Tiffani Bova: The Power of a Remarkable Employee Experience

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People.
Our mission is to make you remarkable. Today's guest is Tiffani Bova, Salesforce's Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist.
Tiffani is an author, speaker and podcast host. She specializes in sales transformation, business model innovation, and go-to-market strategies. She's helped tech giants such as Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, and IBM expand market share and increase revenue.
An Arizona State University graduate, she also attended Wharton School's executive program. She may be second to only Barack Obama as the most famous graduate of a school in Hawaii named Punahou.
Tiffani has been acknowledged as a top sales and marketing influencer by various publications and was named to Thinkers 50 2019 Global Ranking of Management Thinkers.
She authored The Wall Street Journal bestseller, Growth IQ, and recently published her new book, The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth.
In this interview, we will discuss the critical importance of employee experience, EX. This is a concept that is just as important as customer experience, CX. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here's the remarkable Tiffani Bova. In the history of tech, has there been a better example of shitty EX than Twitter since Elon Musk has bought it?
Tiffani Bova:
I would say probably not, for the customer and the employee, both. That was a double whammy.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can you explain what is going on there? I can't understand either aspect, but under what sort of line of reasoning do you think you can do to those employees what he's done, and expect to come out the other side successful?
Tiffani Bova:
I think with leaders that are consistently, if you will, high performing like that, so you've got two other companies he runs, SpaceX, Tesla, you've got those two, you could argue they're successful.
You could argue they're innovative, you could argue all of those things. So I'm going to take what worked at those other two companies and I'm going to apply it like a cookie cutter to this new company I've purchased. We don't need as many people. We don't need all these layers of this, that and the other thing.
Let's just get rid of people and break stuff and then figure it out like I have on these other two companies. Sometimes it is more of a bad habit of a leadership style, than it is specifically that you show up and go, "I just really want to be shitty," as you said. Just, "I woke up today and I just want to be shitty." Is it that or is it really applying what has worked in other parts of his portfolio and applying that same approach to this one? I don't know.
Guy Kawasaki:
But Tiffani, I would argue that with SpaceX and Tesla, he built those more or less from scratch. So he's not doing what he's done before because it's not like he took over Boeing or he took over Lockheed or he took over Ford and threw everybody out and started all over and was successful. He started those from scratch. It's a completely different situation.
Tiffani Bova:
Almost scratch. They were in startup mode. I don't disagree. I just think that if you apply that, that he started it from scratch, is it almost like he's starting Twitter from scratch now? I don't know. I don't know. You got to say you've peeled back everything that people thought made it work.
Blue check, no blue check, advertising, no advertising, have someone monitor, don't have someone monitor. It's broken down everything that kind of made it the place that it was, that town square feel. And I'm active on Twitter, I've definitely noticed a change.
Guy Kawasaki:
In what sense did it change?
Tiffani Bova:
The noise has gotten louder. There's a lot of things in my feed like, why is this in my feed? I've never clicked on something like this. I don't like something like this. It's not like someone else I follow, you know what I'm saying? Just random content.
A lot more advertising I've had to get rid of. I don't want to see this ad a lot more than normal. And then people that I actually enjoyed seeing in my feed, I don't see them as often as frequent as I used to see them in my feed. Those are probably the big changes that I've noticed.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. Listen, so we jumped into the deep end of the pool and with a twenty-five-pound dumbbell tied to your leg, so let's just go to the shallow end of the pool. And just explain the concept of customer experience and employee experience and how the two are linked.
Tiffani Bova:
This is not a new concept, like I am not the first person to say happy employees leads to happy customers leads to greater growth rates. You could track that to a Herb Kelleher, you could track it to a Richard Branson. There are hundreds of thousands of leaders who intuitively understand that. Putting that into action is where we've seen it be less effective, if you will.
Even if you look at earnings calls of S&P companies, the amount of mentions of customer versus employee is like 14X of like customer oh yeah, “We have employees” or where they focus the effort. “We are a customer led company. Our customers are true north, customer experience is where we spend our time.” All very good statements. I'm not saying it's not great statements.
