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Speaker 1: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and

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Speaker 1: Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio.

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Speaker 2: Now, I have been promising you an innovation evangelist, and

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Speaker 2: I've got one.

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Speaker 1: Tiffany Bova joins us.

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Speaker 2: She is the global customer growth and innovation evangelist over

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Speaker 2: at sales Force. She joins us on zoom from Los Angeles,

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Speaker 2: and we're not going to talk specifically, I guess about

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Speaker 2: Salesforce and their product, but about her new book, The

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Speaker 2: Experience Mindset, Changing the way you think about growth. Tiffany,

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Speaker 2: thanks so much for joining us. It's great to have

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Speaker 2: you on the program. Tell us first, how you got

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Speaker 2: the idea to write this book.

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Speaker 3: Well, I'll tell you the pandemic was an amazing opportunity

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Speaker 3: to really look deep within organizations to figure out where

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Speaker 3: is there a disconnect between what they were doing for

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Speaker 3: customers and what they were doing for employees. And when

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Speaker 3: we started to come out the other side of it,

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Speaker 3: sure enough, we saw through our research that there was

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Speaker 3: a big disc connect between what the C suite thought

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Speaker 3: was happening in the organization and what employees actually thought

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Speaker 3: was happening. And I think that was a big part

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Speaker 3: of the great resignation as well as what we're still

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Speaker 3: seeing a little bit of that quiet quitting.

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Speaker 2: It's kind of a theme, actually, I keep hearing this

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Speaker 2: today about executives who.

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Speaker 1: Think one thing and their employees.

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Speaker 4: Who think they reports are just not on the same page. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 4: So I think this is a little bit controversial. Tiffany,

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Speaker 4: you write that there's an over emphasis on the customer

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Speaker 4: experience today that came the expense of the employee experience.

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Speaker 4: Tell us about that over emphasis on the customer experience

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Speaker 4: and how they came to be.

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Speaker 3: Well, when we made the sort of shift to digital

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Speaker 3: back in the early two thousands, a lot of that

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Speaker 3: was oriented around how do we make it easier for

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Speaker 3: customers to buy something from US, engage with us either

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Speaker 3: from a support standpoint, or buy products and services from US.

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Speaker 3: And over the last twenty twenty five years, we've continued

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Speaker 3: to work tirelessly and spend billions of dollars on reducing

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Speaker 3: effort for customers. But unfortunately, the unintended consequence of that

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Speaker 3: was the effort for employees actually went up. I'll give

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Speaker 3: you one statistic. The average enterprise has a little more

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Speaker 3: than eleven hundred unique applications in their environment, yet only

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Speaker 3: twenty six percent of them are integrated. Now, who bears

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Speaker 3: the brunt of that lack of integration employees, So.

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Speaker 4: It sounds like it's just a recipe for employee burnout.

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Speaker 3: Then it's burnout its lack of ability and access to

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Speaker 3: the right sets of data and tools and how AI

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Speaker 3: is the hot topic of the day. But AI is

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Speaker 3: only as good as the data it's looking at and analyzing.

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Speaker 3: And so if you've got data and disparate systems, the

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Speaker 3: challenge there is you really need that single source of truth.

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Speaker 3: Where is it sitting, is it accurate? And can your

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Speaker 3: employees action it quickly when they're doing something.

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Speaker 2: For or with a customer well, and also, you know,

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Speaker 2: at a basic level, the customer experience can only be

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Speaker 2: so good if the employee experience is not right. I mean,

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Speaker 2: the employee experience has to be strong for a customer

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Speaker 2: to benefit.

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Speaker 1: Absolutely.

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Speaker 3: Look, I say the fastest way to get customers to

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Speaker 3: love your brand is to get employees to love their job. So,

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Speaker 3: if you are a customer and you complain quite often

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Speaker 3: about the length of hold times when you're calling in

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Speaker 3: a customer service, you know, department or how long it

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Speaker 3: is it takes for you to get replacement of some

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Speaker 3: product or to get the shipping label to send something back.

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Speaker 3: A lot of that has to do with the fact

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Speaker 3: that employees have to jump through so many hoops to

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Speaker 3: make that happen. They don't show up every day and

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Speaker 3: go I can't wait to just upset all of our customers.

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Speaker 3: I mean, that's not what they plan on doing. They

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Speaker 3: show up to do their best work, and we as

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Speaker 3: companies and as leaders, especially those making decisions around technology,

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Speaker 3: have to keep in mind what do employees need to

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Speaker 3: do in order to be scessful, especially for organizations that

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Speaker 3: are looking to grow.

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Speaker 2: So what do you do to improve the what what

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Speaker 2: can you sort of generalize in terms of actionable employee

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Speaker 2: experience improvement?

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Speaker 3: Well, I'd say start with what are the things you're

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Speaker 3: currently doing for your customers as it relates to customer

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Speaker 3: experience or CX. Do you have a matching effort on

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Speaker 3: the employee side? Many use things like Net Promoter Score

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Speaker 3: NPS to track improvement on customer experience for brands and organizations.

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Speaker 3: Do you do e NPS on the employee side? And

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Speaker 3: so you could do a quick analysis of what are

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Speaker 3: you tracking. And you know the comment earlier made by Katie, right,

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Speaker 3: this over pivot to customer has a lot to do

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Speaker 3: with where the metrics are, Where are executives compensated and

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Speaker 3: measured and managed, and what are people focused on? And

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Speaker 3: if they're just overwhelmingly focused on the customer, the employee

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Speaker 3: will suffer because of it.

