The CX and Culture Connection Podcast with Host Matt Egol of JourneySpark Consultants

Customer experience is remembered through emotion, reinforced by leadership, and sustained through culture. Matt Egol is joined by Lenn Millbower, founder of OffBeat Training and former Walt Disney Company leader, to explore how organizations create experiences that strengthen customer loyalty, employee engagement, and long-term business performance. The conversation examines why purpose should gu...

Organizations navigating disruption often focus on systems, processes, and technology. This conversation argues that leadership experience deserves equal attention. Matt Egol, Simon Robinson, and James Killian examine how leadership experience influences customer experience, employee experience, and organizational performance. They discuss why leaders can unintentionally undermine transformation e...

The convergence of AI, customer experience, advertising, and marketing technology is creating a new operating model for growth. In this conversation, Matt Egol and Scott Brinker explore how organizations are navigating a rapidly changing landscape where traditional Martech platforms, emerging AI ecosystems, and modern data platforms all compete to become foundational layers for innovation. Key the...

Organizations are under pressure to adopt AI quickly, but speed without thoughtful implementation often creates resistance instead of progress. Matt Egol sits down with Jeanine DeFalco and Travis Falstad of Mixta AI to discuss how simulation-based AI can help organizations build stronger learning cultures, improve leadership development, and create more human-centered approaches to workforce trans...

AI initiatives often stall at the pilot stage, not because of technical limitations, but because they are not designed to fit how organizations actually work. Matt Egol speaks with Jack Shay, founder of End Product, about how leaders can operationalize AI in ways that connect to real workflows, build trust with teams, and deliver measurable business outcomes. A central theme is the gap between exp...

Customer experience, leadership alignment, and brand strategy operate as a single system in high-growth organizations. Matt Egol speaks with Alan Gonsenhauser about how private equity-backed companies navigate inflection points, from acquisition and churn challenges to scaling operations. A central theme is the importance of defining and governing the ideal customer profile across the entire organ...

Customer experience is moving beyond insight generation into a discipline centered on performance, decision-making, and organizational alignment. Matt Egol sits down with Zach Hamilton, creator of the Experience Performance System, about the structural shifts redefining the CX function. The conversation explores why traditional approaches—focused on surveys, dashboards, and reporting—have struggle...

Evidence-based strategy is often discussed, but less often operationalized. In this episode, Matt Egol and Bernard Jaworski explore how leaders can move beyond surface-level metrics toward deeper customer understanding that informs meaningful strategic choices. The discussion highlights a critical distinction: gathering data is not the same as generating insight. The goal is not confirmation of wh...

AI capability becomes meaningful only when organizations build the conditions for people to use it well. Matt Egol and Mitch Doering, Global Head of People Technology at Wayfair, examine AI adoption through the lens of culture, leadership, and organizational design. Rather than focusing only on platforms and technical capability, the conversation looks at the systems that shape employee confidence...

Customer experience is shaped less by campaigns and more by daily behavior. In this episode, Matt Egol sits down with Gijs Brecht Fijn, Founder and CEO of Lemon Scented Tea, to explore how organizations move from brand messaging to cultural brand transformation. They examine the difference between marketing-led repositioning and leadership-led behavioral change. The central premise is clear: the p...

Major technology investments rarely fail because of technical limitations. They falter when governance, leadership alignment, and organizational capability are not deliberately designed. In this episode, Matt Egol speaks with Steve Kunkle, Founder of Mainly Governance and former SAP executive, about the structural and cultural dynamics that determine whether enterprise platforms deliver sustained...

AI is accelerating a long-overdue shift in customer experience—from collecting feedback after the fact to designing quality into experiences from the start. This episode examines how CX leaders can move beyond siloed surveys and generic metrics toward more contextual, conversational, and signal-based listening. The discussion covers the evolution of voice of the customer programs, the growing impo...

Events are an underused lever in customer experience—not because they generate feedback, but because they create relationships and shared context. In this episode, Matt Egol speaks with Bryan Rutberg about what makes an event “purposeful”: starting with the intended outcome, designing the environment for the right conversations, and ensuring leaders show up fully and intentionally. The conversatio...