But where I think organizations have lost their way is they forget that the people that deliver upon those promises of customer experience and customers being the true north is the employees. And so what has been delivered to those employees is not setting them up for success.
It has been more of a brute force of making sure we do everything we need to do for the customer and the employee will figure it out. And I think the pandemic shined a light on those lack of investments between the two.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you say that customer experience boils down to reducing customer's efforts, i.e. making things easier. So what does EX boil down to?
Tiffani Bova:
Making the role of an employee easier. I'll just give you an example. I'm sure you won't be surprised by it, but if a call center agent that you call and you wait twenty minutes to get on that phone, why are you waiting twenty minutes? Because the calls are taking longer.
Why are the calls taking longer? Because they have to log in to five systems to actually solve that customer problem or they have to stand up and ask for an approval or they need to call someone else or they need to transfer the person because they don't have the capability or permissions to do whatever it is the customer needs to have done.
So the employee bears the brunt of all this inefficiency in the organization and the downstream effect to that is a customer waits on hold for twenty minutes. Or doesn't get their question answered or they're forced to a chatbot on a screen instead of talking to a human.
If I were to say that it is reducing effort for the customer on experience increases it, reduce effort, we have a better experience. On the employee's side, unfortunately, the result of those efforts for the customer has been greater effort for employee and worse experience for the employee.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so what are the key elements that we need to fix here?
Tiffani Bova:
What we did was we did a global study. We went around the world and asked C-suite executives and employees a slew of questions. And we found that the employee actually said tied for number one for the reasons that they believe that the company is unable to be as successful as it could be. Number one was people leave too often.
Tied for number one was outdated tech. The executives actually said outdated tech was number six. It was the greatest gap between what the executives thought and what the employees thought was holding them back to long-term growth.
And so if you just sit on outdated tech and you go, "How's that possible?" Like Guy, you and I have been doing this for a minute, how could it possibly be that it's outdated tech? A lot of it is because those executives don't use the technology their employees use every day. So they're not actually aware of what is happening in the organization as it relates to what technology is being used when, where, and why.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, back up for a second. You said outdated tech was tied for employee's leave. You mean turnover?
Tiffani Bova:
No, no, no. So tied for number one by employees was employees leave too often, and the second tide for number one was outdated tech.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, but when you say leave too often, you mean go out to lunch or quit then go to another company?
Tiffani Bova:
Quit and go to another company. So it's super disruptive to the employee base if a high performer from your team leaves or your manager leaves or the person running a project leaves, it's really disruptive to those "left behind".
Those that are left holding the bag of all the work that now needs to be done because somebody has left. And so that momentum, that team, that collaboration, all the things that happen when you get that kind of history walks out the door. And we've seen over the last two-and-a-half years, lots of people have walked out the door. So that is highly impactful on the employee's side.
Guy Kawasaki:
And to your point, maybe a lot of those people are walking out of the door because of the shitty EX.
Tiffani Bova:
Yes. And so when we looked at the reasons, it was not only outdated tech, it was lack of integration of technology, silos between groups, lack of collaboration. The one that I find the most humor out of is the vision and leadership of the executive team was like number five for employees and it was last for the C-suite.
So they don't think that their leadership and vision is the reason that employees are not happy, which that's a whole another conversation. But ultimately it was a handful of things that were not aligned between the C-suite and the employee that we felt had the greatest impact on those attributes that the customer would appreciate. This is not all things HR. This is just at that intersection where the moment that matters when an employee touches a customer in some way.
Guy Kawasaki:
And where was money in this ranking?
Tiffani Bova:
You mean like salary?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Tiffani Bova:
So we didn't ask that question on purpose. We didn't get into sort of DE&I compensation all extremely important to the human side of business. But we wanted to focus on that intersection of what do employees need to increase their satisfaction, commitment, willingness to do the job that has the greatest impact on that customer experience.
Guy Kawasaki:
You often read these one of cases where a company requires every new executive or every periodically to go serve in customer service or man the phone lines. And is that useful or is that PR bullshit?
