In this episode of the CXNOW Podcast, host Lauren Gold sits down with Cate Marques, Chief Experience Officer at Terra Kaffe, to talk about rising through the ranks in CX, earning executive buy-in, and why giving CX a seat at the table isn't optional.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Lauren Gold: Welcome, everyone, to the CXNOW Podcast. I'm your host, Lauren Gold, and today I'm speaking with the beautiful and brilliant Cate Marques, Chief Experience Officer at Terra Kaffe. Do you all know Terra Kaffe? It is an amazing brand. They've turned coffee from a product into a lifestyle experience — so much of which is because of Cate's hard work.

I can definitely relate to needing a coffee experience and a ritual, so I love working with this brand. Cate and I have hit the stage together a couple of different times, and I am so excited for today. We're going to talk specifically about CX at the executive level. Cate, welcome.

Cate Marques: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here, and I'll take any excuse to chat with you, Lauren. We could go all day — but I don't think anybody's got that attention span.

Lauren Gold: We could go all day. We promise to make it impactful, but if anyone needs a repeat, Cate and I are your girls.

Lauren Gold: I am always in awe of your journey at Terra Kaffe. You've told us about the early, early days — how you grew the entire experience team, how Terra Kaffe has evolved, and the customer experience they bring. I'd love to hear more personally from you: your journey rising to the top as an executive within CX. You are absolutely a brand in and of yourself, so tell me more about that.

Cate Marques: Oh my gosh, thank you. Yeah, it's flown by — it's crazy. I'm coming up on my six-year anniversary at Terra Kaffe, which blows my mind.

I started right at the start of the pandemic and I didn't know what I was getting into. I got connected to the founder and CEO through a former colleague, and they said, "Do you want to come on board and help us build the next thing in coffee?" And I said, "Yeah, absolutely. I drink coffee, sure, I'm qualified for this." I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was the second team member. I'd been in early-stage startups in the past, but I had never worked in the hardware space, never worked in the coffee space — actually not even in the e-comm space.

Had you told me then what my role would become, I would have told you, "You've got the wrong girl. I'm not an executive. I don't even know my way around CX in the D2C or e-comm space."

What happened was that I showed up. And my journey to the top, so to speak, has been a series of showing up — looking around, seeing what needs to be done today, and being willing to get my hands dirty and learn really quickly. To thrive in CX, but also in the early-stage company ecosystem, it requires a willingness to wear many hats and just learn how to do new stuff every day.

When I started at TK, I was one of three people, including the founder. We didn't have CX. We had a Gmail inbox. Our support line was my cell phone. If it was Christmas, if it was 11 PM — if I was awake, our phone lines were open. If you emailed, it was me. If I said, "Let me circle back with our product team," that was also me.

It started super scrappy, and to be honest with you, it stayed super scrappy. We've obviously grown since then, and we've been working with Kustomer for the last four and a half years, which has seen us through several iterations of CX — from when we were just a few people in a little space in Brooklyn, to a much larger team, to moving toward a BPO model.

But the consistent thing as it pertains to my journey into an executive role has been meeting the moment. What does the moment require? What does the company need now? What does our community need now? And just doing my best to figure that out, one day at a time. That, paired with being in the right place at the right time and getting lucky — because there is nowhere you can grow as quickly as you can in an early-stage company.

Lauren Gold: That hits home so much. I love how you say "just showing up," because so many people are looking for the silver bullet, the perfectly mapped-out journey. But just showing up and caring about what you're doing — having an impact regardless of role, title, or the size of the company — I believe good things will happen for your career.

Cate Marques: Yeah. When I started there was a vague job description, but had I allowed my role to be defined by that, this growth trajectory wouldn't have happened. What did happen was that I saw something that needed to be done, and whether or not it was within my defined responsibilities — if it needed to be done, there was just nobody else to do it. It had to be me or it wasn't going to happen. I think that's something a lot of CX leaders can learn from. You're never going to hear a yes if you don't at least ask.

Lauren Gold: And startups definitely have a way of keeping you humble and hungry, which is a great place to be. You're learning every day, contributing every day, and if you're lucky, maybe having some fun along the way too.

