You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio.
Now, I have been promising you an innovation evangelist, and I've got one.
Tiffany Bova joins us.
She is the global customer growth and innovation evangelist over at sales Force. She joins us on zoom from Los Angeles, and we're not going to talk specifically, I guess about Salesforce and their product, but about her new book, The Experience Mindset, Changing the way you think about growth. Tiffany, thanks so much for joining us. It's great to have you on the program. Tell us first, how you got the idea to write this book.
Well, I'll tell you the pandemic was an amazing opportunity to really look deep within organizations to figure out where is there a disconnect between what they were doing for customers and what they were doing for employees. And when we started to come out the other side of it, sure enough, we saw through our research that there was a big disc connect between what the C suite thought was happening in the organization and what employees actually thought
was happening. And I think that was a big part of the great resignation as well as what we're still seeing a little bit of that quiet quitting.
It's kind of a theme, actually, I keep hearing this today about executives who.
Think one thing and their employees.
Who think they reports are just not on the same page. Yeah, yeah, So I think this is a little bit controversial. Tiffany, you write that there's an over emphasis on the customer experience today that came the expense of the employee experience. Tell us about that over emphasis on the customer experience and how they came to be.
Well, when we made the sort of shift to digital back in the early two thousands, a lot of that was oriented around how do we make it easier for customers to buy something from US, engage with us either from a support standpoint, or buy products and services from US. And over the last twenty twenty five years, we've continued to work tirelessly and spend billions of dollars on reducing effort for customers. But unfortunately, the unintended consequence of that
was the effort for employees actually went up. I'll give you one statistic. The average enterprise has a little more than eleven hundred unique applications in their environment, yet only twenty six percent of them are integrated. Now, who bears the brunt of that lack of integration employees, So.
It sounds like it's just a recipe for employee burnout.
Then it's burnout its lack of ability and access to the right sets of data and tools and how AI is the hot topic of the day. But AI is only as good as the data it's looking at and analyzing. And so if you've got data and disparate systems, the challenge there is you really need that single source of truth. Where is it sitting, is it accurate? And can your employees action it quickly when they're doing something.
For or with a customer well, and also, you know, at a basic level, the customer experience can only be so good if the employee experience is not right. I mean, the employee experience has to be strong for a customer to benefit.
Absolutely.
Look, I say the fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job. So, if you are a customer and you complain quite often about the length of hold times when you're calling in a customer service, you know, department or how long it is it takes for you to get replacement of some product or to get the shipping label to send something back. A lot of that has to do with the fact that employees have to jump through so many hoops to
make that happen. They don't show up every day and go I can't wait to just upset all of our customers. I mean, that's not what they plan on doing. They show up to do their best work, and we as companies and as leaders, especially those making decisions around technology, have to keep in mind what do employees need to do in order to be scessful, especially for organizations that are looking to grow.
So what do you do to improve the what what can you sort of generalize in terms of actionable employee experience improvement?
Well, I'd say start with what are the things you're currently doing for your customers as it relates to customer experience or CX. Do you have a matching effort on the employee side? Many use things like Net Promoter Score NPS to track improvement on customer experience for brands and organizations. Do you do e NPS on the employee side? And so you could do a quick analysis of what are
you tracking. And you know the comment earlier made by Katie, right, this over pivot to customer has a lot to do with where the metrics are, Where are executives compensated and measured and managed, and what are people focused on? And if they're just overwhelmingly focused on the customer, the employee will suffer because of it.
And I'm curious what role the pandemic played in all the this and sort of accelerating this dynamic, if at all, because you were talking about it was this shift to digital that really caused this over focus on the customer experience. Of course, everyone went online, almost all aspects of life went online in twenty twenty, and the lines between work and your personal life obviously became very blurred. I mean, I feel like I never truly logged off of my
Bloomberg terminal for about two years. Tell us about how the pandemic sort of impacted some of the trends we're talking about.
Well, I'll tell you it's shined a light on the lack of investments that were made for employees. And what I mean by that is all of a sudden, as you just mentioned right, overnight, people who used to work in the office or work in a call center in a building. Were moved home, but maybe they only had desktop terminals and they didn't have laptops. Maybe they didn't have access to high speed internet at home. Now, all
of a sudden, there may be flexible working environments. What are organizations and companies doing to make sure there are people who may be working remote we have what they
need in order to be successful. Edelman did a research study kind of in the middle of the pandemic and found that it was the first time employees outranked customer as the number one stakeholder in a business for long term success after a decade being customer employee, popping to number one showed that this lack of investment I'm on the employee base around training, capabilities, tools, systems, processes, et cetera.
Those kinds of operational mechanics were just ignored, especially around things like systems and tools and processes, which has just created this spider's web right that employees have to navigate every single day.
By the way, isn't it expensive to invest that much in employees? I mean, you work at a company that I assume wants to keep costs in check, right, so of course you can make your employees very happy, you know, with with a lot of outlay, But how do you do it with how you know rise and costs.
Yeah, when we did the research, that was really the foundation for the experienced mindset. It wasn't necessarily about all things wrapped around human resources or HR. It was really focused on the moment that matters when an employee does something that touches a customer, develop a product, answer a phone, go on a sales call, create a marketing brochure or anything like that. And so, you know, I often say
back because that's really a solid question. And one I get often is that you know, many will come back and say what about investing in the talent right or reskilling as an example to answer your question, And the CFO says, look, what if we make all these investments in our people and they walk out the door. And I say back, like, what if you don't invest in them? And they stay?
Yeah?
Which is which is worse?
I want to talk about what sort of happens to this push to focus more on employees again, if we do actually enter the recession that people have been saying or is going to come for at least a year now, does this sort of focus go away if companies are worrying about, you know, their bottom line, the economic contraction, things along those lines.
This is the risk.
You know, we did so much very quickly. As you mentioned, when the pandemic first happened and everything shifted to online, there was still a majority of small businesses across the US specifically that had gotten online for the very first time in the first six months of the pandemic. So there is also it is not even right everything that people are either realizing or missing out on when it
comes to technology. But I will say to you that we can't just think about tech and investing in employees as a way to become more productive and do more with less. We have to make sure that the things we learned and did for our employees during the first sort of two years March twenty twenty to kind of the beginning of twenty twenty three, that we don't snap back to those old habits that got us in the
position of the great resignation in quiet quitting. And so does it need to be everything that we might have been doing, like allowing people to continue to work from home versus having some kind of flexible work arrangement and going in the office a couple of days a week or a week a month or something like that. I think that's where leaders, especially at the c suite, especially in large organizations, has to ask the employees what is
the best way forward for us? Take that information and then do something with it, versus creating that disconnect where the employees think this is what they want and the executives are doing something completely different.
All right, Tiffany, thanks so much for joining us. Fascinating story, fascinating book. Tiffany Bova is the Global customer Growth and Innovation evangelist at Salesforce.
Talking about the experience mindset