Tiffani Bova:
I think it's highly useful and I'll give you a couple of examples. Guy, have you ever watched Undercover Boss?
Guy Kawasaki:
Sometimes yes.
Tiffani Bova:
If you think about the TV show Undercover Boss in the first five or seven minutes they spend putting makeup and hair to disguise the executive. And I'm always like, what a waste of very expensive TV time. No one would recognize them anyway because they never leave their office.
Then when you watch the show, they show up and they go, "My God, I've been wondering why we have this high line item on inventory and we don't know where it is” because you open the supply closet and it looks like the Tasmanian devil has run through it.
And there's no tags on it and you have all this inventory back there." And they're surprised that the people that work for them haven't been trained to do a job or don't have the help they need or the technology doesn't work, and then they make commitments to the organization. Imagine if it didn't take Undercover Boss for a leader to go and spend time with their people. So I am a firm believer of it.
So now let's do a recent example. Howard Schultz left Starbucks. Came back, left, came back, and now just left again. The new CEO in his first sort of sixty, ninety days, spent a day at a Starbucks facility. So he worked the counter, then he was a barista, then he worked in the supply room. And lo and behold, all these amazing ideas, I'm going to do this now, an hour a day.
An hour a day, I don't know if he said a month or a quarter or something like that, but it should be a regular activity for executives to see what it's like to work at your organization. That is the best class, management by wandering around. Very Tom Peters, right, In Search of Excellence, simplicity, spend time with the people who work for you so you can understand what's happening in their day-to-day.
Guy Kawasaki:
So Tom Peters reemerges as the visionary he always was.
Tiffani Bova:
He's just retired. He's just retired, so you got to give him a little props.
Guy Kawasaki:
We actually had him on this show, so he was great. And he has a whole new thing about managing by zooming around, too.
Tiffani Bova:
Yes, he wrote the foreword to the new book, so I was honored to have him do that.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you advocating that EX and CX are equally important or are you supposed to go all in on one or what's the balance here?
Tiffani Bova:
Yeah, that's a great question because I was part of the team in my prior life. Prior to joining Salesforce, I was a research fellow at Gartner. And in about 2008 we made a prediction that the CMO would spend more than the CIO on technology, and everyone thought we were crazy. And it wasn't that we thought they were buying tech for tech's sake.
We knew they were buying tech because they were trying to dial in a better customer experience. And then we advocated for the CMO to sit at the C-suite table. And if you look across the last fifteen years, we have chief customer officers, chief experience officers, chief marketing officers. I am not in this book advocating we have a chief employee experience officer.
What I am advocating for is a mindset shift. When an organization makes a decision that has an impact on the customer, what is the implication to the employee? So if you're going to roll out new tech because the customer says, "I want video engagement with my banker. I want to have a video call with my wealth manager, that's what I want to do."
And the executives go, "That's what the customer wants. Customer gets what customer wants, boom, we're going to roll it out." And in the background, they didn't restaff. “Who's going to be manning this? How do we take the video call? Who do we transfer it to? What if that wealth manager isn't in the office?” All of those things are broken in the background.
What ends up happening? The customer has a terrible experience because that video call is really never really available, and the employee is scrambling to deliver on something and no one asks them what they might need to do that offer that they want to give to the customer.
So by flagging the sand on this is when you make a decision for the customer, when you change something, just pause for a second and ask what's the implication to the employee? Right now, nobody owns employee experience. 76 percent of executives around the globe said nobody owns EX. They also said, "We survey our employees and we don't know what to do with the data."
It just is one thing after another where it's what do you expect? You are surprised by the great resignation, you are surprised by quiet quitting, or have you just not been paying attention? If you had that kind of churn rate in a recurring revenue business as the churn you've had in employees, people would be losing their jobs.
Guy Kawasaki:
So who should theoretically own EX in a company?
Tiffani Bova:
So this was the advice, that there are attributes and aspects that are HR-oriented. So obviously chief human resource officer or HR may have learning and development, career development, onboarding, those kinds of things that make up the employer-employee relationship and career development. On one side you have the technology.
