EP012: How CarParts.com Replaced Their Entire Support Stack w/ Aurelia Pollet

Aurelia Pollet, VP of Customer Experience at CarParts.com, led a small team that built a fully custom AI chatbot and ticketing system from scratch in three months. She shares how they did it, what went wrong when their AI agent Harper made promises it couldn't keep, and why the real value of AI isn't cost-cutting — it's creativity that was never possible before. KEY TAKEAWAYS Build vs. buy is a real question: Off-the-shelf tools were bloated with features they didn't need and missing the ones they did — building from scratch gave them full control at lower cost. Start with one small thing: The chatbot led to the ticketing system, which led to email automation. One use case compounds into the next. Guardrails are the hardest part: Their agent Harper promised customers she could cancel orders — she couldn't. Too few guardrails and AI goes rogue; too many and you've just built a robot. AI enables proactive CX: With 50,000 orders/week, proactive outreach was impossible before. Now they're building toward monitoring every order and surfacing problems before customers call. Insight without action is noise: Aurelia doesn't want to be the "Chief Complaint Officer." Her job is to tie customer insights to company strategy and act — not just report. Maintaining AI is a full-time job: Agents need ongoing updates just like human employees — new policies, new products, new questions. The build is the easy part. ABOUT OUR GUEST Aurelia Pollet is the VP of Customer Experience at CarParts.com, a publicly traded e-commerce retailer shipping ~50,000 orders/week. A mechanical engineer by training, she spent 15 years in luxury goods before moving through B2B and nonprofit roles. She led CarParts.com's AI-native rebuild of its entire support infrastructure. Connect with Aurelia on LinkedIn CHAPTERS 03:46 - Welcome and introduction 05:42 - Aurelia's background: from mechanical engineer to VP of CX 07:05 - What "end-to-end CX" means at CarParts.com 10:09 - Adding value at scale: the win-win framework 12:26 - Building an AI chatbot from scratch in 3 months 14:34 - From chatbot to full AI ticketing system 16:51 - How AI frees humans for empathy and complex cases 20:08 - Gathering customer insight across the journey 24:50 - Insight as action (avoiding the "Chief Complaint Officer" trap) 26:50 - The build vs. buy decision 32:57 - Hard lessons: Harper's promises and the guardrail problem 38:54 - What's next: stabilizing and scaling the AI stack 43:23 - Advice for leaders who haven't started yet About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it. Your Hosts: Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io