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1. Value Curiosity: Daniel values curiosity in work culture, believing it is a two-way street: new hires must be eager to learn, and leaders must remain open to new perspectives to foster growth and improvement.
2. Advocate One-On-One Training: At Black & White, Daniel emphasizes one-on-one, personalized training to ensure new hires not only master the job but also fully embrace the company’s values, balancing operational excellence with genuine care for his team.
3. Empower Agents to Make Decisions: Daniel advocates empowering new team members with decision-making authority and clear judgment on when to escalate issues, believing that it builds trust and efficiency, enabling leadership to focus on resolving more complex problems.
4. Leverage Industry Collaborations: Daniel believes that small E-Commerce companies can associate to grow business and enhance CX. Black & White has successfully leveraged industry collaborations to create proactive, personalized customer experiences that boost engagement and sales.
5. Prioritize High-Touch CX: Black & White’s customer experience goal is to align the online shopping experience with the high-touch, personalized service of their cafés. Daniel highlights the company’s “subtle touches” initiative, which adds unexpected value and human connection to select orders.
Daniel Moore’s journey with coffee began behind the bar as a barista. Now, he leads as Director of Customer Experience at Black & White Coffee Roasters. Discover how Daniel built the CX team from the ground up, launching thoughtful initiatives designed to bring the same high-touch service found in Black & White cafés to their E-Commerce customers.
Meet Daniel Moore, Director of Customer Experience at Black & White Cofee Roasters!
Black and White Coffee Roasters is the brainchild of two US Barista Champions. Founded in 2017, Kyle Ramage and Lem Butler were inspired by the coffee they experienced at the competitive level and wanted to make those coffees as widely available as possible. B&W is committed to connecting people to the most interesting and approachable coffees it can find. B&W strives to be more than just a quality coffee roaster - the company hopes to challenge itself and customers to push the envelope of what specialty coffee ‘should’ be and how it should taste.
Daniel began his journey in the coffee industry in 2007 as a barista in the Raleigh, NC area. He later moved to Portland, OR – widely considered a coffee mecca – where he landed his first office role in the industry as an account manager, eventually transitioning into customer service. “We were doing everything from turning frowns upside down to taking orders over the phone,” he recalls.
After returning to Raleigh, Daniel reconnected with Kyle Ramage, a former colleague from his early barista days. Kyle had co-founded Black & White Coffee Roasters and invited Daniel to join the team. “When I got here, there was no one person assigned to handle the CX for the company, which was almost four years old by this point,” Daniel explains. Drawing on his background in customer service, he stepped into the role and ultimately became the Director of Customer Experience.
The origins of Black & White Coffee Roasters can be traced back to the World Barista Championship – a prestigious competition where each participating country sends one barista to showcase their skills in preparing espresso, espresso with milk, and a signature beverage. “It’s very niche. In coffee, it’s the highest achievement a barista can reach,” Daniel explains. “The founders of Black & White went back-to-back winning the U.S. competition, earning a place at the table, and then placed sixth and fourth in the world.”
Their shared passion led them to coach each other on the finer points of coffee, eventually securing investment to open a café with a 15-kilo roaster in Wake Forest, NC. “Here we are, eight years later,” Daniel says. “We roast between 12,000 and 15,000 pounds a week. We have two cafes plus a licensed concept in our local airport.”
Compared to colleague companies in the industry, Black & White has a significantly larger direct-to-consumer business, accounting for around 50% of total sales. “We deal with more individuals than most brands like ours. We’re just sending one bag of coffee to a thousand people a day,” Daniel notes. Recognizing that the customer experience doesn’t end at checkout - but that shipping is largely out of their control—the company is investing in improving its digital customer experience. “It’s not a hospitality experience where they’re coming into a café for a drink,” he says. “They’re visiting our website to buy coffee.”
Daniel was the sole CX team member up until a year ago when after internal hire, a new agent was brought on. “Anything they need to escalate comes to me. And then we overlap with our marketing department often – some customer experience issues are managed by two members of that team as well.”
Key Qualities Daniel Looks for in a New Hire
“Our company values – service, community, and excellence – influence everything we do,” Daniel shares. New hires are expected to align with Black & White’s core principles, and a curious approach to work is definitely a plus. Daniel places strong emphasis on soft skills: How well do they communicate? Are they friendly and empathetic? He elaborates, “You’re looking for somebody who can absorb negative emotions from others and then respond with curiosity and kindness regularly.” While administrative skills and coffee knowledge can be taught, Daniel believes the desire to help others is something that comes naturally.