So the CIO should be as interested in the tools that are used by employees as they are for what tools are used for the customer. And more importantly, not the keep the lights on kind of technology, but literally the average enterprise has, this was 2021 number, it's 900 or so unique applications, the average enterprise 900 unique-
Guy Kawasaki:
What?
Tiffani Bova:
Yep.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really? 900?
Tiffani Bova:
And now it's 1,150. Now it's 1,150.
Guy Kawasaki:
What?
Tiffani Bova:
And the 900 number sit on the 900 number for a second. Only 24 percent of them are integrated.
Guy Kawasaki:
Ha! Better to be a barista.
Tiffani Bova:
So point being who has to navigate this lack of integration? Employees. So like the CIO or IT manager has to be involved. So we've got HF, we've got IT. And then you definitely want to have whether it's the chief customer officer or the marketing, whoever has the CX ownership need to jointly share this initiative, but it has to be a corporate mandate from the top.
If you're going to track something like net promoter score NPS, then you should track ENPS. If you're going to track a customer effort score, you should track an employee effort score. Like balance it in the management and pick three or five.
Gartner put out that there's fifty metrics that are tracked for CX somewhere in the company. That's a lot. And what's tracked for employee? It might be three, four, who's in the pipeline? What's attrition? What's the satisfaction score?
So for me, it isn't ownership as much as it is a mindset shift to make sure that we try to get more in balance. It's never going to be fifty-fifty but right now it's so off that we need to pull it back closer to the kinds of efforts we're putting in for customer.
Guy Kawasaki:
But just to be a devil's advocate here, if you're saying it's a mindset shift for everybody, the flip side of that is it's nobody's ass on the line. So how's it going to happen? Just kumbaya?
Tiffani Bova:
No. So the metrics have to change as well. So that's why I was saying, I usually, when I'm sitting with an executive, I'll ask them, "What's your top five CX metrics?" And then I'll ask, “What's your top five employee metrics?”
They can rattle off the C, they could probably even say what their NPS score is and how it's progressed because guess what? They're measured on it. Guess what? Their incentives are attached to it. They're very keenly aware of what's happening. And then when we get to employee, they might say, "Oh, our customer satisfaction score is this. Our attrition rate is that." And then I go, "Okay, but what about do you have the balance of..." So at a minimum the metrics have to align. So if you've got three or five top CX metrics, try to match it on the E side. So that's your way of saying I'm going to hold the executive team accountable on both sides equally.
Then guess what happens? They start to push it down of “This is what's important to us, this is what we have to manage against.” And for the management layer, making sure you have these kinds of metrics, but a lot of it comes from, I'm going to use ENPS as an example, so that's the employee net promoter score. It's kind of that, would you refer someone to work here?
Similar to if you were doing NPS. Instead of doing that, what if you did an instantaneous, and I know you'll appreciate this one, you just created a deck for a presentation. “How easy was it for you to do that on a scale of one to five?” “Oh, it was a two. It was awful. I couldn't find the font library, I couldn't find the image library. I didn't know what to where to get this information. Where's the corporate deck?”
Whatever it might be, but right away you're asking an employee when they've finished a job, how easy was it to do that job. Now you can start to uncover where is it, the greatest pain points for the employee. Similar to you ask a customer, how easy was it to order? How easy was it close the ticketing? Tell us how happy you were with the service call. Like we're asking customers all the time. We are not asking employees the same set of questions.
Guy Kawasaki:
Backing up a little bit, you made the statement that happy employees make happy customers. And let's just assume that's right for a second.
My question is how do you define a happy employee? Is it an employee who can play volleyball at lunch and pick from barbecue versus sushi versus vegetarian pasta, free dry cleaning, dental servers, the portable garage comes and changes his or her oil while she's at work? What is happy in this sentence?
Tiffani Bova:
The one I use is the fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job. And love is worse of a point where how do you define love or happy? That sort of understanding. And so having a baseline of where you're starting from, so how satisfied are they, how productive are they, how quickly are projects getting done?
