I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Naomi Hyde, CX Lead at Rheal Superfoods, about all things CX.Â
The conversation, grounded in the importance of customer experience within the wellness sector, had me reflecting for a good while after. In a world where we put logos, accreditations and awards next to brand names, what value do they hold without customer experience? But here’s the uncomfortable truth: none of that matters if your customer experience is broken.
This is the gap Naomi Hyde, CRM and CX Lead at Rheal Superfoods, navigates every single day. And it’s the reason why the conversation between brand values and actual execution is so rarely aligned, yet so desperately important.
The intention problem
In the CX Life podcast intro, I talk about something I’ve seen across every brand I’ve worked with. I’ve spent years working with brands trying to help them connect with their customers. And what shocks me every time is how much intention goes in at the top and how much is lost by the time it reaches the person buying.
Rheal has brilliant intentions. Founded by Charlotte and Sean Ali when Charlotte was struggling with celiac disease, the brand exists to solve a real problem for real people. Their B Corp status, founder story and clean ingredients are all legitimate differentiators. But intention doesn’t win customer loyalty. Execution does.
Listen first, defend never
When Naomi talks about how Rheal handles customer complaints, she nails something most brands get wrong: “You can’t tell them they’re wrong. It’s not like, ‘Oh, this top didn’t fit me, so I want a new one.’ It’s ‘okay, there are so many reasons why you might not have experienced what you’re hoping for from this supplement.'”
This is kindness as a strategy. And it’s radical.
Rather than dismissing negative Trust Pilot reviews, Rheal treats them as product intelligence. When customers reported disliking the taste of their new menopause product, the team didn’t argue. They listened, reviewed the taste in-house, created recipes, updated customer care responses and built email flows around the feedback. All within days.
This is how brand values become real. Not through marketing copy but through the actual sequence of actions your team takes when something goes wrong.
The subscription paradox: Making the exit easier
Here’s where most brands sabotage themselves: they try to lock subscribers in because the metrics look better that way.
Rheal does the opposite. Naomi’s team deliberately makes it frictionless to pause, skip or cancel subscriptions. Because they understand: the moment you stop hiding the exit, you create permission to stay.
Rather than viewing pausing as churn, Rheal sees it as a gesture of respect. Customers who take supplements aren’t robots. Some days they skip doses. Some weeks they need a break. When you let them pause without friction – with clear notifications and simple controls – you’re not losing them. You’re building trust.
The laundry tablet example Naomi references in the podcast is brilliant design: let users input their washing frequency upfront, then prompt them to revisit if they’re using more or less than expected.
The StrategiQ view: We’ve helped multiple clients build ‘pause-first’ flows that actually reduce churn long-term because they’re grounded in customer reality, not business desire. The data shifts when you stop making people feel trapped.
The maths that matters: From campaign-first to automation-led
Numbers tell you what’s working. For one of our client accounts where we manage the full CRM evolution, the shift was dramatic: 56% revenue from automation, 44% from campaigns. A complete flip from where they started.
This isn’t a vanity metric. It’s proof that when you build flows that respect customer behaviour – triggered by what they actually do, not by what you want to sell – the system compounds. You don’t need to manually campaign your way to revenue. The automation runs, it’s predictable and it funds the bandwidth for the reactive work that always emerges.
As I put it in my conversation with Naomi: “You can have all of your flow architecture done, but actually it’s ever evolving. It’s ever moving.”
Stat of the week:
56%
That’s the percentage of revenue Rheal’s automation flows now drive versus campaigns. A year ago it was heavily tipped toward campaign-driven revenue. This shift happened because the team stopped seeing automations as a secondary channel and started building them as the primary revenue engine.
Segmentation that doesn’t feel creepy
Most brands over-segment until they’re sending individualised promotional messages that feel invasive. Naomi’s approach is more thoughtful: tight enough to be relevant, loose enough to reach people and always grounded in customer logic not conversion logic.
Testing subscriber vs. one-time purchaser behaviour separately revealed something counterintuitive: subscribers are your most engaged, highest-converting segment. Yet many businesses deliberately avoid emailing them, assuming it’ll trigger churn. Rheal realised the opposite is true. They just needed the right cadence and the right message.
“Right message, right person, right time,” as I always say. Simple to state. Brutally hard to execute.
Naomi’s take on Claude and AI automation is pragmatic: “It creates work before it saves you time. You have to spend a lot of time with it.”
But when trained on Rheal’s tone of voice and brand guidelines, it accelerates the admin bits: briefing, light-touch audits, reporting. Not to replace human judgment, but to multiply it. She’s particularly bullish on AI for reporting: pulling data from multiple platforms, creating summaries, building visuals. The kind of work that buries CX teams and drowns out strategic thinking.
The caveat matters though: “It doesn’t replace human intelligence.”Where AI fits (and doesn’t)
The r(h)eal measure of values
Here’s what struck me most: Naomi and her team don’t talk about B Corp status or founder story to justify their CX work. They mention those things because they naturally show up in how they actually operate. The kindness, the listening, the respect for customer agency – those aren’t marketing angles. They’re operational defaults.
That’s the test. Not what you claim to stand for, but what a frustrated customer experiences on the Tuesday they reach out with a problem. What email they get. What tone it carries. How fast the response is. Whether you make it easy to pause, cancel or stay.
Your brand values are only as credible as the person on your customer care team executing them at 2pm on a Wednesday.
Rheal gets that. And it shows.
One thing to take into next week… Audit how your team responds to one negative customer review. Not the process. The actual tone of voice. Does it sound defensive? Does it sound like an AI? Does it acknowledge the customer was heard? That response is your brand values in action, whether you like it or not.
Speak soon,
Nat McHale, Head of CX, StrategiQ
Obsessed with the gap between brand intention and customer reality. Currently testing my hypothesis that everything gets better when you listen first.
What’s next?
The full conversation with Naomi is now live on the CX Life podcast. She walks through how Rheal weaves founder story and brand values into customer experience work, why Trust Pilot reviews are actually good news and how segmentation and testing have to run continuously, not as one-time projects.
Listen to the full episode →
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