Cate Marques: If you want to grow, there has never been a world that I've seen — at least in startups — where you get the promotion and then you start operating at the level of manager. No. You operate at that level, and you do it for a while, and you try to make an impact, and then you will be rewarded with the growth. You've got to put the work in before the title or the comp is granted upon you.

Lauren Gold: In so many cases, you're already doing the role before you step into it. And speaking of humble and hungry, startups definitely level the playing field — which I love, because those people who are so willing to show up and have an impact are the ones, like yourself, who pave an amazing path through a lot of grit and hard work.

So, you started your journey at Terra Kaffe, and about four years ago you crossed into the C-suite as Chief Experience Officer. Tell me more about that. Was there a shift when that happened — a moment where you felt you could really represent the customer experience you had built?

Cate Marques: It really starts at the beginning of the company. For anyone not familiar, we sell very high-end bean-to-cup espresso machines. This is a category that has long been dominated by the same five or six players that are, on average, over 100 years old. They've coasted on the legacy they've built — and I'm grateful for them for popularizing home espresso. That said, when you're selling a $1,000 or $2,000 machine and you're up against incumbents with name recognition, if you want to convince people that this is the right move for them, you don't have a choice but to listen to your customers.

That spans the entire customer journey. Pre-purchase: what are they saying? Why would they ever take a risk on a young, relatively unknown brand with such a large investment? Post-purchase: what are the pain points? What can we solve for? For us, it was always about what we're going to build next — and that's come from insights gleaned from our community on previous generations.

From the very early days, I had a bit of a leg up, because we didn't have a choice. We had to listen to our customers in order to sell anything. Our founder recognized that. I think there's a reason why the first hire he made was CX.

That gave me a good springboard. I had founder buy-in from the beginning. And because I got here really early, we built a solid relationship of trust — it wasn't a question of how do I get him to pay attention to what I'm saying; it was more, how do I make it a total no-brainer for him? From there, we built naturally on that. I had my finger on the pulse of what our community was saying and what they wanted. I had his buy-in. All of the pieces were there. And I think that's why I was able to rise through the ranks quickly: as long as I kept coming back and proving the value that our community could bring to the business, I was given a continued seat at the table.

I definitely feel for CX leaders who are coming into brands that don't have that kind of buy-in from the beginning. The job is hard. But what needs to be done is proving that listening to the customer will benefit the business.

People in CX leadership wear two different masks. To your customer, you're the face of the business — these are the policies, this is the timeline. But to the business, you're the face of the customer. How do you merge those two worlds into one cohesive narrative that doesn't position the business versus the customer? It's a balancing act, because often what the customer wants costs the business money.

Lauren Gold: It's amazing that you and the founder have that relationship — kudos to him for having the foresight to understand how critical that would be and for making such an important hire. For those CX leaders who don't feel they have a seat at the table — where do they begin? We know what we need as CX leaders, but how do we translate that into something meaningful?

Cate Marques: I love that question because it's something I'm asked often — and something I've had to think about, even with my founder's buy-in. I've still received skepticism from investors and business partners: "Why is somebody from CX in your board meeting?"

What it comes down to is this: how do I distill metrics and KPIs in a way that actually makes sense to the finance team, to an investor, to a potential manufacturing partner? And what is the value to them?

This has gotten a lot easier in the age of AI. What I've started doing over the last couple of years is taking our data — qualitative survey results, customer feedback — and throwing it into Claude or ChatGPT to tailor those metrics for the specific audience, whether that's the engineering team, the product team, the finance team.

We run fairly frequent customer surveys and we get a ton of contextual information. But a lot of what we operate in is qualitative. How do you turn that into something quantitative, and then tailor it for the audience? Make it as easy as possible for them to digest.

If I say "our customers are expressing some hesitation about this new feature," my finance team does not care. They want to know: what is that doing to our return rate? What is the potential exposure if we don't fix this bug? It's articulating the value in their language, in a way that makes it so easy for them to understand that they feel like I'm just giving them information — when in reality, I'm guiding them to my point of view.

Lauren Gold: Tailoring it for different personas is such a pro tip, because it feels obvious to us, but translating the trenches to what's meaningful to others is hard.