What kind of kicked me off on this was I was standing on stage at an event in Vancouver and I said, "I didn't think it was a coincidence that Salesforce is a great place to work pretty much globally. It's one of the most innovative companies in the world. It's the fastest growing enterprise software company. So if it's a great place to work, we're more innovative. Our customers are happy and we're growing.”
So could I prove it? It's great to say, but could I prove it?
So what we did was we did a plotting of US companies and we said, "Let's look at net promoter scores and let's look at Glassdoor ratings, and let's look at all these things that were publicly available." So there was publicly available companies and we could map that those that were high on EX and high on CX had a 1.8 x faster growth rate than those that did not.
So for a billion dollar brand, it was a forty million impact, but the attributes that went into that, going back to happy and love those words showed itself in attrition, showed itself in best place to work, showed itself in satisfaction, showed itself in innovation.
It shows itself in the output of those employees and their willingness and commitment to do something. Now let me put a little asterisk here. There was a stat that came out the other day that I shared on Twitter that was the digital transformations failing and the willingness of employees. It dropped from 76 percent of willingness of employees to do these digital transformations down to 19 percent.
Guy Kawasaki:
What?
Tiffani Bova:
Yeah, from 2017 to now. So it was like the willingness of employees has plummeted.
So I posted it, I got a lot of feedback like “That doesn't make any sense. If I'm not willing to do what I need to do to do this project, it ain't going to get done very fast or I'm not willing to use the new tool.”
How many times does, let's just say, a Canva get deployed or Salesforce get deployed and then you have a utilization problem? Like no one's logging in, no one's-
Guy Kawasaki:
Never with Canva.
Tiffani Bova:
So with us, we definitely do. We have that utilization problem because sometimes it's just a bad deployment or there's no willingness from the employees. And so then you have this false negative of it's not working. Whatever it is you've deployed is not working.
Guy Kawasaki:
As an aside, Tiffani, I just want you to know that I gave Marc Benioff his first job when he was a freshman at USC. So I deserve some credit for the work environment at Salesforce.
Tiffani Bova:
I know you did, and I'm thankful for it. There's no coincidence there. You gave him his first job. He loves Hawaii. We have an Ohana culture.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's something three of us share.
Tiffani Bova:
That's right, that's right. I was going to say, and it's no coincidence I work here. It is a full circle moment.
Guy Kawasaki:
You mentioned the G word a few minutes ago as in Glassdoor. What does a Glassdoor rating and the reviews you read really mean? Is it just only the most pissed off and the most happy people fill out those things? Or is it accurate and reflective of what's going on in a company?
Tiffani Bova:
I think it's directional. I think it's directional. So to your point, it may be super happy, it may be super unhappy, but it'll have the middle of the road as well, which also is an opportunity. If they're not super happy, why not? If they're really disgruntled, why?
And if they're super happy, why? And so it gives this unfettered, it is not a survey, it is not a scale of one to five. It is “This is terrible, it sucks. Like you don't want to work here” or “This is amazing, you want to work here. It's the best place I've ever worked”, whatever it might be.
But going back to what we said a few minutes ago about Undercover Boss, it requires people to actually go and read it and listen to it and then go, “Hold on a second, I've noticed the sentiment has really dropped in the last quarter. What happened?”
“Oh, this leader left or this division was rolled into that division”, or “We made an acquisition, something changed.” And so if you are watching those signals, then that is one data point. So I think directionally it's going to give you insights into things you may have a blind spot on, especially if you're only surveying once a year.
Guy Kawasaki:
So in the real world, let's say someone is considering going to work for a place and let's say its Glassdoor rating is four or one, four, two, up there, good rating. But then you read the comments and it's absolutely bifurcated. “Worst CEO I've ever worked for.” “Greatest CEO I've ever worked for.”
What are you supposed to do with things that like so conflict each other in the comments?
Tiffani Bova:
So if I were going to be looking for work again, I would look and I would look before I interviewed. And then the things that were super polarizing, that's where I would ask questions. I see mixed reviews around the CEO, like their leadership style.
