The CX Files #31 - Zack Hamilton

Learn in this episode:
- How to debug root causes of CX problems like the $50 million one Zack found
- How to start speaking the language of the C-suite.
- The reason NPS is an advocacy metric and why you need a revenue metric instead.
- How the friction economy is costing brands millions.
- The reality of Agentic CX and why 85 percent of AI strategies fail.

Zack Hamilton is the creator of the Experience Performance System and author of the book by the same name. With a background leading retail experience strategy at Medallia and serving as CXO at Aaron’s, Zack specializes in eliminating insight theater and aligning CX to P&L outcomes. He is also the host of the popular podcast Unf*cking Your CX.

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Transcript

The CX Files #31 - Zack Hamilton

Zack Hamilton: [00:00:00] Hey this is really good Let's continue to monitor it and we'll do something about it next quarter five quarters later Zack's now working with the organization and I look at the payment processing and yes they're only getting about a hundred 150 pieces of feedback a month about it which is driving cart abandonment. But if you actually go into Adobe or Google Analytics and you look at the like for like on code it wasn't just a hundred customers it was 10,000 customers, right? But only a small percentage of customers gave feedback. And so in total it was a $50 million problem over those 14 months...

Ben Foden: Hello and welcome to the CX Files podcast My name is Ben Foden and today's guest is Zack Hamilton Zack Hamilton is the creator of the Experience Performance System and [00:01:00] author of a new book of the same title which is Apparently selling very well in 48 countries his past experiences include the CXO role at Aaron's, leading the retail experience strategy at Medallia and also as an executive leader at Forsta and Parcel Lab He is the host of the popular podcast and fair warning there's gonna be some adult language in this episode Popular podcast unfucking your cx He currently advises CX leaders and executives at global brands who are tired of the endless dashboards useless metrics and insight theater and who want real impact instead. Zack eliminates customer friction aligns CX to P&L outcomes and build systems that actually drive growth. Zack thanks for coming on

Zack Hamilton: Hey Ben Thanks for having me Honored to be here and looking forward to our conversation

Ben Foden: Yeah it was great to to be a guest recently on your show as well and I think you're leading such an important conversation You have an important voice [00:02:00] which is just cutting through the nonsense what is some nonsense or some surprise or something that really caught you off guard in the beginning of your career in cx

Zack Hamilton: Yeah I think it if you think about the beginning of my career in cx I didn't set out to be a CX practitioner quite frankly I didn't know what customer experience was I was in retail operations at Aaron's I was a store manager and quite frankly been I was doing CX without knowing that I was doing cx So as a store manager every quarter we got a percentage of our profit of our bottom line profit And

Zack Hamilton: I was always really Curious about what are our customers experiencing with us inside of my four walls What is it that I can control I couldn't control the promotions or the branding or anything that that Aaron's controlled from the corporate office But what I could control was how did our customer feel when they walked in to our store every single day if they were late on their payment did we treat em like a human [00:03:00] being A lot of our customers had unfortunate things that happened to them They lived paycheck to paycheck They were gonna miss payments That was just the nature of our business And so I was always looking at customer feedback I was always praising our team members especially when they got name dropped by a customer I wanted to really celebrate them and celebrate them for going above and beyond And look that led us to the top store I became a multi-unit leader VP of operations where then I had 127 stores in my spanning control that's when I made my way to the corporate office And after leading strategic initiatives that's when CX was dropped into my hands And our CEO said look Zack I know we have an NPS score I'm not for sure if it's really good or not And I'm thinking to myself at the time it's it's a negative 27 It can't be that good But he is I have no line of sight to what our customers are even saying [00:04:00] I've never seen a customer comment his feedback to me was can you just bring some transparency to the business to the executive leadership team insights and that is what I did right So my first executive leadership team meeting it was about six to eight weeks later and I brought I had a huge PowerPoint deck NPS trend charts csat trend charts oat I had my texting analytics my themes my sentiment analysis like I had everything ready to show that my customer verbatims And about 10 minutes in they all looked bored They were distracted they were playing on their phones And our CEO just kinda looked over at me and he said so what