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Speaker 4: And I'm curious what role the pandemic played in all

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Speaker 4: the this and sort of accelerating this dynamic, if at all,

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Speaker 4: because you were talking about it was this shift to

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Speaker 4: digital that really caused this over focus on the customer experience.

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Speaker 4: Of course, everyone went online, almost all aspects of life

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Speaker 4: went online in twenty twenty, and the lines between work

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Speaker 4: and your personal life obviously became very blurred. I mean,

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Speaker 4: I feel like I never truly logged off of my

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Speaker 4: Bloomberg terminal for about two years. Tell us about how

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Speaker 4: the pandemic sort of impacted some of the trends we're

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Speaker 4: talking about.

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Speaker 3: Well, I'll tell you it's shined a light on the

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Speaker 3: lack of investments that were made for employees. And what

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Speaker 3: I mean by that is all of a sudden, as

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Speaker 3: you just mentioned right, overnight, people who used to work

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Speaker 3: in the office or work in a call center in

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Speaker 3: a building. Were moved home, but maybe they only had

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Speaker 3: desktop terminals and they didn't have laptops. Maybe they didn't

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Speaker 3: have access to high speed internet at home. Now, all

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Speaker 3: of a sudden, there may be flexible working environments. What

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Speaker 3: are organizations and companies doing to make sure there are

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Speaker 3: people who may be working remote we have what they

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Speaker 3: need in order to be successful. Edelman did a research

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Speaker 3: study kind of in the middle of the pandemic and

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Speaker 3: found that it was the first time employees outranked customer

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Speaker 3: as the number one stakeholder in a business for long

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Speaker 3: term success after a decade being customer employee, popping to

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Speaker 3: number one showed that this lack of investment I'm on

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Speaker 3: the employee base around training, capabilities, tools, systems, processes, et cetera.

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Speaker 3: Those kinds of operational mechanics were just ignored, especially around

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Speaker 3: things like systems and tools and processes, which has just

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Speaker 3: created this spider's web right that employees have to navigate

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Speaker 3: every single day.

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Speaker 2: By the way, isn't it expensive to invest that much

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Speaker 2: in employees? I mean, you work at a company that

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Speaker 2: I assume wants to keep costs in check, right, so

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Speaker 2: of course you can make your employees very happy, you know,

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Speaker 2: with with a lot of outlay, But how do you

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Speaker 2: do it with how you know rise and costs.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, when we did the research, that was really the

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Speaker 3: foundation for the experienced mindset. It wasn't necessarily about all

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Speaker 3: things wrapped around human resources or HR. It was really

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Speaker 3: focused on the moment that matters when an employee does

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Speaker 3: something that touches a customer, develop a product, answer a phone,

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Speaker 3: go on a sales call, create a marketing brochure or

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Speaker 3: anything like that. And so, you know, I often say

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Speaker 3: back because that's really a solid question. And one I

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Speaker 3: get often is that you know, many will come back

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Speaker 3: and say what about investing in the talent right or

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Speaker 3: reskilling as an example to answer your question, And the

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Speaker 3: CFO says, look, what if we make all these investments

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Speaker 3: in our people and they walk out the door. And

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Speaker 3: I say back, like, what if you don't invest in them?

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Speaker 3: And they stay?

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Speaker 2: Yeah?

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Speaker 3: Which is which is worse?

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Speaker 4: I want to talk about what sort of happens to

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Speaker 4: this push to focus more on employees again, if we

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Speaker 4: do actually enter the recession that people have been saying

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Speaker 4: or is going to come for at least a year now,

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Speaker 4: does this sort of focus go away if companies are

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Speaker 4: worrying about, you know, their bottom line, the economic contraction,

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Speaker 4: things along those lines.

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Speaker 1: This is the risk.

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Speaker 3: You know, we did so much very quickly. As you mentioned,

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Speaker 3: when the pandemic first happened and everything shifted to online,

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Speaker 3: there was still a majority of small businesses across the

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Speaker 3: US specifically that had gotten online for the very first

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Speaker 3: time in the first six months of the pandemic. So

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Speaker 3: there is also it is not even right everything that

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Speaker 3: people are either realizing or missing out on when it

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Speaker 3: comes to technology. But I will say to you that

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Speaker 3: we can't just think about tech and investing in employees

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Speaker 3: as a way to become more productive and do more

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Speaker 3: with less. We have to make sure that the things

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Speaker 3: we learned and did for our employees during the first

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Speaker 3: sort of two years March twenty twenty to kind of

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Speaker 3: the beginning of twenty twenty three, that we don't snap

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Speaker 3: back to those old habits that got us in the

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Speaker 3: position of the great resignation in quiet quitting. And so

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Speaker 3: does it need to be everything that we might have

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Speaker 3: been doing, like allowing people to continue to work from

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Speaker 3: home versus having some kind of flexible work arrangement and

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Speaker 3: going in the office a couple of days a week

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Speaker 3: or a week a month or something like that. I

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Speaker 3: think that's where leaders, especially at the c suite, especially

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Speaker 3: in large organizations, has to ask the employees what is

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Speaker 3: the best way forward for us? Take that information and

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Speaker 3: then do something with it, versus creating that disconnect where

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Speaker 3: the employees think this is what they want and the

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Speaker 3: executives are doing something completely different.

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Speaker 2: All right, Tiffany, thanks so much for joining us. Fascinating story,

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Speaker 2: fascinating book. Tiffany Bova is the Global customer Growth and

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Speaker 2: Innovation evangelist at Salesforce.

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Speaker 1: Talking about the experience mindset