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1. Focus on Cultural Fit: Julia emphasizes that strong CX hiring is driven by cultural alignment first – ensuring new team members fit the team’s values and way of working – because this fosters collaboration and comfort.
2. Foster Customer Relationships: Happy Mammoth’s CX strategy centers on building long-term customer trust. Julia prioritizes education, ongoing support, and proactive check-ins, reinforcing a relationship-based approach rather than purely transactional interactions.
3. Endorse an Intentional Approach to AI: Julia stresses an intentional approach to AI in CX, using technology that enables natural, conversational, and personalized interactions – AI is most valuable when it reduces friction for both customers and teams rather than adding impersonal automation.
4. Listen to Your Team: Julia advises CX leaders to listen to their team. Actively involve frontline agents in decision-making, as their day-to-day customer interactions provide critical insights that can drive continuous improvement across the department.
5. Value Human Touch in CX: As brands and companies rapidly adopt AI across their operations, Julia believes this growing automation is simultaneously increasing customers’ desire for authentic human interaction and emotional connection in e-commerce experiences.
After years working in sales and operations, Julia Ralaimihoatra transitioned into the customer experience space and joined Happy Mammoth in 2023. Now Head of Customer Experience, she leads an international, fully remote team of 38 members supporting the C-Commerce supplement brand, which offers products focused on hormone balance, gut health, sleep, anti-aging, and beauty. Discover how Julia balances AI and the human touch in CX, with a focus on building brand trust and fostering lasting, meaningful relationships with Happy Mammoth’s customers.
Meet Julia Ralaimihoatra, Head of Customer Experience at Happy Mammoth!
Happy Mammoth is an Australian-owned wellness company specializing in natural, science-backed supplements designed to support women's hormone health, gut health, and metabolism. Its mission is to source the highest quality, natural ingredients and carefully formulate supplements that support women's unique health needs of all ages.
Julia Ralaimihoatra’s path into customer experience was a natural evolution. “I’ve always worked in sales and operations, and over time my roles shifted more toward customer experience than anything else,” she explains. She joined Happy Mammoth in 2023 as the Australia-based supplement brand’s Customer Satisfaction Manager, before stepping into the role of Head of Customer Experience in February 2026.
Based in Argentina, Julia leads a fully remote, international CX team of 38. The group includes 18 customer service agents, with the remaining members focused on social media, reviews, and payments.
With team members spread across the globe, Julia identifies time zone differences as the primary challenge of leading a remote team. “It’s the main issue when problems arise or tasks need to be handled quickly,” she explains. Over time, however, she has developed a strong understanding of her agents’ schedules and knows who is available at any given moment.
Julia prioritizes cultural fit when hiring new CX team members. “They need to align with our team – the way the whole team works, responds, reacts, what’s important and what matters to them,” she says. When someone integrates well, it creates a more comfortable environment where the team can collaborate effectively. Alongside this, she also looks for relevant experience and a positive attitude.
At Happy Mammoth, onboarding is a structured four-week process. New agents receive training across software platforms, product knowledge, workflows, and core customer service operations. “Then there’s about four weeks of shadowing,” Julia explains. “We’ll pair them with a stronger agent in chats, emails, or social media depending on where they are going.” This comprehensive approach is designed to build confident, independent, and well-informed agents.
Julia prioritizes key CX metrics to evaluate her team’s performance. “We look at response time, resolution time, and then have our quality team review every conversation to evaluate solution, tone, and so on,” she notes. CSAT scores are also monitored, though with the understanding that they don’t always fully reflect an agent’s performance.
As a growing brand in the supplements industry, Happy Mammoth understands that customers turn to it to support their health and wellbeing. For this reason, building relationships grounded in trust is a core priority. “The focus is on educating them, supporting them, and guiding them,” Julia adds. Agents also conduct regular check-ins to understand how customers are doing and whether they need additional support along their journey.
As a subscription-based supplement company, Happy Mammoth doesn’t follow traditional peak seasons. Instead, sales spikes coincide with special offer campaigns running at the start of the year, April–May, July, and November. “There’s a surge in emails,” Julia explains, noting that customers often have questions about how the offers work and how to claim them.
Julia credits Zowie with enabling her to avoid scaling the team during peak periods. She also sees these busy times as an opportunity for experienced team members to take on additional hours. “It’s a way for them to make more money. And the agents who are working extra – I am confident in what they are doing.”
Julia admits she was initially hesitant to adopt AI in Happy Mammoth’s CX strategy. Early automated interactions felt overly transactional and often created more work for her team. Her perspective shifted after implementing Zowie, a customer AI agent platform. Emphasizing its ability to deliver more natural, personalized exchanges, she explains, “it’s able to understand the customer and actually have a back-and-forth conversation. And that was the winner for me.”
Zowie is integrated across every conversation scenario, enabling an impressive 77% of tickets to be fully automated. “There’s such a specific flow that when a customer comes in who wants a refund, for example, is going to go through the whole flow with the AI and come out the other end with a refund – happy,” she adds.
Julia believes AI will continue to play a valuable role in CX, particularly in handling basic transactional interactions such as order tracking, where live agents aren’t necessary. However, she anticipates a growing demand for genuine human connection in E-Commerce, where customers want to feel like more than just a metric or transaction. “I think that because we put AI everywhere, customers are starting to need human touch – they want to speak with a human,” she explains.
Julia believes that seeking input from your team should be a priority for all CX leaders. “Listen to your team, get them involved,” she emphasizes. “When you’re a manager, you tend to think you have to make every decision and know everything. But that’s not true.” Agents on the front line often have valuable insights into what is and isn’t working. “Ask them the right questions – push them to share what they’re seeing and experiencing. That’s how we improve the department,” she adds.
Can’t-live-without-tool? We couldn’t live without Slack.
Key hiring trait? Hungry and being positive.
AI or no AI? Yes to AI.
Recent book or podcast? Right now, anything to do with AI. It’s been my obsession. I don’t have a specific one, but I’ve been constantly listening to AI podcasts discussing ideas, prompts to use, etc.
#1 challenge as a CX leader? The time zone differences.
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