Jamie Homen is the Chief Customer Officer at Mural, a leading visual work platform. He’s a change leader and enterprise productivity strategist overseeing Mural’s delivery of exceptional customer experiences across all segments.
Questions
- How did you get from where you started to where you are today?
- If you were to identify maybe the top two or three things that you think are critical when leaders are thinking about their strategies. How can leaders balance financial constraints with delivering a satisfying customer experience?
- What key strengths have helped you grow as a leader and enhance your team’s skills?
- What is a significant challenge you’ve overcome—whether personal or professional—that you’re especially proud of, and how did you navigate through it?
- Now, Jamie, could you share with us what’s the one online resource, tool, website or application that you absolutely can’t live without in your business?
- Could you share with our audience maybe one or two books that have had a great impact on you, it could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you’ve read recently, but it has had a positive impact on you.
- Can you also share with our audience, what’s the one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you’re really excited about either something you’re working on to develop yourself or your people?
- Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you’ll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you get derailed or you get off track, the quote kind of helps to get you back on track.
- Where can listeners find you online?
Highlights
Jamie’s Journey
Me: Now, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share with us in their own words, a little bit about their journey, how you got from where you were to where you are today.
Jamie shared that he’s been in customer experience for just over 20 years now, seems a little wild to think about that timeframe, but he actually started his career answering phones as well, and honestly never really thought that it would lead to becoming a Chief Customer Officer. But in fact, that title wasn’t really a thing back then, so, he’s really happy to see the evolution of companies elevating customer representation to the highest levels of the organization.
But started his tenure at Mural just about a year ago. Mural is a leading visual collaboration platform with AI enabled interactive workspaces that help organizations visualize the work that they’re doing and unlocking new ideas to get to those outcomes faster. And he just feels like that’s such a critical aspect of how customer experiences resonate, and then also how our modern companies are operating in such a remote environment as well. So, it’s just been a wild ride so far and 20 years in.
Balancing Financial Constraints with Customer-Centric Leadership Strategies
Me: Now, we are in a Customer Experience podcast, and it’s important with your wealth of experience in customer experience, and even in the role that you play at Mural, that we try to provide our listeners with some level of strategies that they can use within their own industries. I think customer experience for the most part is pretty standard, whether you’re serving customers digitally, face to face, or even over the phone, they have a need, and the company is providing them with a service or product which hopefully can fulfil that need. If you were to identify maybe the top two or three things that you think are critical when leaders are thinking about their strategies, less financial driven, because I know companies are in business to make money, but how do we incorporate that and still ensure that we’re meeting the needs of customers, even though we may not necessarily have all the resources to give them the fluff and the quality of the experience that they might be looking for. How do we bridge that gap?
Jamie shared that the number one area that they find is truly it’s in alignment of their go to market teams. If you think about go to market teams as a product function, a marketing function, a sales function, and then ultimately, at the end of sort of that whole loop is the customer experience function, handling things that may not go well, or ultimately, things that you need to feed back into the business to continue evolution, and making sure you’re driving that good customer experience, it’s about alignment across all of those functions.
And so, from a customer experience perspective, they’re often looking at how those teams are aligned upstream to make decisions with the customer at the center of those decisions. They actually did a survey this year of go to market leaders that represented different teams within marketing, sales, R and D, as well as customer experience teams. And the results were really interesting where they talked about the importance of the alignment, 85% of teams surveyed said that it was very or extremely confident in their processes to ensure that alignment happened, while 85% of those same survey respondents ultimately said that they feel a disconnect in alignment and that while they’re confident in their processes, they’re still experiencing these disconnects.
And so, the most effective way they drive this within their organization is through co creation and building out these solutions as you go. Instead of it being more of a relay race where you’re making a decision about a product or a process, you have those voices at the table to create a better solution so that the customer ultimately yields that result immediately upon deployment, instead of it having to be a bit of a disconnected experience after the fact. That’s the number one approach that they find helps to solve for that.
