Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Ty Givens, who is the Founder and CEO of CX Collective, where she partners with ambitious brands to build customer experience programs that don’t just keep up—they lead. Ty joins me today to talk about how emotional labour and systems thinking are missing from leadership, why there is a better way to reduce employee churn and inconsistency rather than chasing tools, burnout for team leads, and how to get fast-growing support teams that are often structurally shaky onto a more steady footing without losing momentum.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Think you know Gen Z? Think again – Interview with Matt Powell of Great State – and is number 555 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Ty:

• A lot of times, companies misconstrue the customer service aspect of their business with just the person who’s nicest to customers or the one that customers love the most.
• What they miss once you start to grow and scale is that being nice is not actually the remedy that you think it is to a great customer experience; being proactive is.
• If I’m the nicest person on the team, and I have no operational background, there’s a risk that as the team grows, the scope of work will outgrow me.
• Also, as the team grows, the emotional labour becomes much bigger, that can lead to me doubting myself as a leader.
• That doubting of myself as a leader can manifest itself in the way that I interact with and engage with my front-line team.
• Here’s a problem ……expectations from the executive level when they don’t understand what it takes to actually do the things they are talking about.
• You need to communicate what you need in order to be successful.
• However, a lot of times, you may not have the financial support to grow the team. So you can’t add to headcount. But what you can do is take the resources that you have within that team and start to allocate them to different parts of your area of the business where you can get a bigger ROI than if they were on the phones or emails or chat. For example, you could look for someone who might have a knack for statistics and ask them to help you with some workforce management or planning. You might have someone who is a good teacher and you want to have them help with training.
• And maybe you’re not answering, an additional 200 tickets a day, say. But maybe through those roles, you’re reducing your tickets by 300 a day, right? So you have to think about it on the ROI side.
• To better understand how you can operate within a system, you first need to understand the system that you’re in to allow you to figure out how to operate more effectively within that system.
• If you step into that leadership role, it’s imperative that one, you look after yourself, two, you deliver, and three, that you build your knowledge and the connections of things around it. And the only resource that you have that’s available to you is your time.
• Ty has a playbook on time management. She has other playbooks too. Check them out here.
• You must create time to think. It matters.
• Too often do people turn to tools when they face a problem. That’s a mistake.
• If your process is broken, any tool you choose is just going to further exasperate that.
• Start with your policies and processes.
• Make sure that you’re leveraging AI to work for you so that you don’t end up working for AI.
• Adrian McDermott, the CTO at Zendesk, said, “If AI is the next industrial revolution, then knowledge is the coal.”
• Ty’s best advice: I do think the employee experience ties into the customer experience. Listen to your employees. Listen to them with an open mind, even if you think you know better, and let them influence the process because everything is about the process. Doing so will help you create advocates.
• Ty’s Punk CX brand: Amazon, because they do the opposite of what most people tell you to do, which is be warm and fuzzy and be super engaging and make it easy for people to contact you. They don’t actually do any of those things. They’re very direct, it’s very straightforward. In most cases, you’re gonna solve your own issue and you can’t even find how to contact them 99 % of the time. But when you do, they’re very quick to resolve your issue in the most efficient and effective way.

About Ty

Ty Givens is the Founder and CEO of CX Collective, where she partners with ambitious brands to build customer experience programs that don’t just keep up—they lead. Over her career, Ty has transformed support operations at every stage, from scrappy startups launching their first helpdesk to Fortune 500s rethinking how they serve millions of customers.

Known for blending operational rigor with a human touch, she’s passionate about creating service systems that scale without losing authenticity. Ty’s work bridges the gap between vision and execution, equipping teams to deliver exceptional experiences that grow loyalty, and the bottom line.

Check out the CX Collective website, the playbooks that Ty mentioned, say Hi to Ty on Instagram @itstygivens and feel free to connect with Ty on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash