of his highest CSAT scores, across every company he's worked for, came on outage days. When handled well, those days produced scores around 50% above the average. His argument is that customers already know things break. How you handle it is the only thing they're actually judging.

Topics Discussed:

• Why containment rate is a meaningless metric and what it actually measures

• Manual support as the most expensive technical debt a scaling startup can carry

• The two-step framework for deciding what to automate and what to fix first

• Rate of change in inbound volume as an early warning system no platform has fully solved

• Why data alone doesn't move product teams, and the storytelling structure that does

• Embedding proactive support into the build process through phased rollouts and power user cohorts

• Why CX foundation work must come before executive headcount, not after

• Why emotional connection becomes the primary differentiator as AI compresses product advantages