At a Glance:

Paleovalley offers high-quality health foods, superfood bars, and grass-fed meat snacks alongside its sister meat-subscription service, Wild Pastures. Under the leadership of Monica Acevedo, the customer service function has scaled from a lean team of five into a thriving organization of 29 agents. 

Who is Monica Acevedo?

Meet Monica Acevedo, Director of Customer Service for Paleo Valley and Wild Pastures.

About Paleo Valley

Paleovalley is a health-forward company on a mission to make truly nutrient-dense whole foods the easy choice. Founded 12 years ago, its lineup spans grass-fed meat sticks, organic supplements, superfood bars, spices, and coffee, all made with clean, natural ingredients. 

Its sister brand, Wild Pastures, delivers 100% grass-fed, pasture-raised, grass-finished beef, chicken, and pork straight to customers' doors through a flexible subscription. Now six years in, Wild Pastures has grown into a trusted source for ethically raised meat. Together, the two brands serve a fast-growing community of customers who care about what goes into their food and where it comes from. 

Monica’s CX Journey

Monica's path to CX began in 2008, behind the counter as a bank teller. As the economy slid into recession, she made a deliberate move into healthcare, taking on a front desk manager role at a doctor's office. It felt like a career she could build for the long term, and she began mapping out where it could lead. Then, a friend's referral opened a door she had not considered: her first role in eCommerce. She took the leap, and it changed the trajectory of her career.

A friend's referral opened the door to her first role in eCommerce, and Monica ran with it. Working across eBay, Amazon, and a brick-and-mortar store gave her a fast, hands-on education in the realities of the field, and she used it to build a deep skill set and climb quickly into management. From there, she moved to a smaller company, drawn by the chance to do something she had not done before: build a team from the ground up rather than simply run one.

The CX Team at Paleo Valley

Paleovalley's customer service function was struggling, and Monica was brought in to turn it around. She started where she had before, with a team of five: setting KPIs, defining goals, and building a real career path for her agents. The results speak for themselves. That team of five is now a thriving organization of 29, with a deliberate structure that runs from Monica down through supervisors, team leads, and tiered agents. Each agent is dedicated to a single brand, so customers get service from someone who knows their products inside and out. 

Monica's team works remotely, which Monica considers a strength rather than a hurdle. Her real focus is making sure every team member feels genuinely supported, and making sure the feedback they gather from customers does not stop with them. She built the function so that insight flows cross functionally and actually improves the product and the customer experience. 

CX Team Success Factors

What makes CX successful at Paleovalley and Wild Pastures comes down to preparation and speed. Monica's team is trained and equipped to resolve issues fast, so tickets get answered before they age and customers get real help rather than a holding pattern. AI does the work it is best at on the back end, intelligently routing each ticket to the right person and resolving routine volume before it ever reaches an agent. That keeps her team focused on the conversations that actually need a human. 

Another way to make sure that customers get the information they need, when they need it? Setting up high quality FAQ systems and making sure that live chat really does offer support. That way, as many as 10-20% of customers who have questions don’t even need to open a ticket, they can get their questions answered without it. Monica’s goal is to make sure that even more customer concerns are handled this way, through self-service deflection, resolving issues without a ticket or an agent needed at all 

Hiring the Right People

When Monica hires for her team, she screens for one quality above all others: empathy. The work is demanding, and agents field the same concerns and the same frustrations over and over. Her standard is that every customer feels heard regardless. As she puts it, for the team it might be the hundredth time dealing with an issue that day, but for the customer it is the first time, and that mindset shapes how she expects every interaction to go.

Skills can be taught, Monica believes, but that instinct to meet people with patience and care is harder to train. She looks for agents who bring empathy and positivity to every conversation, and who pair it with the drive to actually solve the problem and see it through.

What’s Coming Next?

AI is a partner on my team, not a replacement for it. The agents are the backbone of everything we do, and that does not change. What AI does is take the repetitive volume off their plates so they can focus on the conversations that actually need a human: the nuanced, the emotional, the complex. Those will always need people, and people will always be the heart of great customer service. 

For Monica, she’d love to see the AI handling more of the routine volume and then have the rest of the team on the backend taking care of anything that the AI can’t or quality checking the AI. But she recognizes that it’s a balancing act to make sure that AI is doing all that it can but also that customers are not getting frustrated about its use.

Monica sees this shift extending well beyond Paleovalley. Across the industry, she expects AI to become the first line for routine customer service, with people handling the complex, nuanced, and emotional conversations that need real judgment. But she is clear that this is not the end of human interaction in CX. It is an evolution of it. The careers change, they do not disappear.

AI is never set and forget. It takes skilled people to shape how it responds, to keep improving it, and to step in wherever judgment, empathy, or context are required. That is not a fallback role, it is a higher one. As AI takes on the routine, the human side of CX becomes more strategic, not less essential. 

Tech stack

Our current stack relies on a few key tools to keep operations running smoothly. For ticketing, we use Richpanel. We have actually grown alongside them, and they frequently build new widgets, reporting features, and tagging systems directly from our feedback. For phone support, we plug in Aircall to handle our voice operations. Finally, we use Brandwatch to manage and track all of our social media monitoring and engagement. 

Topics of interest 

The hardest part of leading customer service is that many companies still treat it as a cost center, not a growth driver. They underestimate how much the CX team shapes loyalty, retention, and how customers feel about the brand. Monica sees it differently. Great service is one of the most direct levers a company has on lifetime value: a customer who feels taken care of stays, reorders, and recommends. Her job as a leader is to make that case with data, build the cross functional relationships to back it up, and shift the narrative so the rest of the business sees CX for what it is, a driver of revenue rather than a line item.