CX Spotlight: Zack Hamilton on Scaling CX, Ditching Dashboards, and that Jailhouse Customer Call!

CX Spotlight is a series where we speak to customer experience leaders from across industries who are rethinking support, building customer-first cultures, and finding clarity in the messiness of real-life CX.

Every edition is a quick, candid conversation. No fluff. No jargon. Just real-world insights from people who’ve been there and done that.

Table of Contents

• In Conversation With Zack Hamilton
  • 💬 What would your support alter ego be called — and what would their superpower be?
  • 🎯 How did you find your way into the world of customer experience? 
  • 🧹 What’s the weirdest or most unexpected support request you’ve handled?
  • 🌍 What’s one practical change you’ve implemented to make your team more customer-centric?
  • 🛠️ What’s one tool or app you can’t live without at work?
  • 💪 One piece of advice you’d give someone entering the field of customer support?
  • 🤖 A use case where AI actually improved CX for your team?
  • 📧 Is email underrated or overrated as a support channel?
  • 📖 A book, podcast, or show you’d recommend to other CX pros?
  • 🙂 What emoji do you regularly use when interacting with customers?
  • 🎾 If you weren’t working in CX, what would you be doing?
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In Conversation With Zack Hamilton

As the founder of Unf*cking Your CX, Zack Hamilton helps CX leaders shift from being “insight-driven people” to becoming performance operators. He’s the creator of the Experience Performance System™ (EPS), a strategic framework that helps customer experience teams turn customer feedback into real business outcomes like growth, retention, and cost savings. 

But Zack didn’t start in formal CX roles. He was deep in growth-focused roles like leading ecommerce launches, building loyalty programs, managing P&Ls, and scaling operations. The turning point came when a smartphone product launch underperformed, and his CEO asked a simple but revealing question: “I know our NPS, but I don’t know why it’s changing, or what to do about it.”

That moment led Zack to create a system that translates friction into action. 

In this conversation, Zack shares his philosophy for prioritizing feedback, the warehouse issue AI helped solve in 30 days, and the time a customer called from jail to protect their Super Bowl plans.

💬 What would your support alter ego be called — and what would their superpower be?

The Friction Slayer. I turn vague customer feedback into boardroom-ready business cases, complete with root cause, impact, and clear next steps. No more “we’ll look into it.”

🎯 How did you find your way into the world of customer experience?

Totally accidental. I was running customer-facing initiatives in eCommerce, sales, loyalty but never called it CX. It became official when a CEO told me he didn’t know what to do with NPS. That’s when I realized we didn’t need more feedback, we needed better systems. So I built one.

🧹 What’s the weirdest or most unexpected support request you’ve handled?

A customer once called from jail to say, “Don’t repossess my 75” TV. Someone’s bringing the payment. I’ll be out before the Super Bowl and I’m hosting the party.” That call reminded me how deeply personal CX can be.

🌍 What’s one practical change you’ve implemented to make your team more customer-centric?

We stopped sending dashboards and started building one-page business cases. Every customer insight is tied to revenue, cost, or risk. That’s how we got cross-functional alignment—by treating CX like a performance system, not a reporting function.

🛠️ What’s one tool or app you can’t live without at work?

Notion. Every framework, client playbook, piece of content—it all lives there. If it’s not in Notion, it doesn’t exist.

💪 One piece of advice you’d give someone entering the field of customer support?

Support is more than solving tickets. You’re the first to see what’s broken. Document patterns. Speak up. Your voice can shape systems if you treat it like more than a job.

🤖 A use case where AI actually improved CX for your team?

We used AI to analyze open-text feedback and found a pattern: shipping delays tied to one warehouse. It led to a fix in 30 days and an 11% bump in repeat purchases. AI didn’t replace the work, it just sped up the insight-to-action loop.

📧 Is email underrated or overrated as a support channel?

Email can be powerful, but only if it’s part of a system connected to journey data and automation. Otherwise, it kills context.

📖 A book, podcast, or show you’d recommend to other CX pros?

Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown. CX work takes courage. You’re often the only one advocating for the customer in a room full of competing priorities. This book reminds you how to stand your ground.

🙂 What emoji do you regularly use when interacting with customers?

Just a classic :). Warmth without watering down the message.

🎾 If you weren’t working in CX, what would you be doing?

Running a professional tennis tournament. Not just for the game but to design the best fan, sponsor, and player experience out there.

Enjoyed Zack’s take on customer experience? Follow him on LinkedIn or check out more stories in the CX Spotlight series.

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