Why Daniel Advocates One-On-One Training
Daniel takes a one-on-one approach to training, guiding new hires step-by-step through the ins and outs of CX operations. “Because I’m leading this department, I have to be able to do the job – and also take care of the people doing the job,” he explains. While solid standard operating procedures are in place, Daniel believes that working closely with team members ensures both the company’s values and processes are clearly understood and consistently upheld.
A key objective for new team members, once they’ve settled into their roles, is to empower them with decision-making authority – along with the judgment to escalate more complex issues to Daniel when needed. “When something gets escalated to me, I’m stoked to fix it,” he says, adding that having a reliable agent to handle day-to-day tasks has allowed him to focus fully on resolving higher-level concerns.
Main CX Support Channels
Black & White provides customers with multiple support channels, including a webform that converts to email, as well as direct email access. “We do a ton of work on social media,” Daniel adds. “DMs on Facebook and Instagram are how people prefer to communicate with us right now.”
KPIs Daniel is Tracking
Black & White does not track traditional metrics – instead, the focus is on strengthening the company’s reputation. Daniel explains, “The KPIs I’m looking for are how happy our customers are in their communication with us, and whether the resolutions that we are able to send out are giving us the idea that we’re making fewer mistakes.” Any team oversights are closely examined and used as learning opportunities to refine CX strategies and enhance overall performance.
Proactive CX and Leveraging Brand Collaborations
Collaborations within the industry have played a key role in Black & White’s proactive CX strategies. Daniel highlights a partnership with Fellow, a company that makes at-home brewing equipment and uses a text-based system to promote coffee roasters to customers. “We’ve been able to leverage their systems,” he explains “to be part of those drops and then collect more people who are interested in that product.” Additional proactive CX strategies include segmented email campaigns tailored to customers' order history and taste preferences.
When asked about Black & White’s primary CX goals and the steps being taken to achieve them, Daniel emphasizes their “make it match” ethos. The aim is to ensure that the E-Commerce experience reflects not only the quality of the coffee customers receive, but also the white-glove service offered in Black & White’s cafés. One initiative born from this mindset is called “subtle touches,” which empowers the production and fulfillment team to include an extra bag of coffee and a handwritten note in select orders, explaining the personal reason behind the gesture. Daniel adds, “We’re doubling down on creating a positive, personal experience that makes the online journey feel as warm and thoughtful as an in-person visit.” Other surprise gifts include Black & White merchandise and wooden “free drink” tokens to encourage café visits from local customers.
“My vision for customer experience in the next 5 to 10 years is for our reach to grow so that my team is bigger and there are more specializations within that team,” Daniel concludes. “Then we can unleash people creatively to take these subtle touches and personalize them even further.”
Can’t-live-without-tool? Without sounding cheeky, access to the Internet. We’re in North Carolina and I like hunting and fishing. I’ve been able to solve CS problems waiting for ducks to fly into my blind. If I have access to the Internet and my phone, then we can be nimble and make things magic for people in ways they wouldn’t expect and where I get to live a life that I want to live.
Recent book or podcast? Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara is like the bible for Black & White. The leadership team here is small, close-knit, and growing. We have two meetings a week where you can bring any issue and the whole team’s job is to try to make it better. Our leadership spends a lot of time thinking about and implementing ways to make things better across departments. We’ve been incredibly influenced by Simon Sinek. A Little Bit of Optimism is something that we’re chatting about most weeks. And then the concept of spears – you have an idea and your best friend's job is to poke all the holes in it they can in that high trust, private environment so that whatever rolls out is going to be worth it.
Key hiring trait? When I’m bringing on someone new, the most important word is curiosity. Not just on the part of the person coming in – they have to be curious and ready to learn the way – but I have to be curious about what they’re bringing to the table because I only have these eyes to look out of. I haven’t seen it from their perspective. If something coming from someone else hits me differently, we might need to adapt or adjust to make the whole thing better. So, curiosity is the word.
#1 challenge as a leader? My #1 challenger as a leader in CX is consistent communication – leaving nothing assumed or unsaid. I know this is going well, but do you know that I think that? I think what they are doing is great, but do they know that? If they are new around here, are they being communicated to in such a way that empowers them to know that what they are doing is the right thing? Or we can adjust if something is a little off target. We all make those assumptions constantly. After years, I realized ok, I thought it, now I’ve got to say it – especially if it's positive. You can critique all day long. But if somebody crushed it, then I’m not only going to tell them, I’m going to tell somebody else too, especially the leadership of our company. You need to know how well this person did and how important they are to the team.
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