People either like it or don't like it. Why do you think that is? I'm talking about me. I'm interviewing somewhere. And so it gives me the ability to know what questions do I want to ask based on what's important to me.
And they may say, "Look, I'm in a call center. I'm going for a call center job." If the CEO is not a great leader, does that impact my day-to-day? I don't know. “I'm going to report to this leader”, that's a different story. “I'm in middle management and I aspire to grow in this company.” That's a different story. So I think once again, it's a data point by which people can inform their interview questions and where they would want to know more information.
Guy Kawasaki:
See, you always mentioned these things and then a few minutes later I got to go back because-
Tiffani Bova:
Yep, go back. That's all right.
Guy Kawasaki:
... I'm drinking out of a fire hose right now. So you mentioned Howard Schultz and Starbucks, and I would throw Amazon in the same bucket. So what should people make out of this? Stores are voting for unionization or an Amazon warehouse is voting for unionization. Does that inherently mean that the EX sucks in those companies or are there just a handful of off people who are trying to get unionized?
Tiffani Bova:
I actually did a case study in my first book Growth IQ on Starbucks, and I used it as a cautionary tale on what not to do with customer experience. And people were surprised, that's what I did because they're held up as a big standard.
But what had happened is they got a little bloated in what was going on in each of the stores, in each of the cafes, and it became very confusing. Are they doing coffee? Are they selling breakfast? Are they selling CDs and teddy bears? I don't know if you remember it got really crazy on what they were selling.
Guy Kawasaki:
And cups.
Tiffani Bova:
It was just nuts. So Howard had left, he came back and the first thing he did was he said, "We got too far away from the experience that our customers expected and what we aspire to deliver as an organization." Then he left and he came back. When what started happening, the employees started grumbling and unionization started happening.
And so the first thing he said, which is now a case study in my new book, the experience mindset is this focusing in on employee that “We just forgot about our baristas, we overwhelm them” with, as an example, it was during the pandemic, “Everything moved from in-store to online and it was really tough for the baristas, the employees of those establishments to handle the volume now that was online.”
Because it used to be like 15 percent of it and now it's 99 percent of it because there was no other way to do it. Now it is that we were customer-centric, true north organization, and the employees got a little bit left behind.
Now flip it onto Amazon. “We are the most customer obsessed company on the planet.” That's what Jeff said on his way out. And that was from kind of day one, his day one mantra. On his way out the door, the last thing he said is, "We want to be the best employer on the planet," as he was walking out the door. So customer got them where they needed to be and lots of growth, hyper growth, but there's some challenges there because a customer says, "I want it same day delivery. And I can ship it back for free if I don't like it."
So that customer first customer always right, customer obsessed. Now they have a return problem, billions of dollars being returned or they say don't send it back, keep it. So who's paying for the shipping? They are and it was free returns.
So you can't over pivot to the customer without some implications. And then to the point, according to their employees, they were not taking care of their employees. So even high performing organizations have space for improvement.
I'll just say Salesforce as an example. We only stood up an employee experience team about ten months ago. Yet we are a great place to work. We're one of the most innovative companies in the world and we're the fastest growing enterprise software company. So even those things do not guarantee that you don't have room for improvement.
Guy Kawasaki:
But wait, I didn't get the answer to my question. What does unionization signal?
Tiffani Bova:
That their employees were not happy. Specific employees, specifically for Amazon was really the warehouse employees were not happy. So what are the things that you need to do in order to make that right? And then you say, "Okay, if unionization is their last resort to make that right, then we have to shore that up."
Now, some people weren't handling it correctly because in those two examples, one or two or three locations were shut down. So was that a coincidence that it was shut down, that it was those that were loudest on unionization or was that a way to quiet it? Who knows? Maybe we could all assume from the outside.
Guy Kawasaki:
So if you're telling me that organizations or locations that vote for unionization are shut down, and the people who were the union leaders were fired, it's hard to build a case that's all coincidence.
