Customer service becomes strategic when it shows the business where growth is getting stuck.
That's the lesson from Patrick Heffron, CFO of StickerYou, in conversations with Rob Manne of Inflectiv at the Digital Momentum Summit. StickerYou is a custom ecommerce business with unusual operational complexity. Customers upload artwork, choose quantity, size, shape, and material, then receive custom stickers, decals, labels, and related products a few days later.
Patrick explains that the company ships "about 500 to 600 orders a day," with an average order value "like $100." Since every order is custom he says StickerYou has a large number of SKUs every day.
That model creates more than production complexity. It also creates service complexity.
More customization means more exceptions, which means more questions, which create a steady stream of customer signals, many of which can point to problems in the buying journey, fulfillment process, product experience, or communications.
Paying for Tools With Unclear Value
Patrick came at the issues with a CFO's eye. The company was paying for tools but the value was unclear. Help Scout was "basic." Salesforce cost "about $40,000 a year" and had "zero use." His conclusion was direct: "We're spending a whole lot of money on these tools and getting very minimal value from that. Let's get value from it."
Which is the CFO case for better customer service. It starts with waste, then moves quickly to visibility, quality, and better decisions.
StickerYou's move to HubSpot was designed to create "a central, one source of truth for everything to do with customer service." The choice mattered because StickerYou's team supports customers through a high volume ecommerce journey. Patrick says the company has "a team that helps service customers," that benefited from a service module that gave better view of tickets, customer feedback, recurring issues, and service performance.
Once the foundation was set, customer service became a source of operating evidence. Patrick described the old state along the lines of the company being able to see a product problem, but unable to say how big of a problem it was. With data in one place, they could say, "Here's how many customers every day come in with this complaint. Now we can address it."
StickerYou's AI Chatbot
The same discipline shaped StickerYou's AI chatbot. Patrick says the idea was "about providing better service," meaning accurate, timely, 24/7 support, with the ability to hand off to a human when needed. The result was strong early. They set a goal for 60% of tickets to be resolved without human interaction and reached 64%.
Patrick described a team that once viewed the work as volume: get through the tickets. The new standard is quality: how many interactions does it take to answer a customer's question, and how satisfied is the customer when the interaction ends? He calls the move "quality first, quantity second," a major change from where the team had been.
That change also reframes ROI. Patrick is skeptical of the clean implementation promise that a new system will save a fixed number of jobs. His better measure is whether the company is better after. For a growing business with a limited budget, the case is about supporting more customers while keeping costs disciplined.
Which is a valuable story because it's grounded. Better customer service was a CFO led effort to stop wasting money, create cleaner data, measure quality, expose product issues, serve customers after hours, and give the business better evidence.