At A Glance

Lynley Nakano, CX Manager at Earth Rated, took an unconventional path from wildlife management dreams to leading customer experience for one of the pet industry's most trusted brands. Managing customer support with just one coordinator, she's leveraging AI as a productivity tool while maintaining the human touch that keeps Earth Rated's community highly engaged. Now her biggest challenge isn't scaling support volume. It's helping customers trust Earth Rated's grooming products as much as they trust their famous poop bags.

Who is Lynley Nakano?

Meet Lynley, CX Manager at Earth Rated! 

About Earth Rated

Earth Rated features a wide product line of pet-related merchandise. All of their items are made with several unifying factors. They are safe for pets. Thoughtfully designed. Carefully manufactured with sustainability in mind. Their stated mission is simple. To make every day moments for pet owners and the animals they love better. 

Lynley’s CX Journey

Lynley's path to customer experience couldn't have been more unexpected - she originally studied wildlife management with dreams of wildlife conservation like "the next Steve Irwin."

While working retail during school and climbing to a manager position, she graduated and took contract jobs in her field. 

Between contracts, she stumbled upon what seemed like "a job that sounded too good to be true" at a rapidly growing tech company called Shopify. "It was a tech job, fully remote, and was in  customer support. And they were going to send me everything I needed, laptop, monitor, all of that," she recalls. What started as a temporary gig while waiting for her next wildlife contract turned into a five-year journey supporting merchants building online businesses.

When she saw the posting for Earth Rated, her love for animals drew her in immediately. "I saw the job at Earth Rated, and I was like, this sounds super interesting. Let me give it a go, and I've been here since the end of last year, and honestly, I'm loving it."

What excites Lynley about CX?

For Lynley, the magic of customer experience lies in creating those viral, memorable moments that transcend the product itself. "I think in today's market, everything's so competitive. And so all those brands that really prioritize these exceptional experiences are the ones who are being spoken about the most - they're the ones you see going viral on TikTok," she explains. 

"It's beyond just having a good product, you really have to make the whole journey for that customer really special." What energizes her most is witnessing the organic enthusiasm that comes from exceptional experiences. "There's nothing quite like that enthusiasm of a customer talking about a brand that they're really like in love with or loyal to or obsessed with," Lynley says. "From a professional standpoint like that gives me life, the opportunity to kind of create those moments and like have those come out organically, it's just so fun."

The CX Team at Earth Rated

Earth Rated operates with a lean customer experience team that falls under the umbrella of "global experience," working closely with their social media team. The core CX team consists of just Lynley as the CX Manager and one CX coordinator who handles the frontline customer interactions. "CX specifically, it's me. And then one super hardworking CX coordinator.

She's the one who's on the ground handling all of the tickets. She's that first point of touch for all of our customers," Lynley explains. 

The team works in a hybrid model from their Montreal headquarters, spending three days in the office and two days working from home.

Hiring Process

When it comes to hiring, Lynley looks for candidates who embody curiosity and problem-solving instincts. "I really like somebody who's curious, people who have a good interest in solving problems. I like to listen to the questions people ask," she explains.

Beyond the interview questions themselves, she pays attention to how candidates engage: "When I say something, are they questioning it? Do they want to learn more? I really like people who kind of challenge the status quo." The most important quality she seeks is conscientiousness, coupled with adaptability. 

"Anyone who feels really comfortable with unfamiliar situations, and feels confident they can figure it out. That, for me, is key. Like, if you have the mindset of, let me learn and observe, and then I know I can do this, love that."

CX Team Success Factors

Earth Rated's customers primarily connect through email, which is  the bulk of support requests, along with phone calls for more complex issues, though Lynley notes "the volume is quite low" for phone support since "most people tend to just write a quick email, it's a lot simpler." 

The team also manages a highly engaged social media presence, responding to questions and comments on Instagram and TikTok where they have "a very engaged community of followers." Rather than focusing solely on traditional metrics, Earth Rated takes a more qualitative approach to measuring success. 

"We kind of take a little bit of a different approach, more qualitative as opposed to typical KPIs," Lynley explains. They track patterns in return rates, return reasons, and star ratings from their eCommerce sales, using Gorgias reporting to analyze tags and identify trends. This data-driven approach allows them to "be quite agile in our response" and collaborate effectively with product, marketing, and operations teams to make improvements.

Building Trust Beyond Poop Bags

Earth Rated's primary goal is expanding customer trust beyond their signature product category. "Our biggest goal and priority right now is deepening that trust between the brand and our customers," Lynley says. While customers already trust their poop bags completely - "People trust our poop bags. We're like the poop bag company" - the challenge is transferring that confidence to their broader product line. 

"the same level of quality and attention  is put into our other products, like our grooming line, for example," she explains. The team wants customers to associate Earth Rated with overall quality rather than just one product category.

Looking forward, Lynley envisions a more proactive approach to customer engagement: "I picture us involving customers in ways beyond just receiving their feedback, but proactively gathering it. And we'd like to involve customers in things like product testing and pop-up events and have customers tell us what they need and want."

Revenue Generation/AI/topics of interest 

When things are quiet on the support front, Lynley sees it as an opportunity rather than a concern. "I tend to take it as a good sign if we aren't being overwhelmed," she explains. During these quieter moments, the team conducts internal testing and deep dives into specific product lines, taking products home for testing and working closely with their social media team to create educational content.

Earth Rated is actively incorporating AI as a productivity tool rather than a replacement for human interaction. "It's not replacing our human interaction. We don't need it to," Lynley emphasizes. "The phones and emails are still being answered by us. 

Any comments or DMs on socials, those are us. These are all real people." Instead, AI serves as a force multiplier for their small team, helping them "punch above our weight in terms of like the insights that we can extract and the speeds at which we can do things." The technology particularly helps with data analysis, allowing them to quickly process information and generate insights that would otherwise take much longer.

Leadership Philosophy 

Lynley's advice for CX leaders centers on curiosity and deep understanding. "Always start with a learning and understanding approach. So learn the basics. Learn your customers, learn your products, learn the problems, really dig in and ask those questions and figure that out," she advises. This mirrors the qualities she looks for in team members - people who ask questions and challenge the status quo. 

Looking toward the future, she believes customer experiences will become increasingly personalized and proactive. "I think experiences in the customer journey, they'll probably become more and more personalized," she predicts, embracing the idea of technology anticipating customer needs. 

"If it's noticing patterns of like, oh, you buy this every four months,let me suggest this at the three and a half month mark. I love that." This shift toward proactive, personalized service represents her vision for where customer experience is heading - "a lot less reactive, a lot more proactive and we'll be kind of able to anticipate people's needs."