Interview
The Gist
- Employee connection. Good EX and CX are linked.
- Cultural impact. Companies that balance EX and CX see substantial revenue improvement.
- Experience focus. Many companies overlook employee needs, hindering overall success.
In the modern business landscape, a balance between employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) is pivotal for success. Happy employees are found to directly enhance customer satisfaction, leading to growth. Companies that master this balance see substantial revenue improvements, while those overlooking the intricate relationship between EX and CX may find themselves hindered in achieving their overall business goals.
Emphasizing the importance of employee well-being, motivation and engagement, leading organizations are investing in personalized training, development and reward systems. By aligning the strategic focus on both EX and CX, a symbiotic relationship emerges, bridging gaps, driving innovation and creating a cohesive brand experience that not only retains loyal customers but attracts new ones. It's a philosophy that's not merely a trend but a proven pathway to sustainable growth and competitiveness in an ever-changing market.
Two experts delving into this critical junction are Myles Suer, a prominent thought leader in the field, strategic marketing director at Privacera and a CMSWire Contributor, and Tiffani Bova, a respected Salesforce strategist and author renowned for her insights into customer growth and innovation.
We caught up with them recently on the topics of EX and CX and more.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Dom Nicastro: Hey everybody, Dom Nicastro here. Managing editor of CMSWire. Usually we have the CMSWire contributor interviews with two faces, mine and the contributor, but now we get three because we have the author of a book that our columnist contributor wrote about. So Myles Suer is the columnist, the CMSWire contributor. And the author of the book is Tiffani Bova, global growth evangelist for Salesforce. And the book is called “The Experience Mindset.” Myles, how are you?
Myles Suer: I'm doing great.
Nicastro: Perfect, Tiffani?
Tiffani Bova: I'm doing fantastic. I'm talking to you two. This is great.
Bridging the Gap: EX and CX Unite
Nicastro: I love everyone's always doing great on these interviews. So that's a good foundation. Let's start with Tiffani, the author of this book, “The Experience Mindset.” And Tiffani, we talked before like at the DX Summit, our old brand for CMSWire conferences now CMSWire CONNECT, quick plug.
And you've talked about the connection between CX and EX a lot. And we've talked before about it. But now “The Experience Mindset” comes out. Why don't you tell us a little bit about you yourself, first, your role at Salesforce and stuff. And then really just how you kind of rolled into this great idea for this book?
Bova: Yeah, you know, listen, I've been fortunate I've been in and around technology now for 30 years. I was a practicing sales, marketing and customer service leader for startups all the way to running a division of a fortune 500 company. And then I made a right turn and I became an analyst. For a decade I was a research fellow at Gartner covering sales transformation going to go-to-market models, companies moving from product lead to customer lead and from on-prem to cloud-based and what that does to the selling motion. Now, I've been here at Salesforce for almost eight years as the, as you mentioned, the global growth evangelist.
And along the way, you know, I have been a practitioner of trying to understand the power of customer experience. And my first book “Growth IQ” was 10 paths to growth and in full mea culpa, I missed employee altogether. And one day, I was standing on stage in Canada, and I said, I didn't think it was a coincidence that Salesforce is a great place to work, one of the most innovative companies in the world and the fastest growing enterprise software company and they said, could I prove that right? Could I prove that the happy employees — great place to work allows us to be more innovative. And those two things allow us to become right, the result of that would be the fastest growing enterprise software company.
Look, I'm not the first to say happy employees, happy customers leads to greater growth. But we're definitely one of the first to do a two-year research study that was able to prove direct connection and correlation. And might I even say causation between happy employees and happy customers and growth?
Related Article: Customer-Centered Employee Engagement: Your CX-EX Connector
EX and CX Fusion: A New Era in Business Strategy
Nicastro: Yeah. And obviously, that led to the book and how you kind of wove those very practical ideas and how to demonstrate that actually work. So you know, what, what kind of led — what was the passion behind, you know, getting this book out the door?
