Transcript from a presentation at SubSummit, May 2026. Cheryl Zajac, VP of Client Insights at Bizrate Insights, in conversation with Aleta Childress, Director of Customer Support at Crutchfield.

Cheryl Zajac:

All right, we are here to address the elephant in the room. What’s the elephant in the room? It’s the insights problem. Specifically, it’s the insights-to-action problem.

Dashboards can tell you what’s happening. AI can scale, provide speed and efficiency. But at the end of the day, it is you — the humans in the room — that determine what is most important and what to do about that. The gap that we are going to close today is helping to identify how to interpret what is actually happening, how to make sense of it, and how to actually drive action on the back of it.

Think about the last brand you completely trusted — not a brand you currently work on. Why did you trust them?

I am willing to bet that nobody said the reason they trusted that brand was because of their algorithm. The last brand you trusted was likely because they understood you, because expectations were clear, because your confidence wasn’t broken in any of those moments. These moments of trust are built or broken in really human moments and experiences.

Aleta is from Crutchfield. Crutchfield is not a subscription-based brand — they’re an award-winning consumer electronics company, in business for 50 years. And they have something that all subscription brands want: loyalty, trust, retention. Aleta, when you think about those make-or-break moments in the experience, what does that look like for you?

Aleta Childress:

When we think about our human relationships — Crutchfield’s been in the business for 50 years, I’ve been there for 27 — our company is founded on trust and human experience. Trust is built over a period of time, and I think even more so now, it’s time after time. You have to show your customers and your employees that you are who you say you are. And then we also have those moments that we all fall short. It’s how you react. Even now, more than ever, those events are public. You can lose trust in just one or two moments, and it takes longer to build it back.

One of the things we’ve held onto — in the absence of AI 50 years ago, and still today — is a human touch. Our owner and CEO Bill Crutchfield is still very adamant about the customer experience and the humans behind it. I take it to my team and I call it “take an interest.” And that’s not just with your consumers — it’s also your internal employees. Just get to understand what their needs are.

Cheryl Zajac:

Trust isn’t built in silos. It really does take a whole business effort. It’s not the responsibility of one team — it’s the responsibility of the entire organization in those moments.

This is the framework we use at Bizrate Insights. The first step is identifying the context — this really helps you avoid solving the wrong problem beautifully. Whenever I’m meeting with a client, I first ask: what’s new? What has changed? Has there been a campaign? New AI tools? A change in operations? What is your team hearing?

Then you focus on the signals. This is probably exactly where your brain goes when you think about insights — the metrics, the data, the dashboards, the operational data, the behavioral data. Signals help you identify the movement, what changes. But it’s not just the metrics. It’s also the human voice behind them. Aleta, when you think about signals, what are the kinds that make your team pay attention?

Aleta Childress:

In a contact center, a lot of it is driven around contact volume. A lot of our business is pretty predictable in terms of how our customers interact with us. But increasing contact volume is a huge predictor that something’s changed, something’s going on. Then you need to understand what’s driving it — repeated questions, repeated inquiries. And there are other things: confusion around shipping, post-sale inquiries.

We have a basic chatbot that we do utilize. Those repeatable types of interactions — consumers have grown to expect to get basic questions answered that way. But our intent is still that we prefer the customer to contact us directly. We do not want our customers to feel like we’re shoving them to a bot. They value our human interactions.

Cheryl Zajac:

Churn rarely shows up as a customer saying “I’m about to leave.” It shows up as: I’m confused, I’m not sure this is right, how do I — it shows up in hesitancy, in return intent, in silence. That’s why it’s so important not to just focus on the metrics. If return intent is up, support tickets are up, and renewals are stalling, and you plug all of that into AI, it’s probably going to tell you you have a product issue. But customers aren’t necessarily going to tell you exactly what they’re going to do. Humans are irrational.

Aleta Childress:

Can I talk about our survey? Fifty years ago, when Bill started the company, he was ready to shut the doors. We were the first to sell electronics via a catalog — very innovative. But consumers didn’t trust the Crutchfield name, didn’t understand how to do installations, and sales weren’t there. Bill did a survey to find out what he could learn for his next business — he didn’t think it was even salvageable. What he learned was that customers didn’t trust the name and didn’t know how to install car stereos. He gave it another effort based on that. And that same approach, with some help from AI today, is still basically our cornerstone.

