The CX Fixer
Hi, I’m Ash Rhodes.
I'm the person companies call when the support queue is overflowing, the team is exhausted, and nobody can quite explain why the whole thing keeps getting worse despite everyone's best efforts. I have been doing this for the better part of two decades. At this point it is less a job than a condition.
Every Problem is Unique . . .
. . . Except those that aren't!
I help companies that are experiencing just about any kind of problem, but some symptoms are more common than others!
If any of the following sound familiar, we should chat.
The Unshrinkable Queues
You've hired more agents. You've tightened processes. You've run QA cycles.
The queue has stayed full and even continues to grow. Your team is doing their best (maybe starting to burn out), but it's just not enough.
What's (probably? maybe?) happening is the contact volume is being generated somewhere else in the company entirely. Product gaps, onboarding failures, billing processes that were Janice's responsibility, but she retired. JANICE.
Your support team has been quietly handling it for years.
The Inexplicable Churn
Your CSAT scores are . . . acceptable. Your NPS is broadly where it should be (though don't get me started on that).
And yet customers are leaving (and more than ever before!), and the exit surveys are vague and unhelpful.
Churn is almost always a lagging indicator of something that was visible in the operational data months earlier.
Declining usage, repeat contacts about unresolved issues, renewal conversations nobody had.
The situation is just not getting read in time.
The Unwatched Growth
The company has scaled. The support function grew with it . . . more or less.
Ish.
But it grew reactively, without architecture and without the structural decisions that needed to be made before the dysfunction became fully entrenched.
Do you even have a proactive / Success arm?
It works, after a fashion, but it does not work well. The team knows it. The leadership team suspects it. Nobody has the time or knowledge or authority to fix it.
What I Do
I am a Fractional CX Leader.Which is a deceptively simple thing. With me, you get the experience of a VP of Customer Experience (just shy of 20 years of building, breaking, and rehabilitating CX functions) in the time and at the cost that a company at your stage can actually absorb.What I am not: A consultant who produces a report and disappears . . . Unless that's what you really want. What I build, I build with your team. The goal is a function that runs without me, and that is how I measure whether the engagement worked.What I am also not: a full-time senior hire at the salary that implies. I have already made every expensive mistake there is to make. You are paying for the pattern recognition without the learning curve (though I AM available for the right full-time engagements. Please contact me).The companies I work with the best are usually somewhere between ten and two hundred employees, in a growth phase where the informal Customer Support, Success, Experience, Account Management, etc. approaches have stopped working and the gap between what they have and what they need has become too impactful to ignore any longer.
How It Works
Step 1: Diagnose
First two to three weeks. I read the escalation queue, pull the data, talk to agents, team leads, and the leadership team about what they are trying to build. I build a picture of the actual state of the function, which is almost never the same as the stated one (I say, having done this enough times to be confident that it's the rule, not the exception).
Step 2: Roadmap
Not a long document. The three to five things that will make the most difference in the next ninety days. Generally this consists of a quick-win cluster (because credibility matters early), and a structural cluster (because that is where the lasting impact is).
Step 3: Build
Every single organisation with which I work has a different set of needs.
It could be that you need:
· An entirely new team from the ground up.
· Quality frameworks.
· Knowledge management systems.
· Hiring profiles for the leadership layer.
· Reporting structures that surface the right information to the right people.
Step 4: Hand off
When the function is genuinely ready for a full-time leader, I help find one and hand over something that's worth inheriting.
Depending on the situation, the new leader may be a coached internal promotion or a talent hunt. Either way, I remain available to assist until hand off is complete.
My Track Record
NOTE: As a function of my business, most of my contracts include comprehensive NDAs ipso facto that cover most of my activities within any particular organisation. Some organisations prefer to broaden that NDA to include the name of the organisation itself.
Thank you for your understanding the need to anonymize the information below, and understand that your own information will be treated with the same respect!
In recent years, preventable contact volume was reduced by more than 40% at one organisation by identifying a handful of upstream process gaps that had been generating volume for months without ever appearing on a product roadmap.
Incident-related contact volume reduced more than 75% with another client through earlier detection and a redesigned triage process.
Monthly churn was reduced by 12% over the course of a year, without a pricing change or a product launch, through an early warning system that became organisations first customer health score.At one organisation, 35% of all contact volume was traced to a single workflow that nobody had reviewed since the company's inception years prior. Once it was surfaced in terms the product team could act on, it was fixed within a quarter. Volume dropped materially.
About
Ash Rhodes. The CX Fixer.
Co-headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and Mesa, Arizona, USA. Working in Customer-facing roles and building relationships with customers since long before "customer success" was even a job title.
I have spent nearly 20 years in this specific corner of the CX world. Digging into the broken functions, taking responsibility for the inherited teams, and guiding the organisation that has a support operation but does not yet have a customer experience strategy. I have experience performing these feats across the globe and across industries, including B2B and B2C SaaS, fintech, healthtech, logistics, crypto, and a host of other industries. The team sizes have ranged from one person to over two hundred.
I moved to the Netherlands in 2025 following a life of travel (for both work and fun) all over the world.
For formal procurement: I operate as DTAR B.V., registered in the Netherlands.
Let's Talk
If you have a CX function that is not working and you want to understand why, I am happy to have a conversation. No discovery calls with SDRs first. No sales deck. Just a conversation between people who know what functional Customer and Operations teams actually look like.I am based in The Hague, Netherlands and Phoenix, AZ, USA and work with organisations across Europe and North America.
I respond to everything that is not a sales pitch. If you are selling me something, I admire the hustle but the answer is no.