Lessons - The Crucial Role of Customer Experience | Tiffani Bova, Author & Global Salesforce Evangelist

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. What do companies miss and through your experience, your life cycle, because even as you wrote your first book, you were looking at what companies miss in a certain perspective, but that's evolved, obviously, which is why this is the second focus on the second book. Yeah, it's a great question, because this is a little bit of a mayocopal, right? I mean, a mayocopal. Yeah. Ultimately, those 10 paths to growth to your point, Scott, were nothing earth shattering in new, that nine first paths were like, you know, sell more to your existing customers, launch a new product, go into new markets. I mean, none of that stuff. It was really a spin on the Amsoft Matrix, which is the sort of two by two that really helped companies from a strategic standpoint. But what I did was I took those tried and true strategies for growth, and I modernized them using social mobile cloud, big data, AI, you know, all the tools that we now have at our disposal were not, you know, not even a glimmer, you know, in the 60s when the Amsoft Matrix was developed, yet the strategy of selling more to your existing customers, a product you already have is everybody still does it, and then sell new products to the customers you have, everybody still does it, right? But rethinking that was what was so important and kind of getting back to the basics and understanding the connection between the decisions that you make when it comes to growth. So that was kind of the foundation of growth IQ, but the very first growth path was customers. I called customer experience kind of your true North, everything should be revolving around what your customers want, what they need from you, and still a true statement. But what I missed in that in any depth in the entire book was that the keepers of your brand promises, best products, best customer service, you know, best offices, you know, best field service technicians, whatever it might be, those brand promises are delivered by your employees. So if your employees are not happy, engaged, committed, enabled, trained, all the things I sort of talk about in the new book experience mindset, you know, it will be a miss because the greatest strategies are delivered by people. And when things, you know, push comes to shove your Excel spreadsheet or your, you know, this force report, whatever it might be, does not come run to your aid. Like, it's the people of the organization that do right. So if the, if there is a disconnect between what employees need in order to develop those great products, deliver those great experiences, you know, go that extra mile for the customer, then it's all for not. So it was really a misformeat and not include that as one of the quote unquote growth paths. You know, low and behold, two years later, I went down a path of doing a lot of new research and it led me to the fact that this connection is so tight that there's, it's just almost not possible to deliver great CX without having great EX. How do you actually gauge whether or not a company does have an optimized EX because they're all going to, 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, 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. But 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 Kelaher, 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. So 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 employee 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, right, like it's really obvious to me, 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 our true north, we're a customer-centric company. That's the first sort of whatever route, you know, sort of mantra you want to have internally. And I'll give you sort of one example. 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 customer-centric company on the planet. And did they grow? Absolutely. Do they knock down 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, of 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. Well, even Amazon in particular, a lot of negative stories about how they treated their employees. 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? It's 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.