Zack Hamilton: And that moment Ben like I'm thinking in my head so what dude you must be suffering from amnesia cause this is exactly what you asked me And I think the biggest lesson learned coming out of that was [00:05:00] The industry was really and our discipline was really built on information right So there was there's this piece around collecting insights and then if you just quote unquote democratize which I hate that word but if you just democratize the insights in your dashboards you're customer centric Your cross-functional partners will know what to do with the data with the information And so I thought I was operating at a high level right I was giving the organization something that they've never seen before Rich Insights and then I got hit with that So what which ultimately was the hardest lesson learned but it was the greatest thing that happened in my career was that very first meeting I remember actually walking out of the meeting and I was actually pretty upset pretty pissed off Like [00:06:00] I felt like I was set up for failure by my CEO of this is what I wanted I delivered it But that's the only thing that he really knew like he only knew about What the industry was saying and I remember calling my mentor David Beer who's store operations leader and I was telling him about the situation And his nickname for me was Guido And he said listen Guido customer experience Those guys don't know NPSC sat nothing only know p and l You have to speak their language if you want them to listen to you Next time you're in that meeting you have to speak the language of executive leaders And so those were the two I think very early lessons very early on when CX was dropped into my lap of I have to change the system in which we operated customer experience in

Ben Foden: Yeah wow there's so much there what a great [00:07:00] trajectory too and a great place to get to to to that level of understanding of what is needed I think a lot of us strike out with a good intention of Understand what the other party needs right The CEO in this case and try to deliver that And it's still not enough context in many cases And we'll bring all these reports and the nitty gritty and the things that we see day to day but you're right you I think you said something like you have to speak Their language and that language is p and l essentially at the executive level it's high level it's abstract and it is dollars And that's such an important lesson for people out there to translate and you can justify and explain those connections you can go from csat NPS handle time cost per ticket Some of these things you can go and you can start to tie them back but I think that there's the there's so many skills that are required right And you're demonstrating a lot of these very well [00:08:00] but what do you think about that the evolving skillset of a CX leader and like how has that changed over your career and where is that going

Zack Hamilton: It's a good question I look I think our I think the discipline has When you think about the identity of a CX leader I think the discipline and how we're perceived by our peers within our organizations are really around insight management right We're insight leaders we're insight managers we're voice of customer managers so we manage insights and data I initially wrote a blog about four years ago now on What my role was inside the organization and how I perceived myself and how I rebuilt the identity as this leader of CX inside of errands and I really framed that around I was the dot connector so I connected the dots between [00:09:00] what were our customers saying and feedback No matter where we collected it across the journey right Or maybe even a post call from the contact center but how do I recognize all these different patterns and how do I connect the dots to business impact I looked at myself as a dot connector a translator So translating customer to executive I looked at myself as an influencer ultimately as a CX leader As much power as I wanted within the organization I didn't own really the p and l I didn't own the resources that really actually had to do the work All of my cross-functional partners did so I was an influencer I was a seller of change so I looked at myself as almost like a on selling frictions that needed action to be owned by cross-functional partners And then ultimately how did I manage all of that [00:10:00] So when I really think about those skill sets those are still the skill sets that absolutely needed as we think about the future of CX and where we're going But I think I would also add a couple more skill sets and so when we think long term around a Genix CX or autonomous cx ultimately we're no longer gonna be doing the managing We're gonna be optimizers So we're gonna constantly be feeding these agents data and key learnings and really drive optimization of those agents and all the data that that they're leveraging and I think the other skillset is just financial and business acumen I think that's the number one that I see so many leaders CX leaders fall down it's strange cause I've talked to so many CX leaders I coach so many and one of the first questions I'll ask them Ben is like when was the last time you read your company's 10 K [00:11:00] or listened to an earnings call

Zack Hamilton: Like I never have And I'm like if you don't know how your business makes money how are you gonna drive impact Of

Zack Hamilton: Right And so a lot of people will push back I think the disciplines also got stuck in this identity of we're the fighters for people right Like we're the martyrs that we're fighting for our customers and we're advocates somehow profitability and performance became dirty words in cx

Zack Hamilton: If we really think about the fundamental of cx CX has always been a performance metric Always And so I'm not one of those advocates against profitability When you think about business acumen and how do you drive results right I think if you're truly advocating for your customer then you're essentially for the business to fix the frictions that are gonna wanna deliver value to the [00:12:00] customer but also deliver value to the business right I think it's actually profits through people because if your business isn't profitable It's not gonna be around long term And I think these are the skill sets that are significantly overlooked You can't find them normal college education you don't find them on the CXPA exam for our discipline but these are such critical skills that you need to really win through influence inside your organization

Ben Foden: Absolutely I think the meta skills of career of influence of internal salesmanship these are absolutely critical skills and And maybe it's even more so for CX given its kind of position And as to your experience the the need to work with cross-functional partners the reality that a lot of CX leaders don't own their p and l I think that's a challenging environment for anybody But but there is [00:13:00] there are resources and there are voices out there and consultants and help to cover those bases I feel like the modern landscape is shifting so quickly and it's all of those meta things that we're talking about around career and business acumen generally But when you look at the specific day to day where is it breaking down right What are the What are the repeating stumbling blocks in the actual discipline not the career and salesmanship side but the actual discipline because just personally as a consumer I have experienced so many broken cx so many broken customer experiences that just they I've made a post about this recently but if you if your business is diverting customers away from the channel that they started on Against their will if you're forcing them into channels they don't wanna use against their will If you're d not responsive essentially you're sending a message that you don't [00:14:00] care and even if you're saving money by like deflecting or whatever you might be losing more in trust and retention and customers who don't come back So like where are the stumbling blocks here and why is it that so much CX is still broken I

Zack Hamilton: This is such a loaded question Ben I think there's a few things I think the first piece is really around we're just measuring the wrong things

Zack Hamilton: I first started leading cx I was told every organization's North Star should be nor should be Net Promoter Score NPS If you really think about that metric and I'm sure I'll I know I've gotten some hate mail about my position on NPS but NPS is an advocacy metric It's not a revenue metric

Zack Hamilton: It's an advocacy metric right If you actually read the question And so one we get so consumed with vanity metrics NPS csat oat customer effort score you name it right Contact centers thinking about [00:15:00] average handle time for example which is great right If you don't measure it it's not gonna matter I hear all those things blah blah blah blah blah But none of those things Really help you drive customer centricity So if you really think about it you're the metric that you should be focused on is customer lifetime value especially for B2C in financial services it could be assets under management it could be Net revenue retention like if you're in software for example those are all lifetime value metrics And so if you really think about it if you consistently deliver great experiences over time you make that connection you earn loyalty you should see those metrics improve right Your lifetime value just gets stronger so I think the first thing is we're measuring the wrong thing So then of course we're [00:16:00] goal setting on the wrong thing I

Ben Foden: It all flows from that

Zack Hamilton: Our technology platforms have essentially become our CX strategies

Zack Hamilton: So because of that we look at outputs Versus outcomes right So from an output

Zack Hamilton: It's thinking about I'm gonna launch new engagement touch points I'm gonna refine my survey to increase response rates right So now my strategy is I'm gonna increase my response rates I'm gonna increase Truly the number of pieces of feedback that I get throughout an entire year we think about I'm gonna redesign these dashboards we have very low adoption on the dashboards I'm gonna redesign those I'm gonna do a texting analytics model refresh So I'm gonna update my text analytics model We have some emerging topics that are happening so we're gonna tag those We're gonna create a model for it are all outputs On a platform that again don't drive the business that's [00:17:00] the other thing is we're fixated with outputs versus are the outcomes that we are driving And so to your point you're experiencing a lot of just dead ends really just broken systems And I think that's why we are now in this era of the friction economy Every business claimed to be that they were a technology company right During the pandemic And so everyone was working within their own technology silos they were adding parts redesigning parts of the customer journey So inherently none of these technologies are really connected and we're not really working cross-functionally So we're creating all these frictions within the customer journey that we don't intend to do it But unintentionally recreate significant amount of friction within the business that our customers experience And if you really think about friction yes there's positive friction that you can add to an [00:18:00] experience and it can create a great experience Don't get me wrong like I completely understand that if you think about The unintended friction that doesn't add value to a customer To your point sending them down channels that they don't want to go down into My login not working multiple times and I can't get immediate help on it I can't get a promo code to apply to my checkout Thinking about holiday shopping these are all frictions that we look at them case by case and we don't Get to the root cause and assign a value to that specific friction And so what ends up happening is these frictions start to cost seven figures to the business And now the friction has actually now significantly outgrown customer acquisition And I'll give you an example I was working with a client a couple months ago who I [00:19:00] started to go in and dig into the data and they've had promo code issues for the last 14 months Everyone knew that sorry Payment processing issues Sorry So everyone knew that they had a payment processing issue with a specific type of mobile device right They were getting feedback on it every single month and every single month The CX leader would say Hey look we can our customers continue to be pissed off We have payment timeout issues They have error error processing They don't know if their purchase went through or not it's debiting money from their account but then putting it right back So they don't know if it's all these things are happening

Zack Hamilton: Let she continued to get told was Hey this is really good Let's continue to monitor it and we'll do something about it next quarter five quarters later Zack's now working with the organization and I look at the payment processing and yes they're only getting about a hundred 150 pieces of feedback a [00:20:00] month about it which is driving cart abandonment But if you actually go into Adobe or Google Analytics and you look at the like for like on code it wasn't just a hundred customers it was 10,000 customers right But only a small percentage of customers gave feedback And so in total It was a $50 million problem over those 14 months And I remember doing this readout with the CEO and she said Why hasn't anyone brought this up to me And the CX leader's like I've been talking about this every month And so she looked at the CIO and was like what's it gonna cost to fix this And he is it's probably a $30,000 whatever it was And she's that's it I would've given you $5 million to go solve this problem knowing that this is costing us 50 million over 14 months and so that's been why I believe [00:21:00] we're in this friction economy where friction has now weighed the customer acquisition cost And quite frankly when we get all that unintended extra friction we are no longer loyal

Zack Hamilton: Defect and we're gonna go to a new brand

Zack Hamilton: Brands who are doing a really great job of creating better experiences look think about it with our smartphone devices With you know us being aic an economy addicted to TikTok and Instagram reels and Facebook reels our loyalty changes about every six and a half seconds right Consumer behaviors moving faster than what it's ever been before I can visit 15 brands in 10 minutes on my device I don't have to go to a shopping mall are the things that are impacting our discipline All this consumer behavior shifting friction cost has now outgrown customer acquisition cost but CX [00:22:00] leaders are still focused on is my NPS high How's my csat And all the outputs around what they believe is their strategy which is their VOC platform

Ben Foden: Yeah God you're making so many good points here I'm left listening to this I'm at once shocked by the $50 million number That's incredible but I think I'm more than I'm shocked is I'm excited by the scope of the opportunity that is in front of CX right now I think that there has never been a time when there are more tools more resources More knowledge available and the scope of the role has never had a better place at the table there's never been more respect for VOC and there's never been more respect for for leaders that can tie it to the outcome 

Zack Hamilton: yeah absolutely look I think the opportunities there I think those CX leaders I also see us kind of playing the [00:23:00] victim trap a lot of

Zack Hamilton: Which is also holding the discipline back of my executive leadership team just doesn't believe in customer experience And I would call BS on that because at one time Here She did your CEO She did That's why you have a job She

Ben Foden: Right

Zack Hamilton: in you and your team and the millions of dollars that you're spending on your tech stack The problem is we've never showed up with receipts

Zack Hamilton: Never delivered value back into the business And so it wasn't that they didn't care they just lost trust And so I think to your point when you think about this significant opportunity that's at our feet right now and ahead of us the biggest thing that's gonna and I truly believe this is an identity change We have to view ourselves differently right And so I think there's also one that identity [00:24:00] crisis that we've already talked about I think there's this other piece of fear of messing up right So here's my current status quo I may not have a large team but as long as I get my monthly or quarterly NPS insight report out I'm not gonna get fired now My team may not grow my responsibilities aren't gonna grow the investment in that I need to enable my strategy is probably not gonna get grow It's probably just gonna get cut back But there's that fear of messing up that if I radically change this our internal system and the way that we operate If I don't deliver a win I'm gonna I'm gonna lose my job And that

Zack Hamilton: I'm not saying that fear is not there but what I'm saying is it first starts with the identity of who we are as [00:25:00] CX leaders and what we are capable of and then it is having the courage to say This insights management system is no longer serving us the Marie Kondo right Think it's for its purpose and then let it go And now let's build a new system that's essentially we need to Marie Kondo the heck out of cx we need to think traditional experience management for the for its purpose that it for the last 10 or 15 years but now we need to move forward from traditional experience management

Ben Foden: The life changing magic of tidying up your identity as a CX leader

Zack Hamilton: right That's right

Ben Foden: Yeah oh that's a great analogy And I like the the simplification piece here too right you've had this theme in a few of your comments today of don't focus on this thing that you've been focused on Focus in on this piece which is where you need to be and let the other things go right It's time to shed the old [00:26:00] way of doing things and I think I'd like to take it even a little bit further and you're talking about this sort of the fear of being being res held responsible for bad results The fear of getting attacked as the messenger right The bearer of bad news and I think that actually it is better This may be controversial but I think it's better to dig deeper into the pain dig deeper into the problems and lead with those

