Lessons - The Controversial Truth About Business Growth | Tiffani Bova - WSJ Bestselling Author

In this lessons episode, explore how balancing employee experience and customer experience drives faster growth and long-term performance. Discover why companies that invest in people outperform competitors understand how leadership decisions shape culture and productivity at every stage of scale and uncover how an experience mindset unlocks sustainable growth across organizations of any size. You know, you worked with some of the biggest companies in the world. I'm going to name names and like they're the names that every, like, so Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Hula Packer, IBM, Oracle, AT&T, Dell, and Amazon. Those are the top of the top. You can't, you can't really find, maybe you can if you look hard enough, but that's pretty much on the list of every large organization where you should go to to look for who's doing business properly and whatnot. Now, if you ask all the leaders at those companies, they're going to say that they focus on their employees. They're all going to say, of course, yes, employees are the most important part of our business. It seems like such a, but are they really, are the biggest companies in the world actually focusing on their employees at the level at which you think is required to actually deliver the most impeccable CX? Because I would even say that you look at the companies that were disrupted in like the classic example is like Blockbuster. I'm sure Blockbuster thought they took care of their employees, but there was a missed, there was a missed there, and then there was a missed alert to, you know, a lack of a lack of understanding of how the market was shifting and a lack of understanding of how their model was being disrupted. And maybe that's because there wasn't enough voicing of this problem internally with the employees in terms of product or how they saw the company moving. I don't know, but how do you actually gauge whether or not a company does have an optimized EX because they're all going to say it till they're not. They're all going to say it till they're disrupted, right? Yeah, so what happened was I was standing on stage in Canada a number of years back. And I said that I didn't think it was a coincidence that Salesforce was one of the best places to work around the globe. You know, for not number one, we're sort of in the top five ish, right? Pretty much globally. We're one of the most innovative companies in the world. And we're the fastest growing enterprise software company in the cloud, specifically for sure. Now, those are not sort of accolades that Salesforce stood up one day and said, these are the things we are. This is really sort of what the market has, you know, given us from awards and things like that. So I didn't think it was a coincidence. So then I said, you know, look, I'm not the first one to say it. Herb Kelleher, you know, the former CEO and founder of Southwest Airlines, was like, well, take care of our employees. They take care of our customers. If we do that, right, it takes care of our shareholders and it comes back and we can take care of our employees, right? And it is sort of this flywheel effect. Richard Branson has said it, right? Take care of our customers. They take care of our employees. We do that. We can grow. Nothing new there going back to almost what we were just talking about with growth IQ. But I hadn't seen proof. I hadn't seen proof sort of from growth rates on those companies that do those two things really well. How much faster they grow than the rest of the market? So we did a very small US only based project, Salesforce and Forbes insight. And we took publicly available information of like net promoter scores and glass door ratings and customer satisfaction scores and churn rates and then revenue and revenue growth, right? We took, it had to be publicly traded for obvious reasons because we just wanted to go out and try to prove this out. And sure enough, what we found was that companies that did employ experience well saw a lift in KPIs on customer experience. Okay. When we looked at customer experience, we saw a lift in KPIs for employee experience, right? So if you have happier customers, right? They're not yelling at your employees. Your employees don't feel like eight hours a day, they just get yelled at on their customer service line, right? Or something like that. But when both of those things happened, one of them was sort of a 1.3 times growth rate. One was a 1.4 times growth rate. When you got those two things right, it was a 1.8 times growth rate. So for a billion dollar brand, it was a 40 million dollar impact. So we knew we were on to something. Now if you do e strong, you still get a good growth rate. If you do C strong, you still get a good growth rate. So I'm not saying you can't get growth if you're not doing both well. But what I'm saying is you can get a faster multiplier, if you will, a greater multiplier of growth, rather, if you do both right. So back to the original front start of that question you had, yes, executives intuitively understand this. And I would say that most through the second body of research we did said, if it's so obvious, why isn't everybody else doing it? Like it's really obvious, Tiffany, like this isn't anything new. I'm like, I know. However, like tell me who owns employee experience. So many executives will say, of course, employees are super important to us. I care about my people. I care about my employees. And through the research, it showed that that's what they would say. But in the same breath, they would come back and say, however, we ask our employees to default to the customer above all else. So this default of I am interested in the success of my employees. But we're always going to say that our customers are a true north. We're a customer centric company. It's customer first sort of whatever route, you know, sort of mantra you want to have internally. And you know, give you sort of one example, you know, the most customer centric company on the planet. That was their mantra. Who was it? Do you know who it is? I don't know. Amazon Amazon. Okay. So that was their statement. We want to be the most sort of customer centric company on the planet. And did they grow? Absolutely. Like did they knock out industries? Absolutely. Do they create entire new categories? Absolutely. Fair, right? But then what happened? The pandemic hit and who wasn't happy anymore? Employees. And the second that happened, it was really right when Jeff Bezos was stepping down as CEO, it sort of was added that we want to be the greatest employer on the planet. So now you have this balance, right? If we're going to do this, we have to do that. And when employees that sort of unhappiness, if you will, with employees really showed itself during COVID, right? Great resignation, quiet quitting, unionization, even Amazon in particular, a lot of negative stories about how they treated them. And now they want to unionize, right? And they're not alone. So you have Starbucks really well known and held up as a very strong customer company. Right? I mean, no complaints. Really from customers. But then what happened? Employees started to get unhappy. Then what happens? Right? Then they want to unionize. And so I can say that it's not a bad thing to be customer-centric. Obviously, I've been touting that one statement of being customer-centric for almost 18 years. So I would say that that is a good thing. However, it sort of starts and stops with. You have to make sure that the employees are equally engaged in having a good experience. And you actually touched on a point there and you didn't go into it. So I'd like you to go into it. When you ask the question, who owns the employee experience in