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Lessons - The Controversial Truth About Business Growth | Tiffani Bova - WSJ Bestselling Author · Success Story with Scott Clary

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