This episode examines how customer experience, culture, and leadership experience intersect when strategy is grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction. Matt Egol is joined by Simon Robinson, CEO of Holonomics and co-author of Designing Customer Experience with Soul , to explore why organizations struggle to implement strategy even when it is clearly defined. Simon introduces the Holonom...

Growth rarely fails because of effort. It fails because systems don’t connect. In this episode, The CX & Culture Connection explores revenue operations as a system for coordinated growth rather than a functional overlay. Matt Egol is joined by Steve Busby and Stephen DiIorio to discuss how organizations can align people, data, process, and culture to improve execution across the revenue cycle....

This episode examines how customer experience, culture, and AI come together to drive business impact. Matt Egol speaks with HP’s Brandon McGovern about shifting from service focus to end-to-end experience, aligning CX to revenue, cost, and risk outcomes, and treating CX as leader-led work. They discuss distinguishing symptoms from root causes, balancing formal and informal cultural levers, and us...

In this episode of The CX & Culture Connection, Matt Egol is joined by Martha Brooke, CCXP — Chief Customer Experience Analyst at Interaction Metrics and a long-standing leader within the CXPA community. Their conversation explores how organizations can elevate customer listening by combining scientific rigor with a more human-centered understanding of B2B relationships. Martha discusses why o...

Culture doesn’t “eat strategy for breakfast” — it dismantles any strategy that ignores it. In this episode of The CX & Culture Connection , host Matt Egol sits down with James Killian , founder of The Customer-Driven Leader , organizational psychologist, and faculty member in Michigan State University’s Customer Experience Program. James brings decades of experience helping Fortune 500 compani...

In this insightful episode of The CX & Culture Connection, host Matt Egol, CCXP, sits down with Mark Micheli, Founder and Chief Strategist of say__do, to explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the way organizations uncover and apply customer insights. Drawing on his background in journalism, experience design, and leadership at Accenture’s Fjord, Mark shares how AI can deepen empa...

In this dynamic episode of The CX and Culture Connection, host Matthew Egol, CCXP, sits down with long-time friend and marketing thought leader Jim Lecinski to discuss how artificial intelligence is reshaping customer experience, marketing strategy, and organizational growth. Jim, a former VP at Google and current Clinical Associate Professor at Kellogg, shares insights from the newly updated edit...

In this inspiring episode of CX and Culture Connection, host Matt Egol, CCXP, welcomes back the legendary Lou Carbone, a pioneer and thought leader in experience management. Together, they dive deep into the vision and purpose behind the Experience Management Collaboratory—a groundbreaking initiative designed to bridge academia and industry, foster collaboration, and accelerate the science of expe...

On this episode of CX and Culture Connection, host CCXP Matt Egol welcomes Michael Hinshaw, a leading expert in experience management and the founder of MCorpCX, to delve into the transformative concept of the Experience Operating System (XOS) Michael shares how this structured, holistic framework helps organizations operationalize their customer experience strategies by connecting silos and align...

In this episode of CX & Culture Connection hosted by Matt Egol, CCXP, Matt is joined by CX veteran JP Dumas to explore how contact centers are more than cost centers—they’re strategic assets for loyalty, retention, and revenue growth. JP shares how every customer interaction provides signals—whether to buy or of friction—that can be harnessed through data and AI to drive proactive retention an...

On this episode of CX and Culture Connection, host Matt Egol, CCXP, sits down with visionary thinker Bernie Jaworski to explore how organizations can harness the transformative power of AI to create meaningful impact. Bernie emphasizes that AI’s potential is vast—ranging from boosting customer and employee experiences to fostering more human-centric cultures—and highlights the importance of intent...

In this episode of CX and Culture Connection, host Matt Egol, CCXP, welcomes Bruce Temkin, a pioneer in experience management and founder of Humanity at Scale, to explore the profound ways AI is shaping the future of organizations. Bruce emphasizes that the potential outcomes of AI are vast and varied, from enhancing customer and employee experiences to transforming organizational culture and comm...