Bumble’s VP of trust and CX courts a slow-and-steady approach to improved support
She’ll have been married a decade this year, but before joining Bumble, Elymae Cedeño admits she had never actually downloaded and used a dating app.
“It’s kind of been the joke among my friends,” the company’s vice-president of customer experience (CX) and trust said during a session at Zendesk’s Relate conference in Denver last week. “Now I have every single (dating app) on my phone – for research purposes.”
Cedeño described Bumble’s CX mission as understanding what trust looks like, whether they’re it’s when they first sign up, when they begin filling out their profile or begin looking for a potential mate. At any moment customers might need support if they can’t remember their password, have other troubles logging in or when things on a date don’t go as planned.
“Our members have told us time and again that making the decision to sign up for a dating app is a highly vulnerable and can be an emotional decision and journey,” she explained. “Once we realized that, we decided that it is extremely important for us to provide a level of care that matches that moment.”
Automating key areas of customer care was a natural starting point, but Cedeño said the initial attempt to deploy Zendesk ran into a host of difficulties. At the time, Bumble was growing in employee count, navigating regulatory compliance issues and dealing with what she described as “clunky old tooling” within its tech stack.
“We basically spent the first year or so, firefighting, that was the reality,” she recalled. “It was a lot of like building the plane while flying it, and also building the airport at the same time.”
The biggest issue wasn’t Zendesk, Cedeño said, but that she and her team hadn’t been clear on the problem they were trying to solve. It was really about resolving customer problems quickly, while also recognizing that there will be instances (such as when a date goes particularly badly) that a customer wants to talk to a human being rather than a chatbot.
Bumble’s course correction involved strategically evaluating its support taxonomy, and the way that the whole business talked about the service that it delivers. In doing that, Cedeño also spent time with Bumble’s data teams to understand where the volume was coming from and what the key pain points were.
The results of this effort were communicated to all relevant stakeholders to make sure everyone was aligned, Cedeño added. From there, it was not about moving fast but executing with precision.
“We put it on paper and we were very, very intentional about saying, ‘This is where we will start,’” she said. “’We won’t move past this group of five journeys until we get them right.”
Getting it right could mean containment or another CX metric that could be assessed along the way. The team learned a lot about what members got in terms of support from a bot vs. an e-mail, what reactions Bumble could anticipate in a given situation and what kind of sequencing led to the best resolutions.
“We had to accept and be okay with living with some issues and problems that we knew existed, and that our members were telling us were a problem,” she said. “There could be this problem where we know it’s creating a lot of pain, but that (fixing it) is going to come in phase three (of the plan).”
Bumble does a lot of user research, but Cedeño said the team realizes it doesn’t have all the answers in what influences various behaviors. That’s why she and her team also engage with nonprofits and other third parties to help shape product development and its support experience.”
“They can give us that like expert lens into what is going to make somebody feel comfortable, safer, and trust the experience that they’re having on the platform,” she said.
Zendesk Relate 2026 sessions are available on demand for registered attendees.
