Speed without alignment creates experience debt - Interview with Jamie Homen of Mural

0:00So welcome to the next edition of the Punk CX podcast. With me today I have Jamie Homen, who is the Chief Customer Officer at, well, Mural, which is a visual collaboration platform. And well, Jamie, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm doing well. Glad to be here and thanks for having me. Excellent. Now, can you give us a bit of a thumbnail sketch on Jamie? Tell us a little bit more about yourself and the work that you do, just so we can get familiar with you. with you. Yeah, no, happy to. So I've spent about 20 years leading customer organizations. Really, one of the areas that's evolved a lot in the technology space is the overall customer organization.

0:42You know, 20 years ago, there were not many chief customer officers out there. So certainly not a role I knew that I was going to be aspiring to. But I spent a lot of that time in the HR tech space, an ever transforming space, transforming around how companies hire, compete for talent, engage candidates. It's certainly been a transformation. But I started pretty early on. And like a lot of people do in customer experience, I started out answering phone calls in a customer service center back when a lot more was transacted over phone. But I realized pretty quickly that I enjoy helping customers and delivering a good experience And honestly, to me, so much of it was common sense.

1:26It wasn't, you know, you don't go to college for a degree in customer experience, but you can all relate to what a good customer experience is or what a frustrating one is, really. So after a few stints at different companies, I ended up at Mural about a year and a half ago. And what we're really focused on is something so incredibly relevant to the time, but it's really focusing on driving alignment across an organization's go-to-market motions and how they're continuously aligning to drive value and outcomes for their customers. And so a lot of the work I'm working on now, it sits right at the intersection of product, customer experience, revenue, which is why the topic of alignment and how it impacts customer experience is such a big focus for me because it's so incredibly relevant.

2:17So you said sort of one of my favorite words in this sort of space is outcomes which is great because i'm always you know we're talking about outcomes from the customer and the employee and and business outcomes um and how we should be aspiring to kind of like improve all three at the same time and but then the the another important word that sits in the background of that is the this alignment thing and this is that's one of the things that you and i talked about before in the setup to this podcast is around about alignment But you said a couple of things that I thought really stood out, and I wanted to have you on the podcast so we could rummage around them a little bit.

2:53And the first one I wanted to start with was you said speed without alignment creates experience debt. Now, we're all familiar, or many of us are probably familiar or have heard of the idea of technical debt, but experience debt is sort of a new one on me. And so I wanted to, can you tell me about experience debt and how speed without alignment creates it? Yeah, absolutely. So the way I think about experience debt, it's almost a derivative of tech debt or even the design debt that some companies will experience. But it's the gap between the experience that you've promised your customer and what you're actually able to deliver consistently.

3:40Okay. And so, you know, if we go back to tech debt or design debt, you know, you think about it as an organization evolves and needs to build. They may identify different priorities and shifting, which can create product gaps in certain areas. But ultimately, those gaps live in the product. And what we're talking about here is how that starts to show up across the entire customer lifecycle. Okay. So where it really gets amplified is when you have speed without the alignment across an organization, whether you're working with product marketing, revenue or customer experience, you can ship things quickly.

4:17You can launch new features. You can push new features out into the market. But the rest of the organization and your customers may not be able to fully keep up. So understanding your customers, the way the customers change and adapt, because at the end of the day, what you're really trying to do is deliver value for your customers. But if your customers can't adapt to that value at that same pace, you create an experience, a debt overall. And so you start to see adoption lagging behind a little bit, the release velocity, and that's where the debt builds. From a customer's perspective, you feel fragmentation, confusion, sometimes a slower path to value, or sometimes you have even been sold on something that may not come out into reality in how you actually experience the product that you've purchased and start using.

5:06So just because you're adding more doesn't necessarily mean that your customers are getting more value. And so that can be a balance that you have to strike and really intimately knowing your customers and how they change and adapt is part of ensuring that you're able to deliver that experience. Yeah, so it feels like to me because I was speaking to somebody recently, it was an old friend of mine called Lawrence Buchanan, who is a partner across EY Studio Plus. I think that's the new name of their entity. And he was talking about this idea that we should always start with from the, you know, we're in this place of massive sort of change.