an organization? So I want to break it down for somebody who's a smaller company as well, a CEO that's just struggling to make it a little bit more than a million because at that point, it's just like a goal or a five job. But say they're trying to get the 10 million dollars and they have a small team, a little bit outsourced, a little bit internal. They have some full-time W2 hires all the way through to and maybe just walk through the different levels of what EX looks like all the way through to Fortune 500, Fortune 100, who owns the customer experience throughout that journey as the company evolves. And then, actually, I will ask you a two-part question, even though I shouldn't, but I will. I want to know what good EX looks like at different levels. Yeah, it is a great question, right? Because I think this is where I've tried to work pretty hard in writing the book to make sure that I wasn't advocating for a new C-suite role. So many years ago, I was part of the team prior to joining Salesforce. I was a research fellow at Gartner. And I was part of the team that made the prediction that the chief marketing officer would spend more on IT than the chief information officer. And when we said that, it was sort of 2008 and everyone thought we were crazy. But lo and behold, Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP all went out and bought companies that were in that marketing technology stack to get a hold of those budgets that the CIO may no longer be in control of. And if the marketing chief marketing officer was going to become the buyer, how do they create sort of that narrative to attract that new buyer to that technology that they now have? And it was really also about trying to get the CMO at the seat of the executive table, not sort of reporting under the COO or maybe under someone else in the organization, but really getting them a seat on the table because we believed that experience was going to become that new battleground between brands, especially when it is highly commoditized, transactional, like what makes it different. It's going to either have to be a better experience or a better designed and developed product. And so the product development may be too expensive and out of reach for some. So if I can make sure my people are better trained and my customers have a better experience, I could win there. Okay, so in this scenario, in this case, rather for the experience mindset, I did not want to advocate that I need a chief employee experience officer because especially for small companies, a CEO is playing eight roles. Like he's the CEO, CMO, CRO, CHRO, like he's got of everybody or he or she is everybody. So what I want to have happened regardless of size organization is when a company makes a decision to reduce the effort for a customer in order to increase the experience for that customer. So, you know, in 2000, we were arguing about making sure that you could, it's three clicks to get to the cart to buy online. In 2000, we were arguing for three clicks to buy. It's been 23 years and still I show up at sites and it's like six clicks to get out. So yeah, no, so yeah, okay, okay, so yeah, yeah, just let's pick that up, right? So back then in 2000, when we were reducing the amount of clicks for the customer to buy in the background, the effort for the employee actually went up because it back then it wasn't automated, like we didn't have the power of these one click shopping carts and you know payment with things like PayPal or Venmo or Apple Pay or whatever it might be, you know, ultimately we didn't have those things. So we had to kind of manually get things done. So what do we do? Decreased effort for a customer increased experience, unintended consequence, increased effort for employee, decreased experience for employee. And over the last 20, 20 years or so, that has gotten even further out of balance where we've so over pivoted to customer, we've kind of left employee behind. So if you are a small business entrepreneur, medium, business, large business and you are making any decisions that impact customer, I just want you to pause for a second and say, okay, hold on. I think this is the right thing to do to do for the customer. What is the implications to the employee? And I don't care what size you are, right? Or I don't care what role you're in. If you're going to change a process, if you're going to add a new application in the environment, if you're going to pick a new vendor and it's really good for the customer, how good is it for the employee? And that's why I called it experience mindset because I need you to shift your mindset away from exclusively focusing on customer and giving a little bit of pause to make sure you're not negatively impacting employee. Will it be 50, 50? Probably not. But if I can get you to just stop and say, hold on. What's the implication to the employee? We've changed this. Have we trained them? Did we change the processes? Have we given them five more things to do a day versus, you know, reducing things? If I can get you to do that, regardless of size, then it's been a success. And that also, so when you add on a new process, you work with a new vendor, that could also mean hiring somebody to support. So that's not always, so, so you can optimize for customer experience as long as you basically scale out or optimize internal processes so that your employee does not suffer that much. Considerably, you have to make sure that their day to day does not vary is basically what you're saying. That's the goal. If they're maxed out, right? That's the goal. So the maxed out capacity, you know, if, I mean, of course, in some cases, it's going to be you can actually increase their workloads slightly because maybe they do have a fair amount of free time, and they're not really optimized as an individual, but that's okay. But if they are optimized as an individual, then you're either hiring someone else out to support them or you're upskilling them, or there's something that you're doing within your organization to basically let this new process land softly on the people that are actually going to be responsible for. Absolutely, right? And so if someone is at 100% capacity, you can't just add more and expect them to do more, right? And so, you know, the long argument is, oh, AI is going to replace, you know, employees and headcount is going to reduce and all of those things. You said something there where if someone wasn't at capacity, you know, what do you do? Well, you do re-skill and retrain them so that they're doing more challenging work and offload some of the mundane repetitive tasks to technology so that they can get that career development because that plays a huge part in their employee experience. It's not just about technology, it's not just about pay, it's not just about training and opportunity, it's not just about, you know, trust within the organization, it's not just about, like, I know what I'm doing every day and the C-suite is telling me and I see them living it, and so I have, you know, something to model after, it's all of those things. And so, you know, you have to make sure that it's not just about automation, it's not just about technology, it's not just about, you know, making time more efficient. We don't want to just focus on productivity of the human because then if you do that, then you really make the mistake of saying, well, productivity, if that's what it is, then automation is king, then AI is king, the machine learning is king and bots and all the things that can quote unquote even chat GPT, right, replace humans in some capacity. I think that there is opportunity to really bring the employee base along this journey as we start to embrace more and more different kinds of technology. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.