Most brands treat customer service and customer experience (CX) as a cost center: a queue to clear, a ticket count to reduce. Good Protein treats it as one of the most valuable data sources in the business, and that decision is now paying off in an unexpected place: AI search visibility.
On May 27, Barrel hosted a live webinar with partners from Shopify and Good Protein to talk through what's actually working for CPG brands trying to show up in AI-driven recommendations. One of the more practical takeaways came from Jean-Sébastien Crevier, SVP of Growth at Good Protein, who described restructuring how his team uses customer service data. If you'd rather watch the full conversation, download the free recording here.
Here's what that approach looks like, and how to apply it to your own brand.
Every support ticket is a signal. A customer asking whether a product is safe for a specific dietary restriction, or how it compares to a competitor, is asking the exact question someone else is typing into an AI assistant right now. If your site already answers that question clearly, an AI tool has source material to cite. If it doesn't, the AI is left guessing, or worse, pulling an answer from somewhere else entirely.
Jean-Sébastien described moving the CX function at Good Protein under ecommerce leadership. The result: his Head of CX now spends as much time with the Director of Ecommerce as the Director of Growth does. That's a real organizational shift that has made an impact in how Good Protein ranks against competitors.
"It's a gold mine of data, and not only for the bots and the AI agents, but for the business as well," he said during the session.
The shift changes what what the CX role means at a brand. Jean-Sebastien pointed out that a modern CX Lead needs to understand agents and technical systems, not just handle calls with empathy, especially in a business like Good Protein's where many customer interactions are already run through AI agents.
That doesn't mean CX becomes purely a cost-saving function. "It's not only a question of cost saving," he said. "It's a question of, are the outcomes equal or better." The goal is a CX operation that resolves customer questions well and feeds everything it learns back into the business, including content.
Matt Hickey, Partner Solutions Engineer at Shopify, connected this to a broader theme from the session: brands now have access to more operational data than ever, and the ones who can filter through it quickly and act on it will have a real advantage as buying habits keep shifting.
The practical version of this is simple to describe, if not always simple to execute: mine your CX data for the questions customers actually ask, then write clear, direct answers to those questions on your own site. Not the FAQ you'd write if you were guessing what people might wonder, but the one built from what they're actually asking.
Lucas Ballasy, CEO of Barrel, made the same point from the agency side. He described a common pattern in early conversations with prospective clients: marketing teams or founders describe compelling stories and value propositions on a call, and then none of it appears anywhere on the website. Customer service, he noted, is often the best place to find out what actually needs to be said, because it's where real questions surface every day.
"Making sure your marketing and customer service teams are actually communicating seems obvious, but it's often so fragmented within these brands," Lucas said.
A few concrete steps pulled from the session:
This is one piece of a much larger conversation from the session, including how structured data and product page content work alongside CX insights to build AI visibility. Watch the full 45-minute recording here.
Barrel helps CPG brands turn what they already know about their customers into content that gets found. If you want to talk through how this could work for your brand's Shopify setup, reach out at barrelny.com/contact.