Tiffani Bova:
Listen, I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I'm saying that ultimately you've seen... Look at what just happened two weeks ago with that woman from Miller talking about the bonus on the Zoom call.
Guy Kawasaki:
The one about get off the pity train or whatever?
Tiffani Bova:
Get off the pity train. That's a really bad show of employee experience. But it was a little false that no bonuses had actually been announced for this year. She's just like, "We need to make this better." It was just a really bad delivery. It was a bad delivery.
So you see it happening really consistently where I think executives are trying to figure out how do I show up better for the employees, because employees are taking matters into their own hands. I don't know about you, but I feel like unions weren't the thing and now all of a sudden unions are a thing again.
Guy Kawasaki:
Dipping back into the Tiffani fire holes a few minutes ago, it occurred to me that can one make the case that as a company starts it's primarily CX, but as it matures it has to pivot and become more balanced towards EX. So it's a part of a corporate life cycle that this change has to happen?
Tiffani Bova:
Okay, let's go to the Art of The Start.
Guy Kawasaki:
The book?
Tiffani Bova:
Your book.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Don't believe everything I write.
Tiffani Bova:
So let's go to the art of the start. So based on everything I just said, I'm going to toss it back to you. What would you say if you were going to have five people starting a company and they were not that happy and you were trying to innovate, move really quickly, break things have to be agile, all of that? Do you need really engaged employees or is customer experience more important?
Guy Kawasaki:
That's a complicated question. I would make the case if that I hired those five employees, and we didn't have the same passion and vision and the same obsession with making a cool computer or whatever, I hired the wrong people.
I would make the case that in a company's life cycle, you need certain kind of people at the start to create the product and wage war against an incumbent or a new market. But then as you achieve success, then you need more operational people to keep the trains running on time. So it's a different kind of person you need at a different time in a company's life.
Tiffani Bova:
So I would agree with you, I would agree with you, and I would say that this is that mindset of what I don't want to have happen is the gap between those two things get so big that when you start to go to make that change that you have a lot of ground to make up. Versus if you just asked that question, like I just said, be totally customer obsessed when you do something.
Just ask the question, “Are we giving our employees what they need to be successful? If this is what we're going to do at this pace and these are the expectations.”
If they just asked that question, they could be doing two things at the same time. It's sort of this bimodal of one's going to give, one's going to take. It'll never be even, but let's not forget one for the other. And so I would say if they're going to be completely focused on the customer and you've hired in the first round of hiring, let's just make sure you don't end up with 900 applications with only 24 percent of them integrated.
Let's not get there. Let's not get there.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, point taken. How do you think remote work figures into EX?
Tiffani Bova:
So when the pandemic first six to eight months after everybody went on lockdown, I was working from home. It was like a 3,000 percent increase in the purchase of keystroke tracking software.
Guy Kawasaki:
Not a good sign.
Tiffani Bova:
Not a good sign. “So I trusted you when you worked here. I trusted you when you were in a cubicle. I don't trust you when you work at home.” So what does that say to the people? Do you care about what's going on? By the way, some call centers actually required the camera to be on all the time. So that's not a great look.
That is a “I don't trust you, I'm hyper focused on productivity”, et cetera. Now I think the good that came out of that was more focused on mental health, more focused on what people need for a little more work-life balance. Like people were working from their kitchen counters. Not everybody had a space that they could work in that was separate from their house and kids were home and it was a lot of challenging situations.
But what I'm worried about now is you see a lot of companies snapping back to the way that it was before and letting go of some of those people investments, because either they need to get back to productivity, “Everyone has to get in the office, we need to cut costs”, whatever the reason might be, that I worry that we're going to go back to some of those old behaviors.
So now for me, I think hybrid is the answer. I don't think it's always in, I don't think it's always remote. For certain roles, it's always in. For certain roles, it may be always out. But I think a hybrid of pick two days a week or three days a week that the team all gets together in the office.
I think there's a ton of power in face-to-face collaboration that walking around and seeing people and asking quick questions, you feel like you're a part of something, I think that's very valuable. I've worked from home remote for eighteen years, but I don't just work here nine-to-five, five days a week.