Cate Marques: It's actually what marketing teams have been doing since the dawn of time — and now AI has made it so easy for us.

Lauren Gold: Oh my gosh, Cate, I have been knee-deep in Claude and having the time of my life. Building reports, pulling from different systems, analyzing account segments — it's been such a game changer.

Cate Marques: The richness of the information we can get now is incredible. We've run customer surveys for as long as I've been here, and it used to be all multiple choice with one fill-in at the end, because I would have to be the one going through all the answers and categorizing them. Now, everything is a free-write — because I can give it to Claude and it's great. It's revolutionized our ability to quantify things that couldn't have been quantified before, and to just go a level deeper, and a level deeper, and a level deeper. It's blowing my mind. It's made my life so much more enjoyable.

Lauren Gold: I feel the exact same way. There were always those blockers of, "it'd be great if I could understand the data this way, but the systems…" Now you're really only limited by your imagination. The insights are remarkable. On the flip side — what risks do businesses face when they don't have a CX leader at the table?

Cate Marques: The risks are massive, and I see it frequently with founders and marketing teams. Businesses are often built — and marketing campaigns launched — with an idea of who companies want their customers to be. Sometimes the stars align and your target customer is your actual customer. But it almost never happens, because we live in a pretty diverse country, racially and socioeconomically. The people actually buying what you're selling are not necessarily who you think they're going to be.

I think about the early days of TK. We tracked all the engagement metrics on everything we posted on Instagram. And we posted this one photo — just an exterior shot of the Berlin Museum of Art — and it got no engagement. I'm thinking: people don't know what that building is. People don't care. We're a coffee brand. You want to position yourself as aspirational, but there's definitely a tipping point where you go too aspirational and not at all accessible, and you alienate your core customer.

If you're not listening to your CX leaders when they tell you who your customers are, you may miss the mark entirely. You're turning out creative and assets that aren't going to land.

The second risk is more literal: you shortchange yourself of revenue. If you understand who your customer is, you can better market to them — whether that's recurring revenue or net new customers. Your customer acquisition costs will skyrocket if you're doing more work to get people to get your brand and want to give you their hard-earned dollars. People vote with their dollars.

Ultimately, if you don't understand who your customer is because you're not listening to your CX team, you are going to continue to build things that don't land. You might sell a product, but you're never going to become a brand. And that is what will help newer companies stand apart. People are marketed to thousands of times a day — it's so easy to get lost in the noise.

But if you know who your customer is, you can build yourself into something bigger than just a product that solves a problem. You can become a brand. You can build a real community. People aren't going to become flywheels for you — they're not going to tell their friends, "you have to check out this amazing thing" — if they don't feel that emotional connection. And that lives and dies within the CX part of the org. So you've got to give people a seat at the table. You're shortchanging your company if you don't.

Lauren Gold: I love that. You mentioned the product-to-CX feedback loop — and it's hardware, software, and then customer experience. How do you think about bringing that feedback to benefit the end consumer, but also bringing the product to market and making sure the product team feels like part of that journey when they're not customer-facing?

Cate Marques: I'm thinking about that a lot these days. We're currently in product development for a brand new flagship product that I can't say much about yet. But what's cool — and we've seen this work well for our TK2 and our Demi, our two other hero products — is that I get to be in the room for all of those conversations: with our industrial design firm, with our manufacturing partners, with internal discussions.

When you understand how your community is reacting to what you currently have in market, you can say, "They really love this element. This is a pain point." It helps you iterate on whatever you're building next.

As it pertains to product teams and engineering teams in particular, it goes back to making things really easy to understand. There are a lot of tough conversations, because engineers and product leads often just want to build cool sh*t. And it can be so hard to say, "Yeah, that would be really cool, but our customers aren't going to care."

It's a willingness to have those tough conversations on behalf of your customer, so you can prioritize the things they will actually care about. It's knowing the limits, trying to take off your own blinders — which is really hard — and constantly coming at everything with a lens toward: how is this actually going to be used or consumed in the real world?

Lauren Gold: It sounds like you all are lucky enough to have a great dynamic internally. But more broadly in the industry — what misconceptions do you think executives have about CX?

