Rogers Reflections
National networks, structured empathy, and the art of keeping connection human.
Before you can design connection at scale, you have to understand what happens when it’s lost in translation.
When you work in small regional shops customer experience is personal whether you want it to be or not. You might fix someone’s internet in the morning and see them at the grocery store that evening.
At that scale, loyalty is relational.
You don’t need a CRM to remind you who your neighbours kids are.
In national call centres, it becomes something else entirely... a strategy, a system, a thing you have to intentionally manufacture without making it feel manufactured.
Where Nordia taught me how structure holds empathy together, Rogers showed me what it looks like when structure becomes the empathy — when loyalty itself is something you have to architect.
Human Moments by Design
One thing that stuck with me was the “whispers” in our headsets. Before answering a call, we’d see a small prompt:
“Customer has been with us for seven years. Please thank them for their loyalty.”
At first it felt artificial. But then you’d hear the change in their voice when you acknowledged them. the shift to something softer. A simple, intentional thank you could build a bridge in five seconds flat.
It was manufactured, yes, but meaningfully so.
Because a customer’s experience isn’t about whether the gratitude is spontaneous.
It’s about whether they feel seen.
Humans are better at sensing apathy than detecting rehearsed sincerity.
Structure can remind us to care, but it can’t make us mean it.
Choice and the Fragility of Loyalty
Working at national scale taught me something else: just because someone’s here today doesn’t mean they’ll be here tomorrow.
Customers without contracts weren’t “ours” in any real sense—they were choosing us every single day.
Scale can make you forget that choice still exists. It’s easy to start seeing customers as captured assets, pieces of machinery in the system.
They’re not.
They’re people with options, and every friction point is a chance for them to leave.
Keeping them isn’t about locking them in; it’s about giving them reasons to stay… reasons like feeling valued, remembered, and recognized as more than an account number.
Scale changes everything except human nature.
The larger a system grows, the easier it is to mistake control for connection.
The real skill isn’t managing more people,
it’s designing more room for them to stay human inside the system.
Same People, Different Contexts
Here’s the real kicker: The people you serve in B2C and the ones you support in B2B are the same humans.
Maybe they’re buying routers instead of phone plans. Maybe they’re managing a helpdesk instead of their personal phone bill.
Doesn’t matter.
They still want to feel important.
They still want things to be easier, not harder.
They still want to be seen, understood, and appreciated.
Human nature doesn’t change. The context does.
Blueprint for Scaled Humanity
The lessons I learned taking whispered prompts on a loyalty team and turning them into genuine moments of connection aren’t just relics from my call-centre days. They’re blueprints for any system that touches people:
If you want loyalty, design for humanity.
If you want adoption, design for meaning.
If you want scale, scale connection, not just infrastructure.
Because at the end of the day, the system can whisper all it wants...
If you don’t mean it, they’ll hear that louder.