Me: Ensuring there’s a high level of alignment.
Key Leadership Strengths for Team Development
Me: Now, Jamie as a leader in your organization, you have to manage different personalities. What are some of the strengths that you believe has helped you to become a leader over the years, because you say you’ve been in the space for 20 years, not sure if you’ve been in leadership for that duration of time, or if you’ve matriculated to be where you are today. But if you could pick maybe two or three strengths that you found has helped you to become a better leader, to really hone and strengthen the skills of your team so that they can be the best at what they’re doing.
Jamie shared that he would say that he’s been a leader for 19 of those 20 years. Definitely a wealth of time there. But ultimately, he thinks there’s two things. One is in how you empower your teams to make decisions. So, for him, he always coaches his teams to make decisions with the customer at the center of the decision and providing support to them as they’re making those decisions. You don’t want to become a bottleneck or make sure that you only contain your decision-making authority within certain levels within your organization. And really, you want to empower the whole organization to be customer centric and to make those decisions. And so, what he often advises the teams to do is to just look at it from the customer’s perspective. What is the best option to achieve the customer’s objective and making sure that that’s the center of their decision making. And occasionally it may not be the right decision, and that’s okay, but as organizations, we want to sort of empower all of our teams to be able to make the right decisions, and that is one of the things that empowers people to feel confident in their role, that allows them to continue to drive improvements within the overall customer experience with that company or that brand. So, that’s number one.
Number two is just also continuing to have conversations with each of those employees. Each person is unique and has different levels of knowledge in certain areas. We’re sort of in a position right now where we’re doing this with AI, as it relates to different levels of experience with AI. AI is sort of been introduced in the customer experience world for a very long period of time compared to other areas of organizations. And so, we know that people have different levels of skill set, and sometimes you have to provide development or opportunities to them that are more in line with where they’re at, as opposed to sort of just a baseline structure and making sure that you’re providing that guidance and support to help them grow in the direction that they’re looking for.
Overcoming Significant Personal or Professional Challenges
Me: While you were talking just now in terms of the two areas that you believe has helped you as a leader, to lead your team, it crossed my mind to ask, as a leader, or even just as a human being, as an employee. Is there any obstacle or challenge that you faced that you have overcome, and you’re very proud of yourself, that you’ve overcome it like maybe you’ve even exceeded your own expectations. You were at a place where you thought that it just wasn’t possible, it could be business related or personal, but if you could share with our audience, how were you able to navigate through that process?
Jamie shared that he’d actually lean on a personal story. He was not a person who grew up with a wealth of resources available to him he should say, the first of his family to go to college. And ultimately, in high school, working with a guidance counselor, they actually told him that he should not pursue college, and that was really sort of very frustrating for him, it was really what he did want to do. And so, he actually went on to get three degrees. It was sort of a fire within him to say, don’t tell me what I can’t do. I’m going to show you what I can do. And really that is an approach that he’s taken across his career and making sure that if somebody says you can’t do something, you sit down and you sort of reinforce why you think you can do it, and it’s okay to ask for help from people and to seek guidance in other areas. But ultimately, that was one of the biggest motivations for him, and he’s truly proud of where it’s gotten him so far.
Me: It’s amazing that in your life, sometimes negative criticism can actually be the driving force that makes you do better, because someone may doubt you or tell you that you can’t do something, and that’s what lights a fire within you to say, “You know what, I’m going to not even prove them wrong, but I’m going to prove to myself that I can do this. And even more.”
Jamie agreed, that’s exactly it. You’re doing it for yourself, you’re not doing it for others, they’re just helping you find that point within you that that motivates you.
App, Website or Tool that Jamie Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that you can’t live without, Jamie shared that he feels like this is probably a pretty common answer, but right now it’s definitely ChatGPT, and using the most recent version, it’s a tool that you can use for everything from just sort of bouncing ideas off of it to creating personas that help you refine, sort of your messaging, to doing industry research. And so, he just finds a wealth of knowledge coming from there. And it’s one of those things that he thinks all leaders should be engaging with and sort of watching the evolution of AI, because it’s playing a tremendous role in the workplace. So, right now it has to be ChatGPT.