Cate Marques: The classic one is that CX is just a cost center. It can be, but I think the biggest misconception is treating CX as a necessary evil. "How little can we invest in CX without getting our head shot off by the internet?" It's a fundamentally antiquated misconception. Yes, back in the day you could get away with anonymous triage call centers and not think about it anymore. But in the age of the internet, everybody has a platform.

It goes far beyond collecting site reviews. What are people saying on ads they happen to see? What are people saying in the anonymity of Reddit? What are people saying to friends and family? If your business can really thrive via word of mouth, what's happening in those conversations that you can't monitor at all?

There's been this slow move toward seeing CX as a revenue driver — not just because of our ability to upsell or offer a discount code, but because of something bigger. How does your brand feel? How do people feel in their end-to-end journey? Are you encouraging them to share a referral code with a friend who came over and loved the coffee? I do think we're moving in that direction.

The other misconception is a lack of understanding of the skill it takes to do this job well — particularly on the part of the teams on the ground floor — and the emotional fortitude it requires to not know what's coming at you minute by minute, but still show up relentlessly as an ambassador for the brand.

CX teams are doing a million things simultaneously. They have to adhere to an SOP that just changed, remember to tag a ticket in a way that just changed, de-escalate a customer conversation, and all while their queue is ever-lengthening. It takes tremendous skill — incredible neuroplasticity — to go from task to task to task.

There are people at the executive level who think CX is an entry-level position, that anybody could do it. I say: get on the phone, prove it.

Lauren Gold: I agree — a tremendous amount of resilience and showing up every day. Are there warning signs you can identify that suggest a business doesn't value CX?

Cate Marques: Circling back to the beginning of the conversation: it's whether or not someone from CX has a seat at the table. A brand can say they're customer-centric until they're blue in the face, but what does that actually mean?

I have an Oura ring — love it. I saw a post on LinkedIn where someone said, "I'm an Oura ring girl for life. I was outside warranty and they gave me a replacement ring." And I thought — yes, it is amazing. But let's remember two things. One, Oura isn't making money on the rings; they're making money on the subscription. Their interest is in keeping you as a subscriber. Two, Oura is tremendously well-capitalized, so they can afford to keep a customer in their ecosystem.

My point is: it's hard to say what it means for a brand to not care about CX without taking into account stage, capitalization, and what business they're in. But to answer the question — it's whether CX has the seat at the table. It's whether you are actually invested in the people talking to your customers day in and day out. And I don't care if you are giving everybody in your ecosystem free things. If there is not someone from CX in the rooms where decisions are made, you don't care.

Lauren Gold: I like that. Last question — what advice would you give a CX leader who wants their voice to be heard in executive leadership discussions?

Cate Marques: The first things are what I mentioned earlier: make information easy to digest, tailor it to your audience.

If you want an edge in those conversations, learn what they care about. What's driving them? What are their department's KPIs, and how can you contribute to helping them hit those?

We were seeing customer acquisition costs go up, and I had to take the idea to my finance team: let's be a little more liberal in replacing machines rather than repairing them. And they said, "Why? That's going to cost us money." And I said, "Yes — but we're seeing CAC go up because we've had a few people have negative experiences that are now posting about those experiences. Other people are seeing them, they're likely somewhere in our funnel, and if they see that, they're not going to purchase. If we stop here and say let's prevent these negative experiences from occurring, we'll boost public sentiment and reduce CAC. Yes, it's a longer ROI — but I'm speaking in a language they understand."

For those of us thriving in the CX world, we already know how to do this. We do it with customers every single day. Let's use that same skill set internally.

When you do, the other members of the organization will naturally see the value that CX can bring — not just to their areas of the business, but to the business as a whole. You'll get more context, more information, and it becomes this virtuous cycle: with additional info, I can make an even greater impact, until you're sitting in board meetings.

Lauren Gold: I love it. Well, I can't thank you enough. I always learn so much spending time with you. Your journey is so inspiring, and the community is lucky to have you out there helping us raise the bar as CX leaders. Thank you so much.

Cate Marques: Thank you so much for having me. Talk soon.

Lauren Gold: Our pleasure. See you soon.


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