Zack Hamilton: Yeah

Ben Foden: So if you bring a very bad quote from a customer from a ticket or from an interaction you say this is a terrible experience that this customer had Here's what this is costing us

Zack Hamilton: Yeah

Ben Foden: right And here's some ideas or let's have a discussion about how to fix this that Like it it's counterintuitive but I think digging into the bad parts gives you an opportunity to get to the best parts And so going negative can be a positive what do you think about like this idea of not shying away from it but actually [00:27:00] highlighting here's a very bad thing and of course offering a suggestion quantifying it

Zack Hamilton: Yeah I think you're spot on here right I think customer feedback is a gift whether it's positive feedback or negative feedback a gift to your organization and if I think about in just my span of five years of leading CX at errands ended up delivering about $120 million of impact into the p and l validated by our CFO and what we did was sim very simply that really leaned into all the negative friction that's happening There's also positive friction if we were testing something if we saw that it was delivering the experience that the desired experience and the behavior changes were happening within the customer base we'd try and accelerate it But most of our time was with the experiences that broke down and created customer friction That negative sentiment

Ben Foden: Yeah

Zack Hamilton: I first started on this journey everyone was [00:28:00] like you have to be a really good storyteller And I agree with that I think storytelling is It's extremely it's a skillset that maybe I didn't name earlier but it's a skillset that's so important but the storytelling that we're doing as customer experience leaders is our customers are really pissed off because of X Y and Z They're really unhappy with this They're not which is great If you really want it to have teeth within your organization have to make it meaningful for them and meaningful for them is the p and l And this is where I where I created the CX casemaker when I was at Aaron's to help drive and influence prioritization was loved a game of Mad Libs when I was in elementary school Like I loved that It was one of my favorite parts 

Ben Foden: ad libs are great Yeah

Zack Hamilton: I almost I essentially created a Mad Libs problem framing statement to help CX leaders frame that negative sentiment into a problem statement [00:29:00] still storytelling right That is the part of storytelling And so if you really think about how we communicate language is a really good way to see how that person is thinking I ran this exercise last night with a group of CX leaders where I had them pull out like their last monthly or quarterly report And what I wanted them to do was in one color I had them highlight all of the CX language so NPS csat sentiment all those things And then in another color I wanted them to highlight business So anything around the p and l revenue costs like all risk all those things And I call this the Wewe syndrome So it was all about us and customer experience And if you looked at the ratio most of them last night was 95 CX 5 business

Ben Foden: 5

Zack Hamilton: so what we did was we spent time with them [00:30:00] helping them re and it was was like look this is what I Thought I should be doing This is me trying to tell a story within our organization

Zack Hamilton: And so we help them reframe parts of their reports into that business problem

Zack Hamilton: Did that last night everyone said oh my gosh I cannot wait to take this to my leaders tomorrow I can't wait to share this because they're gonna get it And it goes back to that that that I shared with that CEO she'd been hearing every month about payment processing issues but no one really put it in context right Yes the CX leader was telling the story but no one put it in the context that made sense to the CEO And until we framed it up in a different way we framed the story in a different way

Zack Hamilton: Did she actually get it And so I

Zack Hamilton: Criticality piece of this is [00:31:00] there's so much negative friction in your business Just start with go find your top five negative topics or themes in your text analytics dashboard and frame them out into problems Use the madlib frame em out into problems can tell you your prioritization sessions will go much differently the next time

Ben Foden: Wow that's such a it's such a great example with 95 versus 5 and I think that's probably not unique to the group of executives that were with you I think that's probably common and if people it's and certainly not the originator of this idea but start from the result and work backwards a piece of this it's like start with the revenue number or the loss number the profit or the loss in the beginning upfront And then say okay here's where this is coming from Here's how we measured this Here's the root cause Don't start on the other side Start from the result Then work backwards and it'll just of course if a CEO's listening for dollar signs they're gonna their ears are gonna perk up from the [00:32:00] beginning I wanted to switch gears a little bit here and talk to you about where you see things are going What do you see on the horizon for 2026 And of course we have to address AI and all of the promises and fairy dust around it versus what as the reality

