Brand Spotlights
The Brand Spotlight Series showcases innovations and solutions to CX challenges, from today’s leading brands.
Walmart
An interview with Rafi Barragan, Director of Driver Experience & Strategy at Walmart
Rafi Barragan is a strategic technology executive passionate about solving complex challenges through AI, automation, and real-time data intelligence. As Director of Driver Experience & Strategy at Walmart, he leads the development of the Driver experience roadmap and proactive interventional capabilities designed to proactively detect and resolve platform instability before it impacts operations—enhancing resilience, reducing MTTD, and minimizing disruptions. Outside of Walmart, Rafi is the CEO of Second Chance Hero, where he applies his leadership to improving the lives of congenital patients navigating heart transplants. His dual expertise in engineering robust digital platforms and building supportive human networks underscores his commitment to making both technology and life experiences more seamless.
Execs In The Know (EITK): Your role at Walmart focuses on enhancing the driver experience within the Spark Driver platform. Can you share how your team approaches creating intuitive and defect-free driver experiences, and what impact that has on Walmart’s broader logistics strategy?
Rafi Barragan: Our Team’s core mission is to deliver a defect-free and intuitive experience across our last-mile delivery ecosystem for our users. We do this by thinking beyond isolated features or defects and their fixes. We’ve embraced what we call an ecosystem empathy mindset: a design and operating principle that centers the full lifecycle of the user journey, accounting for the invisible forces behind every click, delay, and support need of our users.
We first bring this to life by shifting the culture – influencing our innovation partners to think like platform stewards, not just product builders. In a platform-based organization, what matters most isn’t just how well one product or system performs but how each system change impacts the broader ecosystem. This mindset helps us design for interconnected health, not just individual feature/enhancement success.
Second, we invest in upstream detection. When we think like an ecosystem, we move from reactive issue detection to more proactive capabilities, enabling us to identify and triage defects earlier in the lifecycle – compressing the time from issue detection to resolution. By embedding ourselves in real-time feedback loops and pairing data with human insights, we can uncover root causes faster, mitigate risk before scale, and reduce the volume of production defects that impact our users.
Ultimately, our approach enables more than stability—it creates a more scalable and resilient logistics network, where human experience isn’t an afterthought but the system’s most valuable input.
EITK: One of your core strategic pillars is “One-Call Resolution & Driver-Led Support Optimization.” In an industry where efficiency is key, how are you leveraging automation and proactive interventions to improve driver support and reduce contact rates?
Rafi: I believe that the best support is one a user never needs—and when they do, it should resolve their issue the first time, without friction. Our approach to “One-Call Resolution” is grounded in ecosystem awareness and empathy—we don’t just reduce contact volume; we reduce the need for contact by eliminating root causes upstream.
We’ve built proactive systems that do two things exceptionally well. First, we use machine learning agents to detect and confirm platform defects in real-time. These agents review logs across our back-end systems to flag when a contact may have been driven by a true production defect—not just a misunderstanding.
While we haven’t yet embraced agentic AI, multi-turn autonomous support agents that resolve low-complexity issues without human escalation, we have built generative AI experiences paired with contextually relevant in-app help that surfaces personalized guidance based on where the user is in their journey. Studies show that drivers who engage with content when experiencing user friction are over 80 percent less likely to contact a call center at all.
What’s powerful is that these solutions aren’t just efficient but deeply human when done right. By understanding the journey, anticipating needs (not just reacting to them), and responding with empathy at scale, CX leaders can create a support experience that feels less like a transaction and more of a partnership with users while accelerating efficiency. A one-call or one-content view solves it all support design.