Me: Now, I do get that as a very frequent response. So, no worries where that is concerned. But question, do you find that human beings will tend to now gravitate more to ChatGPT and ClaudeAI and all of the different artificial intelligent platforms that have already know more than they revert to Google?
Jamie stated that he doesn’t quite know that they are yet. He does see a shift, of course, because of the nature of AI today, and Agentic AI and sort of the human persona, as opposed to the general search terms. But he does also acknowledge that there’s some change in how people engage with AI and sort of prompting that’s very different than how people over the last 20 years or so have gotten too used to searching on Google, it’s a very different experience and requires a bit of a shift. So, he does foresee that there’ll be some people who sort of resist moving in that direction as it doesn’t exactly work the same way that they’re used to. But as they pick up, just like Google has changed over time and we no longer do search queries with pluses and parentheses like that. Ultimately, he does see people moving in that direction more, and they’re going to continue to have hands on and realizing the true value that’s out there.
Books that Have Had a Great Impact on Jamie
When asked about books that have had a positive impact, Jamie shared that he would definitely rely on a book that he read his first year as a manager, which was 19 years ago. So, it’s a bit dated in a way. It’s kind of funny to read, but it’s actually Managing Up, which is a book by Rosanne Badowski, and she was the assistant to Jack Welch when he was CEO at GE. And the reason it’s kind of funny is because if you read some of the references within the book, and you think about the modern workplace, it’s an interesting dynamic to see how work is shifted in 30 to 40 years with the advancements of technology. So, the principles and concepts within there are still good and relevant to anybody who has a manager, which is essentially all of us, and it’s also applicable to sort of just human interaction. But some of the references there are pretty interesting when you’re talking about faxes or memos and you’re living in a world of slacks or email today, but still very relevant.
What Jamie is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about something that he’s excited about, Jamie shared that he’s actually very, very deeply involved in their AI transformation within their organization, and making sure that they are applying AI across all areas of their business. And really what he’s keenly focused on is how they leverage AI to pull together this wealth of information they have across the organization about their customers and ensuring that they just have this truly holistic representation of what’s going on in their customers world, so that they can serve them better and make sure that they’re integrating that feedback back into the organization.
And along with that, requires that they make sure that they are keeping an eye on evolution of roles within the workforce related to AI, the skills development and advancement that that may mean for employees in the workplace. Some organizations think of AI as an enhancer of the customer experience and also of the workforce, and that’s sort of his philosophy as well, is that it’s not a replacement, it’s an enhancer, because ultimately, our customers are always going to be people, and there’s always that human element that needs to be factored in. So, he’s just super laser focused on AI right now.
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jamie Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Jamie stated that one that he sort of fall back on is from Albert Einstein it’s, “Adversity introduces a man to himself.” And it’s a very introspective type question, and to him, this is all about how you reflect on how you overcome that adversity. So, the scenario he talked about earlier is, sometimes negative feedback can be detrimental, or you can really take it to heart, but ultimately, how you react and overcome that is on you. It’s on you, and how you look at life and the decisions that you make. And so, it’s one super simple, but one that he truly reflects on.
Where can listeners find Jamie online?
LinkedIn – Jamie Homen
Website – www.mural.co/blog
Me: Jamie, well, we are at the end of our interview. Thank you so much for hopping on our podcast, Navigating the Customer Experience. We really value the great insights that you shared with us today, about your journey, about your leadership tips in terms of the things that have helped you become a better leader in empowering your team, as well as the strengths that you believe leaders should focus on as it relates to customer experience in order to ensure that you’re able to fulfil and meet the needs of their clients, ensuring that there’s a strong alignment so people are getting what they’re actually looking for. So, thank you so much, really enjoy the conversation.
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Links
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