Bova: Listen, we've spent decades you know, and I've been part of it, Myles has as well, like, we've all kind of been part of this, where we've really pushed the agenda of like, we believe experience is going to be the next battleground, that we can't just keep fighting on speeds and feeds and features and functionality. And most definitely, we can't race to the bottom of price. We've got to find something that differentiates us. And experience was something that companies embraced. They spent billions of dollars globally on trying to be better for the customer by doing one thing specifically, and I'm simplifying on purpose, reducing the effort of the customer to do business with you. So that means reduce friction, make it seamless, like go from 10 clicks on your website to you know, one click to buy all that was to reduce effort and improve that experience to hopefully win business.
But unfortunately, the same amount of effort was not put into the employee and a lot of the work and a lot of the effort got pushed from customer to employee and it was totally a blind spot for me. It just was not in my remit. I'm not a people or culture expert. But when I made that statement, and we did two years of research, I really realized and the research proved it out that you will get a lift in customer experience if your employees are happy, and you will get a lift in employee experience if your customers are happy. You start to get that flywheel back and forth as Herb Kelleher has said from Southwest, as Richard Branson has said, like so many executives have said that.
But we learned very quickly that it had to start with employees, it couldn't work in reverse in order to get that flywheel, and the results were for some companies one got 8x faster growth rates over a three year period. So an 8% or so North just north of 8% CAGR for those brands that got it right. And for a retail case study we did there was a 50, five-zero % improvement in revenue, per hour, per head, per store employee, when they focused in on employee experience specifically, it really showed results. And that gets the attention of executives. And that's where I think a lot of what you get out of the experience mindset is to get people to not just be focused on the effort of the customer. But to consider what the unintended or intended consequences are for employees when you make those decisions.
Related Article: Great CX + EX: The Formula for the Total Experience
EX and CX: A Cultural Shift in Great Service Delivery
Nicastro: I love seeing those tangible numbers around that thought, you know, of EX, good EX means good CX. I love that — seeing those tangible efforts. So bravo to you for doing that. And Myles, clearly, these concepts resonate for you, too, as a CMSWire contributor because it was the basis of this column that we're talking about today. So what particularly caught your attention with “The Experience Mindset” and led you down that path to write the column about it.
Suer: Well, a lot of people have talked about it for some time, I mean Zappos and others, you know, talked about it. And one of the things I really did like was the impact of culture, and talk and there was a case study in there about the the gentleman who was an airline pilot at Southwest who decided that this woman needed help on the airplane and decided to do something about it. And I just read an amazing story about the beginning of FedEx, where apparently, this person called because they needed a wedding dress, and one of the FedEx pilots got on a small plane and drove it, flew it to them.
Nicastro: Wow.
Suer: And so culture has got that reinforcing kind of thing. But, you know, nobody had done the data for I mean, the only data I had seen is I had done this thing called Healthy Ops a few years ago. And we were doing almost real-time data on nurse engagement and patient engagement. And we were seeing this amazing fact. My one funny story I'll tell you is, I noticed this one day where everybody's engagement went to pot. And so I called the nursing leader up and I said, why is that? Oh, it's the full moon. Women give more birth there. So Well, why didn't you have more nurses on because a lot of people were left in the hallway and not dealt with until the very last. So I mean, I think what we believed for a long time, and the closest we've gotten to it historically, is just say, well, this person's the use of their system to service the customer doesn't work very well. Let's go fix that. But the reality is it all boils up to, am I giving a great customer experience. The only way I'm going to do that is to give a great employee experience.
Related Article: 3 Ways to Improve EX and CX at the Same Time
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Aligning EX and CX: The Secret to Thriving in Today's Business
Nicastro: Yeah, and that example, the pilot flying the bridal gown or you know, through the sky to get it done is a great example. And that was great customer experience. And Tiffani's probably wondering, so what was the employee experience like in that? Was he able to get into the plane quick? Did he have the tools he needed? You know, stuff like that. But, Tiffani, what those numbers should clearly show in the connection between employee experience and customer experience. When you think about in practical terms, like what is what are the good — what are the brands that are doing this well, doing? You know, how are they putting it into action? Walking the walk? Is it a combination of CX leaders are meeting with EX leaders like HR and CX like talking like, how does this work?