5:44I mean, he talked about it like 10 years ago, we're talking about VUCA, this volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. He says like, it's like right now, it's like VUCA on steroids. And the only thing that we can really be certain of is when we focus on the customer and figuring out what the experience you want to deliver for them and then work backwards from that. And if you do that, then it kind of creates this alignment around that and you can build your organization to sort of deliver that. But then he also says, actually, the problem with that is sometimes you're building something which can feel quite far away.

6:19And so he advocates taking almost like a product, like an MVP type product release strategy. So you build a product, you build your strategy based on like, his like product release one, his product release two. And it keeps going. So you iterate from there and that's how you can maintain alignment and then build sort of metrics and targets around that. I mean, does that sound about right? Yeah, similar in sort of how we look at it. We were looking at it across the entirety of the customer journey and understanding what the value delivery is throughout the journey, ensuring those points roll up into a unified view.

6:58So while the marketing team may own one KPI or metric at a certain stage of the journey, we don't want customers to experience an organization chart. We want them to experience a fluid overall experience with the brand. And so we look at the alignment at the top and spending a lot of time aligning around the value and problems to solve for our customers. What are the true outcomes they're looking to deliver? And then we we build backwards. Yeah. And so we say start at the top, build the alignment and also creates additional fluidity within the organization and the organization being a little bit more nimble in how they approach problems.

7:38Because sometimes what you initially start out to build doesn't end up resulting in the results you're looking for. So we promote a very heavy learning culture, test and iterate, test, learn, integrated into the results and sort of and also pivot if need be. Right. You know, it's not uncommon to hear fail fast, but it's still true and relevant today. I think I must say in respect for Lawrence, he did actually say that the way that you start is you start with alignment at the top and that might actually require banging heads together at an XCO level. and he was just talking about how you execute that once you've achieved that alignment but here's the thing that i wanted to understand is like we could talk about this experience debt but actually what would be more interesting is to understand how would you know how would you see where are you going to see it accumulating or how would you know that you're accumulating kind of experience kind of debt and to make it kind of very relevant for present day and lots of the conversations going on what sort of role is things like artificial intelligence playing in all of that yeah so that's an interesting question for sure so um everybody's talking about ai ai is everywhere it's it's sort of being explored as how you know and of course in our space.

9:06It's one of the areas that AI is ripe for, you know, with heavy data and process orientation within the CX world. But I'll start with the AI part. So the dynamics right now are really interesting because AI is compressing how fast companies can build and ship. But the alignment and decision making and the behavior change within organizations is still dependent on humans and it still moves at a human speed. And so that's where you start to see that gap in the experience that people, whether different generations, different age groups, different people with different technical skills, et cetera, can all absorb at different rates.

9:53And so there's not a perfect answer for that. But the customers or a company that's looking at how their customers might be experiencing that type of debt, you're going to see signals like support volume spikes when you have new feature releases. sometimes you're going to learn that it's either not understood or that they just don't find value in that. You might see slow time to value or where they don't understand how to apply something in their use case or how they're using your product or application to drive the outcomes that they're looking for. And that misalignment is really detrimental.

10:33You really want to continuously focus on those customer outcomes. And then at the end of the day, your biggest would be potentially gaps between what was sold to the customer and what gets used every day. That's obviously a huge risk. It starts to put real pressure on growth, your ability to grow a customer. But if a customer is not realizing value expansion slows, the biggest problem with that is that it starts to erode the trust with the customer. And that trust is the foundation of your customer experiencing, giving a good experience to your customer. So that's really what experience debt tends to look like.

11:13And ultimately, it's not just about internal alignment, but that is one portion. It's about how customers adopt and how they perceive the value and whether they want to continue to invest with you. Right. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. I'll come back to explore how to do that because it feels like you've got almost asking organizations to move at two speeds, but I'll come back to that later on. I want to move on to something else around how we can use, you mentioned data and process and products and roadmaps and things.

