A retail performance executive who has worked across three continents and three industries on the gap between what companies think customer experience is, and what their customers actually feel.
Customer experience has become one of the most overused phrases in business. Every company claims to put the customer first. Very few actually know what that means.
Rodrigo Aviles, Senior Manager, rpc – The Retail Performance Company, has spent his career inside that gap — across automotive, retail, and consulting — watching organizations confuse CX with a department, a survey score, or a line in a strategy deck. At Hyundai Motor Europe, he saw firsthand what happens when an industry obsessed with the thrill of the product forgets the moment after the sale. At RPC, he is now helping companies rethink the foundations.
A self-described Human-First AI advocate, Aviles is not anti-technology. He is anti-thoughtlessness. In this conversation, he makes the case that the real crisis in customer experience today is not a lack of AI — it is a lack of honesty about what problem you are actually trying to solve.
Excerpts from the interview;Â
You’ve worked across automotive, retail, and consulting — three industries with very different relationships to the customer. Where did you see the biggest gap between what a company thought its customer experience was and what it actually was?
Three gaps keep coming up across industries.
The first is understanding. The definition of customer experience varies widely from one organization to the next. In some companies, CX was considered a function within customer service. In others, it sat inside marketing. In others still, people used customer experience and customer journey interchangeably, as if they were the same thing. They are not.
What I have come to believe and what I actively push in my work now is that customer experience is not a department or a team. It is a mindset. From the person at the reception desk to the C-suite, everyone has an impact on the customer, whether they realize it or not. Every touchpoint, every decision, every internal process eventually reaches the customer in some form.
The second gap is ownership. Because CX spans functions, nobody wants to claim it fully. I have been in organizations where the CX team was treated like the black sheep — where other departments would close the door on us because they assumed we were trying to take over their responsibilities. We were not. We were trying to orchestrate. There is a significant difference.
The third gap is measurement. NPS and CSAT have been the default metrics for years, and I will be honest, I am not a fan of NPS. Both metrics measure a moment. They capture how a customer feels at the end of an interaction, whether they are satisfied or not. Everything in between all the friction, the waiting, the confusion, the small recoveries goes unrecorded. And that is precisely where the real opportunities are hiding.
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You led CX at Hyundai Motor Europe during a period when the entire car industry was being turned upside down by EVs, software, and changing ownership models. What broke first — the product experience or the service experience?
The service experience. Without question.
I have seen a pattern across the automotive industry, and I wrote a white paper about it because I think it deserves more attention than it gets. I call it the unsexy part of the journey. Most of the resources, the energy, the excitement — all of it goes into pre-sales. Bring the customer in, get them excited, close the deal. The assumption that follows is: they bought the car, they are happy, they will stay.
But in automotive, some of the most significant revenue sits in after-sales — spare parts, insurance, and additional services. And that is exactly where the experience tends to collapse.
Think about what happens the first time a customer brings their car in for a service. Nobody knows why they are there. There is no communication while the car is being worked on. Days go by with no update. These are not dramatic failures — they are quiet ones. But they accumulate, and they erode trust.
What makes this worse is the benchmark customers are carrying in their heads. When someone brings their car in for a service, they are not comparing the experience to another dealership. They are comparing it to Amazon. They know the exact moment they press send on an order where their package is, when it will arrive, and what they will pay. No hidden fees, no surprises, constant visibility until it arrives at their door.
We cannot change that reference point. We can only decide what to do about it. And in the automotive industry, far too many OEMs have not yet asked that question seriously enough.
You call yourself a “Human-First AI” advocate. Tell me about a moment when you saw AI deployed in a customer experience that made you genuinely angry.
I was with a health insurance provider in Germany for almost six years. Then they redesigned their app — completely overhauled the UX — and everything I knew about how to navigate it disappeared overnight. I am a quick learner and reasonably tech-savvy. It still took me a significant amount of time to find basic functions.
Once I did, I submitted an invoice for a medical expense and heard almost nothing back. The app had a chatbot — marketed as AI-powered, though I remain sceptical there was much intelligence behind it. What followed was an exhausting back-and-forth across multiple channels, where I was asked the same questions repeatedly and gave the same answers repeatedly. Eventually, I left the provider.
A friend told me recently that the same company now claims to have an improved AI agent. His experience has been identical to mine.