Bova: Yeah, great question. When I first started sharing the research around the globe, even before I made a decision to write the book, really, I heard three things. One is, if it's so obvious, why isn't everyone doing it? There are hundreds and thousands of books about why focusing on customer experience is good for business. There are hundreds and thousands of books about take care of your people. Right, and they will take care of your customers.
There was very few that connected both and showed in that moment that matters when an employee touches a customer. So going back to miles as an example, it would, that's really a cultural comment, right? If that pilot was going to be late to work because he drove that dress right to the to the customer? Would he have gotten penalized for it? What if he had to scrape a shift because he was going to do that? If the culture was like, look, we went above and beyond. And it's, it's safe for you to be like, look, this is what I'm gonna do.
That's the cultural component of giving people the freedom and autonomy to not only do what's best for the customer, but do it in a way that works for them. Now, it's not a free for all. It's not the Wild, Wild West. But it has to be that it isn't so obvious, because you'll walk into a company which the second thing was that we found in and in the research, but also the question was, who owns it?
And that is to me an expert's mind question. Who owns it means well, I'm going to stand up a new division. I'm going to put a new leader — I'm going to put metrics — in place. I'm creating almost another silo. And then it makes me argue, which is first — the customer or the employee? Who's first? Who's second, you know, that argument, which is why I called it “The Experience Mindset” because that shouldn't be the question. The question should be, when we make a decision for the customer, what's the intended, unintended consequence for the, for the employee?
Right? Like, if I only asked the customer, well, let me do that. This is — Myles, I know we'll get a kick out of this, we would never in a million years ask our customers to go to five tabs to order from us to go to five different websites to order from us. One to find the product, one to order the product, one to enter credit card information, one to enter shipping information, and one to track the order, we would never do that, right?
But yet, we do it to employees every single day. So we push that effort away from the customer to the employee to have to log in to multiple systems. And look, it's not lost on me, I work at Salesforce, like we could solve that in a single minute, but it's not just about us. It's about integration, collectively breaking down silos, better collaboration, when finance needs something, but the call center and the sales rep has to do another step because they need it. Could we automate it? Do we ask them? Or do we just say we're just going to keep piling more and more things that they have to do on to their plate? And the third thing was, what's the ROI?
I clearly know if I spend this, you know, on advertising, like my CAC is, you know, X or Y. If I spend this, I see Net Promoter Score go up. When I see Net Promoter Score up, I see churn rate go down. But if I invest in employees on things like career development, and they leave, is that not a waste of money? Right? I've just educated them. And now they walked out the door, I'm like, well, what if they, you don't invest in them? And they stay? I mean, what's the ROI of that?
So those were really the three big questions pretty consistently. And so while obvious, the research showed no one owned employee experience, while obvious, they were surveying employees to ask them what they wanted, like they did for customers, but almost three quarters of companies did nothing with that data. And then from a metric perspective, they have, they clearly know what the CX metrics are. And by the way, their executive comp is tied to it. But they don't really know what the EX metrics were, and their executive comp is not tied to it.
So very clearly, you see that at the end of the day, when push came to shove, it was the customer above all else. And that's why we saw the great resignation. And we continue to see quiet quitting because employees are like we're not dealing with — and a lot of the unionization efforts, which I cover in the book, even though really strong customer-centric culture. Like if I asked if you were the most customer obsessed company on the planet, who is that?
Balancing EX and CX: The Unseen Challenge in Top Companies
Nicastro: Yeah, I think it's a great book. Yeah, right. No, I gotcha. I gotcha.
Bova: Yeah, their employees are their warehouse employees are not happy.
Nicastro: That's a great point. Such a great point. I always say that, like, you wonder, Amazon, Netflix, all these all these companies that get high ratings in the CX world? What's it like to work there? Right. There's not as much talk, and you're talk, your your point about incentives for CX related initiatives do not match the incentives for EX related initiatives because I think I'm a decent little manager, like if I got some nice incentives for like making my reporters happy. Or, you know, they had an easy day with their tools that day because of my influence. Oh, man, would that be nice to get a pat on the back for that someday, in addition to getting the pat on the backs for putting out good content on CMSWire.com, some stuff like that, you know, what a great point about the incentives. I love that.