11:54I also want to bring it back to customer service and customer insight support and just the heart of many people's customer experience, i.e. sometimes they really experience a brand when something goes wrong, or that's the heightened experience. And I've always advocated that customer service offers the largest and fastest growing real-time customer inside data set in any organization, effectively, but it's largely not leveraged very well. so here's my question it's like how being i'd be interested to get your perspective on how organizations should be thinking about using that data to influence the sort of the product and roadmap prior to prioritization decisions because it feels like there is that is a real time data set full of insight and you talked about these you know you'll see this experience that manifests itself in terms of like volumes and support spikes of support volume spikes when you have a new product kind of release.

12:59And so help me understand what you're seeing the best do in terms of leveraging that data to influence some of their prioritization decisions. Yeah. So I don't think it'll be surprising, but I completely agree with you that there is a lot of support data out there that it really is like a vast wealth of information about your customers. It's usually your largest sample size of data that is structured and usable in a certain way. And so I think it's one of the most underutilized assets as well. And so I've actually been looking at this very closely over the past year as we evolve into being a more rapid iteration type organization.

13:43And the way I think about it is CX isn't really just the support function. It's actually the signals that you're getting. They're the closest to the customer reality, but it's where you see the friction, the unmet expectations, where things are working the way you intended or not working the way you intended. And the challenge in a lot of companies is that data just sits in isolation. It's in a send desk. It's in a Salesforce report. It doesn't make its way into the product decisions or how things are positioned in the market. And so I'm going to rely on an old traditional comment and just say what organizations really need to do is reflect on their structured feedback loops and where those insights are flowing continuously from CX and product into the revenue teams.

14:37But more importantly, look at it and ensure that it's not an ad hoc process. It shouldn't necessarily be, you know, a once a month review, a report that gets sent out with no acknowledgement or action. But given how fast things move now, especially with AI, it has to be built into how the company operates. And at the end of the day, customers will not feel your roadmap. Many of them will not be aware of it, depending on the type of company you operate in. But they will feel your execution and customer experience is where that gap comes up most. so yeah so i think ideally focusing in on the feedback loop and how to evolve what would normally be seen as the traditional feedback loop and how companies um struggle with feeding that into and operationalizing that data is is really critical so i heard somebody and i get somebody told me i think it was oh there's a guy by the name kenji across it um he has a customer support function at front and i'd be i talked to him on the podcast and he said a really interesting kind of thing he said that their support team sits with a product team and so they basically smash these two worlds together and you just can't get away from it you know and because i think and i think that's an interesting really a really interesting way of doing it because you create those sort of organic links you almost with the kind of the the radar people just hear about stuff that's kind of going on.

16:11And it just starts to seep into the broader sort of product kind of organization. And I thought that was a really interesting way of thinking about, I feel like, closing those kind of feedback loops rather than just relying on a process or a set of meetings or whatever. But when you co-locate people, then this stuff can almost kind of happen by default. It becomes part of your operating sort of day-to-day in many ways. Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that because that is extremely similar to the evolution that we've made over the last six months as well. And so what we've done is actually looked at how our teams are structured and put together cross-functional teams.

16:51So the product teams are centralized around their product areas with a supporting engineering team, of course, but we also have a marketing representation. And I also advocated to integrate support into the team with the goal that as they're continuing to work through their, you know, their rituals and their planning and whatnot, that there's a real person sitting there providing specific data insights. So as part of the release process, we're defining what we want the customer to experience, what information we'd like to collect post-release. And then real time, we have that person able to monitor and feed that back into the product and support team.

17:32So sorry, product and engineering teams. and then tying the loop all the way back to the revenue cycle. We also have the marketing person in there who's understanding and hearing why customers are saying this, why we're building the product this way, what value that's going to deliver. And then it cycles back to the beginning of the motion where we're preparing our customer success team or our sales team to be able to talk to that value and the value creation of the platform for them. So we're really tightening that circle into a week as opposed to something that would normally take, you know, a month to three months sometimes in some, depending on how slow or fast your organization moves for the product development cycle.

18:16So we're seeing that across other organizations as well. And in fact, have really broken down silos to ensure that we have this cross-functional team that can operate at a much faster pace. Nice. Nice. I mean, I'm sure it's quite a big shift, but it's great when you put people in a value of different domains in proximity to each other. They just listen and they talk to each other. It's only a good thing. What was funny was when we first sort of introduced the idea, it sort of landed in a way of not uncommon, but sort of, oh, support. Okay, great. You could tell me this. or, you know, it was very transactional.