This is the pattern I see most often. Companies encounter a problem, and instead of diagnosing it clearly, they reach for AI as the solution. But if you have not truly understood what you are trying to fix, and for whom, the technology will not save you. It will just create a faster, more scalable version of the same failure.
I use this analogy: it is like having a Ferrari in the garage when you do not know how to drive. Technology is not the problem. The lack of clarity about the problem is.
I had a manager early in my career who gave me a piece of paper the size of a business card and told me to write my idea on it. If it did not fit, I had not understood it well enough. The same discipline applies here. If someone needs half an hour to explain the problem their AI deployment is meant to solve, they are not ready to deploy it.
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Customer journey mapping sounds clinical on paper. Walk me through the most surprising thing you’ve ever discovered when you actually mapped one out for a real company.
The most consistent surprise is how little companies actually know about the full journey their customers go through — including the teams supposed to manage it.
Part of this is structural. When organizations work in silos, each function only sees its own piece. Marketing sees the awareness stage. Service sees the complaint. Nobody is watching the customer move from one to the next, experiencing the whole. What journey mapping forces you to confront is that the customer does not care about your org chart. They are moving through your brand as a single continuous experience.
What struck me most in several of these exercises was how much we were unconsciously mirroring our own internal complexity onto the customer. The difficulty, the confusion, the unclear ownership — we were essentially asking the customer to navigate our internal dysfunction alongside us.
But the most valuable realization came from pairing data with direct observation. I am a strong believer in data, but I also think we lean on it too heavily as a substitute for actually watching people. In one exercise, I challenged a team to spend three hours sitting in a dealership, not collecting data, not running surveys — just observing. Who comes in, what happens, where do things slow down, and what do people look confused by?
The gaps between what the data said and what the observation revealed were significant. There were friction points we never would have identified through surveys alone, and opportunities that no amount of voice-of-customer data had surfaced. That is what I mean when I say journey mapping should never just live on a wall or in a workshop deck. There are real people moving through that journey every day. You have to go and watch them.
You’re now based in Munich, having worked across Latin America and Europe. Does culture change what good customer experience looks like — or do people fundamentally want the same things everywhere?
Both things are true, and I think the tension between them is actually useful.
Culture absolutely shapes expectations. Coming from Mexico, warmth is embedded in how service works. You walk into a restaurant, and within seconds, someone greets you, makes you feel welcome, and treats you like you matter. That is not exceptional service in Mexico — it is the baseline. In Germany, that does not exist in the same way. My wife is German, and when we visited Mexico, she found it overwhelming. Too many people checking on her, too much attention. For her, that was not hospitality — it was intrusion.
Neither one is wrong. They are simply different cultural contracts around what a positive experience feels like.
But then there is the other layer, which is universal. Regardless of where someone is from, regardless of generation or background, when something goes wrong, people want it resolved quickly. The frustration of being ignored, passed between channels, asked to repeat yourself, or left waiting for a response that never comes — that is not cultural. That is human. And the tolerance for it is shrinking everywhere because the reference points keep improving. WhatsApp read receipts. Two-minute grocery delivery. Real-time tracking. Every one of these has raised the floor for what people consider acceptable.
The challenge for companies is navigating both. They need cultural sensitivity in how they design the emotional texture of an experience, and they need universal speed and clarity in how they resolve problems. Getting one right while neglecting the other is no longer enough.
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You speak publicly about CX. What’s the question nobody in the audience ever asks — but should?
Are we using AI to help our customers or to help ourselves avoid them?
I think about this a lot. When I look at many of the AI deployments happening in customer experience right now — the agents replacing call center teams, the chatbots standing between customers and resolution — the honest question is: who is this actually serving?
In some cases, the answer is genuinely the customer. Faster, available around the clock, consistent. In others, the technology is being used to reduce the cost and friction of human contact for the company, while the customer gets a worse experience dressed up in modern language.
Klarna is an interesting example. They made significant headlines for replacing a large number of customer service staff with AI. A year or so later, they were quietly hiring humans back because the experience had gaps that the technology could not cover.
I am not against AI in customer experience. I use it constantly in my own work, and it has changed how I operate. But there is a distinction that is not examined enough: are we deploying this because it genuinely helps the person on the other end, or because it helps us avoid dealing with them?
That question — asked honestly, before any deployment decision is made — would change a lot of what gets built.