Zack Hamilton: Yeah look I do I think we can handle both of em in this conversation Like I really believe I'm a huge believer in agentic CX and autonomous cx Like I I truly believe that is the future I've been asked so many times if I went back into retail as a CX leader what would the DNA of my team look like and my feedback has been look I would have agents pointed at business outcomes and my My team would no longer be dashboard jockeys They wouldn't be Insight managers they would be agent Optimizers and so when I really think about just AI today I think about [00:33:00] AI as like the new NPS right 15 20 years ago when Fred Rahel first came out with MPS everyone had to have one We have to have an NPS right My buddies on the golf course they're talking about it I've gotta have one too And so I think as the world continues to adopt tools like Chat GPT everyone truly believes hey if I just plug our business into Ai it's magically gonna solve everything that couldn't be further from the truth It's just gonna escalate chaos when I think about age Agentic CX and I and I think about autonomous cx so I have some clients who we're starting to we're building that their agents but I believe they are It's a step in the maturity that you mature into right It's a model that you mature into but first [00:34:00] organization has to have a performance system built internally where it is human led before you can apply an agent to it right Because agents are gonna make you make decisions All day every day very quickly right They're constantly gonna be wanting they wanna learn they wanna optimize If you're gonna do it the right way right

Zack Hamilton: As an organization if it takes you a long time to make decisions stay away from ai Because it's only gonna force or I should say stay away from ag agentic cx It's only gonna force you into making more decisions the

Zack Hamilton: Thing that you will do is create a significant amount of chaos Then you will unplug it quote unquote unplug it and that initial optimism that you have Will not be depleted If you look at [00:35:00] that recent MIT study I think we've all seen it 85 these initial AI or agentic strategies have failed the reason for that is they don't have a performance system underneath of it that's currently being human led To where now you can apply AG agentic to it I'm a huge believer in it There is that I think the other challenge to your point of this magic fairy dust or pixie dust is there's so much funding out there for startup companies who are AI led So now every technology company whether you have AI or not is AI led I think is freaking hilarious And there's this race to a you see the tremendous amount of funding for chat GPT and some of these other leaders like Anthropic and others And so there's this race to get that funding And so when you really look at that go to market messaging from all these technology companies it's AI first it's agentic first They're [00:36:00] promising some insane amount of returns and most often it's in the contact center

Zack Hamilton: When I really think about the contact center everyone's oh our agentic bot now is handling first contact resolutions dropped by 80 Look at all the operational efficiency that's great Then if you look at the trailing six months that agent has been put into place only it's essentially one big containment loop right They're just containing issues so the same issues that six months ago that a gentech bought quote handled they're the same issues coming in And so

Ben Foden: Right

Zack Hamilton: is Your business is never getting to the root cause of that negative friction which is causing calls or chats or emails into your contact center And so you're still delivering a really crappy experience on the forefront and you're only [00:37:00] containing issues on the back end so what needs to happen is that agent not only do you have an agent that Needs to be able to take action and resolve those issues But you have to have the agent learn right To be able to say okay here's what's causing this This is the root cause We've gotta go fix this in the business to me that's where I think the pixie dust comes in is companies are sold these large operational efficiency stats And companies believe in the hype especially those companies who their CEOs are trying to survive quarter to quarter They'll do anything to get that level of ops efficiency because then you can wipe out 20 30 of your FTE save a couple million dollars put that to the bottom line now short term you've just delivered Wendy or shareholders long term you just screwed the [00:38:00] company

Ben Foden: Yeah there's so many lessons there I feel like you're absolutely right on on a lot of these points I think the the point about being ready or not and knowing what readiness looks like being doing the self-reflection the internal analysis the having the awareness to say look we're not ready for this today Here's what we need to get in place it's hard right Amidst this environment there's so much hype and excitement and you don't wanna get left behind and all of that But I think that the savviest players Are going beyond here's a tool and they're going into here's how this fits and I my hope is that becomes more and more the case And I think a lot of these AI companies I work for one of them a lot of them are gonna get exposed for for basically overpromising and under-delivering the MIT study is a striking [00:39:00] example but I I think you know it is a two-way street you could have the best vendor in the world but if you're just not you're not there as an organization you're not ready whose responsibility is that and there's all kinds of AI readiness frameworks and there there's ways that you can approach this it's not like a secret but yeah Wow Zack so much valuable information here I think people have got some real questions to ask some homework to do and hopefully some lessons learned from this episode yeah this is great So if everybody if you wanna connect with Zack if you want to hire him as a consultant it's Zack Hamilton on LinkedIn his new book is out now the Experience performance System and check it out and you won't be disappointed So that's all for this episode of the CX Files Thank you See you next time

Zack Hamilton: Yeah Thanks for having me Ben Cheers