18:56And we're like, no, no, we want this to evolve to more strategic, right? We don't want to simply respond to an issue. We want to share insights to you about what the customers are saying, what they're providing, what use case works or doesn't work, and how that adds value to your process. And so it was a little bit difficult for people to get their heads around. But when we're starting to see it take off, you start to see it click for people. Oh, okay. I learned this from you. I learned this from you. And also, by the way, on the other end of the support side, we're learning from marketing, which is often one of the most disjointed relationships in an organization because support and customer experience tends to be at a tail end and marketing tends to be at the other tail end.

19:43And so we've really started to see that form into a much tighter circle as opposed to the traditional loops and process or handoffs. I love a good relay race handoff. I'm always trying to get people to think outside of just true traditional handoffs and looking at the blending of an experience and understanding that it's not just this silo, this silo, this silo. It's this team is responsible for this area, but they're also responsible for ensuring that that customer moves on to the next part of the journey in a really seamless way that makes them understand that the organization's looking at their values and not having to repeat what they're looking to get out of the organization, what they purchased that product for, what outcomes they're building towards.

20:29And that feeds all the way through to your success planning with your accounts, how you're enabling those accounts, how you're focusing on driving the adoption of your platform to other pieces of the business where there's value and really looking at it in a more smooth motion as opposed to traditional handoffs that people look at. Excellent. Excellent. So just moving on, I wanted to then, the next thing I wanted to ask you about was that you said alignment is often a market design problem, not just a cultural one. Now I must kind of doff my cap to the, I mean, this related back to the idea of speed without alignment creates experience debt.

21:06It's almost like titles from a, like a set of kind of like pithy kind of like titles. A master's thesis. Yeah. That speak volumes. And I was a bit like alignment is often a market design problem, not just a cultural one. I was like, I don't know if I've got any idea what that means. You want me to tell you? Yes, please. Okay, perfect. So what I mean by that is it's really just that most companies don't actually have a culture problem. I don't think I've ever experienced a company say, I don't want my customers to have a good experience. It's not that they don't care about their customers or that they don't want to be customer centric.

21:43It may just be that they're unclear on how to approach being more customer centric or or that they have one vision of what being customer centric looks like, as opposed to understanding what customer centric to your core base of customers, the people that you're really trying to service are. And it's usually more about the way the organization's set up. So sort of like we were talking about before, where your teams are structured, how the decisions are getting made, how success is measured, it doesn't always match how customers actually buy. And we've seen real changes in customer buying patterns where they're really talking about the outcomes and the value of your product to drive those outcomes for their organization.

22:27They're not simply looking at tactical engagements where, oh, you're going to train my users. That's great. Check a box. But what is the value of that and what outcome does it drive for the customers? And when you think about it from that perspective, you start to see a little bit of a different approach in how you build your customer experience. And so it's sort of the standard to be looking from the inside out when you work in a company. But really, from a customer experience perspective, we're looking from the outside in. So almost removing yourself from the company and saying, if I were this person experiencing this company, is it a cohesive experience or am I being handed off from sales to technical implementation to the customer success person?

23:14And I'm having to start my story all over again with each of them on what it is that you're ultimately trying to achieve with your software. And that sort of deteriorates through the game of telephone. It goes back to that relay race we were talking about. But it's not uncommon for somebody like me, a C-suite executive, to be out searching a platform, testing it myself online, researching it before I'll even ask my team to start investigating whether it would be a solution for solving problems. It used to be a lot more bottoms up and, you know, come to me with proposals and bring these things out there.

23:49But the world we live in and the way AI is shaping how companies are evaluating solutions means that you have to have a much more aligned focus around getting to those outcomes for those customers and being maniacal about how you prioritize against the value for those customers. And so with all this sort of stuff, I mean, what should companies be doing to address all of this sort of stuff? And maybe more pointedly, it's like, this feels like something you might have experienced. And what have you done about this? Yeah, it is something I've experienced for sure. And I think the point's pretty simple, easy to understand, but it's not easy to execute.