Cheryl Zajac:

That’s a perfect example of something I see quite a lot — the dashboard points to one thing, but the customer verbatims point to another. The dashboard was saying return is up, support demand is up — definitely a product issue. But when you dig into the customer verbatims and hear how customers are vocalizing their experience in their own words, you see a different picture. They were overwhelmed. They lost confidence in the installation process and felt like they were doing something wrong — when actually it was an opportunity for the business to better meet the customer where they are.

This is where AI stops in the framework. AI helped us surface patterns fast and at scale. Now it’s up to us to figure out what this means for the business and what we’re going to do about it.

Storytelling goes back to the start of time. If you don’t create the story around your insight, somebody else in the room will — and it might not be the accurate one. The insights formula is simple: Because customers were overwhelmed during the installation process and lost confidence, we will improve our guidance in our installation instructions, therefore expecting lower return intent and fewer avoidable contacts to the support center.

It doesn’t necessarily matter if you use this exact framework. What matters is having a shared way to interpret what is happening and rally everyone around the same truth.

Aleta, what makes an insight valuable?

Aleta Childress:

Prioritizing is so very important — trying to really hit on the things that are going to drive the business and drive customer satisfaction. And when you think about defining priorities, you really need one person who is the owner of a particular action to drive it and see it through. Now, if you’re finding out this is not what we thought — bail, and do it quickly. Let people fail. It is fine. But you really do need that one stakeholder who’s going to either keep it going or say, we’re not going to pursue this further.

Cheryl Zajac:

Do you have any tips for organizing everyone around the shared storyline?

Aleta Childress:

I have a phrase at work — it’s kind of a jarring statement. I say: why do we care? It helps define, as a business, why in the world would we do something. You can get so derailed in the details, and often other departments have their own things they feel are more important. You just need to keep going back to that. Oh yeah — that is the reason why we’re doing this.

Cheryl Zajac:

That’s why having the framework is so valuable. You have the prioritization, a shared storyline everyone can rally around, the insight and action clearly identified, on paper — so you can always go back to the source of truth and hold everybody accountable.

This isn’t intended to be an AI naysayer thing. AI is great for surfacing patterns at scale in a really efficient way. But it’s only as good as the context we provide it and the prompts we give it. Without the human layer, you risk solving the wrong problem beautifully.

Everyone in this room has access to the same AI tools. What we don’t have — what cannot be replicated by a competitor — is the quality of your understanding of your customers as human beings. The richness of that understanding. The speed at which you take action on it. That is your competitive differentiator.

Aleta Childress:

And using particular phrases — “the customer said this, here was their experience” — is so powerful for keeping other departments aligned. Do be careful not to take it out of context, though. Don’t adjust your entire business over one customer. I’ve seen us have knee-jerk reactions — we’re going to change this, we’re going to change that — and I’ve learned over time, was it really one customer? Can we sustain this approach? But if you let people see the whole customer journey and where they fit in it — whether they’re in shipping, fulfillment, or a vendor — it is very impactful. It helps them understand the action and keeps bringing everyone back to why we care.

Cheryl Zajac:

That’s exactly why it’s so important to capture the customer voice. You can bring it to the organization and say — it’s not just me telling you shipping is an issue. Hear it from the customer themselves.

Aleta Childress:

I love to use customer phrases. When you literally capture words from a survey and share them with other teams, it is so impactful for them to actually see and hear what the customer is saying.

Cheryl Zajac:

You can’t beat hearing it directly from your customer. That is the human layer.

AI is going to continue to grow — that’s not stopping. Our dashboards are going to get smarter, our churn models more accurate. That’s table stakes. But what cannot be replicated by a competitor is the quality of your understanding of your customers as your subscribers, as human beings. The richness of that understanding, the speed at which you take action on it — that is your competitive differentiator.

Remember: you bring the magic. Know that you are irreplaceable. You are the human layer.