Zack Hamilton spent 15 years climbing every rung of the retail ladder, from organizing backrooms to running multi-million dollar P&Ls, before becoming one of customer experience's most provocative voices. He was the first retailer to dump NPS at scale, and after 7 years advising Fortune 500 brands at Medallia, Forsta, and ParcelLab, he's got some brutal truths about why most CX programs fail.
In this no-holds-barred conversation, you'll discover:
The NPS trap: Why the metric everyone obsesses over actually killed customer loyalty at Aaron's (and how they lost customers while their NPS went up 17 points)
The low-impact CX death spiral: How following "best practices" perfectly can accelerate your path to irrelevance
Why CX governance committees guarantee failure: The counterintuitive reason why more structure equals less impact
The Starbucks loyalty paradox: How the world's most data-rich coffee company lost their most loyal customer (Zack) for 40 days without noticing
The $10M CX budget challenge: What a 22-year veteran would actually do with serious money and executive backing
Journey pods vs. traditional org structure: The radical reorganization that aligns teams around customer cohorts instead of internal functions
Why CX leaders must become "sellers of change": How to translate customer friction into P&L impact that executives can't ignore
Key Moments:
(5:09) "Cookie cutter, out of the box, status quo - here's your playbook. It just doesn't work."
(11:44) "Give them a metric to hit and they will hit it. Doesn't mean it's healthy underneath."
(22:04) "Your role is a seller of change within an organization."
(32:09) "I'm not going to give a shit about what an MPS is... the North Star is customer lifetime value."
Brought to you by:
Birdie AI - Transform customer feedback into business decisions that drive revenue growth: https://birdie.ai
Background:
Zack built his CX philosophy in the trenches, managing stores, regions, and digital transformations at Aaron's (the largest rent-to-own company in North America). As VP of Customer Experience, he pioneered the first online-to-store lease model and was among the first to abandon NPS for impact-driven metrics. His newsletter "Unf*ck Your CX" has become essential reading for practitioners tired of CX .
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