Bova: And it isn't just money, right? Like, I want you to recognize me, reward me for my hard work, help me have a career path. Invest in the talent, you know, that I trust the fact that if something goes wrong, you'd back me up, you know, or that there's accountability between what the C-suite says they're going to do and what they actually do. You know, at the end of the day, companies have brand promises and all their advertising on you know, what CMSWire like, what did they say were the we have the best products where they were that we'll go the extra mile for you we care the most about our customers? Like that's what they say, right? They have their tagline, and that's their promise, their brand promise.
But who is the keepers? Who are the keepers of that brand promise every single day? It's not the spreadsheet. It's not the PowerPoint. It's not the board of directors, and most of the time, it's not the C-suite. It's the individual employees that deliver on those promises.
Collaboration for Organizational Success
Nicastro: Yeah. Myles, go ahead.
Suer: No, I was just gonna say that one of the things. I'm hoping that the CMOs that read this book, and maybe some CIOs as well who read the book is they need a peer now in their CHRO. They need to go bang the desk of the CEO and say, I need somebody who's a peer and I'll give you an example somebody who acted that way recently.
And I'm gonna pick Salesforce your, your people leader, went and banged on Benioff's desk and say we don't pay women, effectively this organization, they're underpaid, we aren't promoting them enough. And he completely changed everything they do, gave raises and promoted. And even if they weren't promoted, started inviting women into the executive meetings. And that's the kind of thing that really needs to happen in these organizations if they want to win.
Bova: Well, people usually ask, OK, if somebody has to own it, right, and what is, the what is, the what is the secret sauce and making the experience mindset happen, right? Unfortunately, seamless technology and technology is the greatest disconnect between the C-suite and the employees. The C-suite, 52% of the C-suite believe that the technology they provide is working effectively, 52% globally, which then means 48%, don't believe it's working effectively, which for another day, OK. But then 30, only 32% of employees believe it's working effectively. So already, we have a 20% gap between what the C-suite thinks and what the general employee base thinks, now wait for it. Only 20% of customer-facing employees agree the technology they're given allows them to be most productive and collaborate effectively within their organization. That's customer facing, like, Oh, my goodness, what the heck is going on. So this is a matter of the CIO is hyperfocused on things that are important, keeping the lights on right, keeping the business, they're rolling out new tools, they're modernizing, they're going from on prem to cloud, all the things we've been pushing for the last 15 or 20 years, check, check, check.
But how much time do they spend actually understanding that of the thousand or so average, or enterprise average number of applications they have? It's 1062. It's a MuleSoft study, the average enterprise has 1062, and applications, unique applications, and only 27% of them are integrated. So who bears the brunt of that lack of integration? Employees right, now all of a sudden, they're logging into five places. So CIOs, it's not about the HR application. It's not about like getting new hires their laptops, and their phones and their desktops and all of those things.
It's about the integration of the tools they have to use, right, the broken processes in between that. And so it really is a mindset between the CIO or IT, the CMO, or the chief customer officer, whomever that might be, you need your, you know, chief of customer success. So it may be your call center, who's running that your revenue, so heads of sales, right? Those four become like we are touching employee and customer and those two things have to work better in harmony. So this is a collective effort, not about a new role. A new role will not solve it.
Nicastro: Yes.
Integration Challenges: Fixing Some of the Messiness in Remote Work
Suer: So I was just gonna say I would agree. I mean, the integration problem’s a big one. We let things live in stovepipes. And therefore, employees really did have to migrate from — how many times you've been on a call, I need to get in to, log in to another system student answer your problem.
I think the integration is a big thing. The other thing which has been particularly bad I mean, Diane Hinchcliffe, who also works with you all, has talked about how the people applications, prior to COVID-19 wouldn't have made the top 10 list of most companies. And the reality is I interviewed HR leaders during COVID. And one of the big problems they pointed out to me is that they were all reliant on what they call human Band-Aids to keep things running. In other words, if you couldn't make something work, you'd go down the hall and ask Joe or Mary how to do it. And they said, Well, what do we do when we now are going from 8% of the workforce remote to 40% remote? How do we make those systems work? We got to fix all those things.
So the, it's on the CIO, it's on HR, it's on CMOs. We have to fix the mess.