24:35and that goes back to that kind of almost the two speed thing i was talking about earlier because it feels like the world's going yeah but you're talking about alignment and it's a bit like it feels like the world's spinning really fast and you're telling us we need to step off and do something which feels intrinsically slow and hard and quite a human sort of thing again i get alignment in order to be almost to say you needed to go slower in order to go further and faster And that sometimes in this sort of current environment can often feel counterintuitive. Yeah. One body of work that we've worked through recently that I feel has been very high value for the organization is around just top level alignment around the journey and where a customer's experience comes from throughout each stage of a journey and really defining what success looks like in each part of that life cycle.

25:29And not just within the individual teams. It's not uncommon to say we need to improve X and then a team goes out and solves that, but they haven't factored in what product is working on. They haven't factored in what revenue is working on, et cetera. And that creates a disconnect. So spending that time up front to align around the entire customer lifecycle and not specific teams makes a big difference. It's things like looking at adoption or realized value as opposed to just pipeline or how fast we're shipping features, right? And those are more examples of siloed metrics. Not that they're not important, they are, but are they your top line metrics and understanding that cohesion?

26:10And the second piece I would say there is to really intimately understanding your customer base is really critical to ensure that you match either their pace or the methods that you deploy match that organization's pace of change and delivery, and also helping the customers through the change at times. Instead of just saying, here's your release notes, here's something our success team put together for you that is related to this group of work that's happening in your organization, and here's how this feature could help you do that. Really getting into that more personalized experience is much more valuable to them.

26:47It sort of takes the burden of figuring out how to integrate it. And if you're really embedded with your customers and understanding how they're working, what they're working on, you can have a much more educated thought process around how you position that back to your customers. But then also taking the insights from onboarding, support, customer success, and then ultimately tying it back into that feedback loop that I was talking about, but not, you know, not a slow feedback loop, but a very much more rapid iterative feedback loop allows customers to understand that you're listening and that you're going to be reacting to them very quickly.

27:25I think customers tend to be pretty forgiving and knowing that not everything will be perfect every time, but they really do care about how you handle it after that. And that again, goes back to that building of trust, which is just this underlying underlying foundational element of continuing to build a relationship with a customer and letting them know that you are a good partner to their organization and willing to work with them. So here's a question related to go back to the alignment sort of thing. Do you think that has to be driven from the XCO or the C-suite down or can the alignment be achieved independently if you just got two willing or a few willing departments that are willing to collaborate?

28:05Right. Yeah. So I will say that I have seen this both ways where you're sort of from a CX perspective, you're sort of influencing across functions and it can be tedious. I'm just going to be honest about that. That goes to misaligned priorities. So my opinion from an employee and a customer perspective is that it absolutely has to be aligned at the top, at least on some baseline foundational objectives or outcomes that you're looking to drive within a period of time to roll downhill. because that sets parameters and foundation for the teams within the organization to be able to understand the direction, to ensure that they're meeting the expectations for the customer's outcome, but also that they can make decisions more rapidly without having to seek additional guidance or stop and seek out some input at teams higher up.

29:05So if we're working through that in a way where we align at the top, that will increase. My experience has always been that that one, it makes it a much better working environment for everybody because you have some guardrails to keep yourselves honest. There's no lack of priorities in any company out there. I have never seen a company say, I have nothing else to do. And I surely will never see that in my lifetime. So the reality is they have to have a framework. They have to have guardrails at times around how to prioritize. And sometimes that is one of the hardest things for a company to do.

29:43But that's how you maintain focus and keep those things moving in accordance with the objectives you're aiming for. Awesome. Thank you for that. And so, Jamie, that's what I had for my main questions. And so I just wanted to throw it back to you and say, is there anything else on this that Do you want to kind of pick out or highlight that we've missed out? Yeah, semi on the topic of alignment, definitely periphery. But I think just given the nature of customer experience, the data rich process oriented world that we operate in, we have to acknowledge that it's prime for AI augmentation. And so I think from the alignment perspective, what I truly think about as a CX leader is, is how do we continuously drive alignment and ensure that our people understand how to deliver a positive experience?