I'm on the road so I get that interaction because when I was locked up and I was home five days a week all day, it was much more difficult for me. I really missed that human interaction. So I hope hybrid is where we land, where appropriate.
Guy Kawasaki:
Our discussion has been perhaps unconsciously biased towards tech, large company consumer brands, Starbucks. But what if I'm listening to this and I just own a restaurant, or a dry cleaner, or a surfboard shop or something.
And I'm thinking, “Okay, I understand, but we don't have 900 applications to integrate, Tiffani. I'm just trying to make people eat my ribs or buy my surfboard or shop in my single location store.”
So what does that person do for EX?
Tiffani Bova:
So I asked two questions. When was the last time you caught an Uber ride guy or Lyft?
Guy Kawasaki:
A seemingly simple question has a complicated answer. So when Uber went on, its whole binge where to me I perceived it as a very misogynistic company and it just trod on employees and particular women. So I boycotted Uber.
I will not catch Uber to this day. I will catch Lyft, but I haven't done either for a while, first because of the pandemic and then now because I just refused to travel. That's a long answer to a short question but...
Tiffani Bova:
So let me take you back. You are making, as a consumer, a conscious decision to not deal with a brand because of how they treat their employees.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's absolutely true, yes.
Tiffani Bova:
There you go. There you go. Proves the point. So now since you don't have that one, usually what I ask on the backside of that is let's say you said last month, let's just say. I would say, what did you pay? Most likely you're going to say, I don't remember.
Then I'll say, “Did you have a male or female driver? Were they talkative? Was the car smelly? Was the music too loud? Were they really friendly? Did they help you with your bags?” You're going to remember all that experience much longer than the price you paid.
So now I'll ask you about a restaurant. If you went to a restaurant and the food was absolutely spectacular and the service was terrible, would you go back?
Guy Kawasaki:
No.
Tiffani Bova:
So that is why experience is so important. Now, why was the service terrible? Were they understaffed? Were they trying to use a new handheld device for ordering and they weren't trained on it? Was it really dirty? Were they out of the three things you enjoy eating there?
So that experience shows itself in every employee interaction. That's why I focused in on those moments that matter. When a customer is in front of an employee in some way, the packaging they build, the instructions they write, the website they build, the food they deliver, the car they drive, the check-in at a spa, a nail salon, like whatever it might be, those employees, the collection of those employees are your company.
And so people make decisions, as you just said with Uber, that you have boycotted them because of what they do to employees. And you would not go back to a restaurant even if the food was spectacular, if the service was terrible.
Now you might give them a second try because it might have been an off night, but most definitely you wouldn't give them a third if it was bad.
So that experience is remembered and has huge impact on decisions that are made by consumers, by us every single day, whether it's a small mom and pop store, a franchise, fast signs location, a nail salon, a surfboard shop.
If you had someone working in a surfboard shop and I went in to buy and I didn't know anything about surfboards and the other person's, "I like this one because I like the design." I'm like, “Okay, but what about my height, my weight, I don't surf big waves”, and they don't know anything about the product, that's a terrible experience.
That's why it's important regardless. And we use the big examples because most people have had experiences with those big companies, employees. But to your point, you are correct. It's impactful. You need one employee, but treat yourself good if you're a solopreneur. But if you've got a handful of employees, it's equally as important, if not more so because you only have a handful.
Guy Kawasaki:
Hey Madisun, I treat you well, right, Madisun?
Tiffani Bova:
Just checking. So I give a Canva example. So I've been with them twice down at World Tour Sydney events the last two years, and their employees are really happy.
And look, they're growing like gangbusters and they love their CEOs and their founders and look at the company's growth. So there is lots to be said if you're looking to accelerate growth, don't just only exclusively think about the customer.
Guy Kawasaki:
I checked yesterday to prep for this interview and the Canva Glassdoor score is 4.7 and the Salesforce Glassdoor score is 4.2.
Tiffani Bova:
There you go. There you go. There you go. I'm not surprised. Well, we've just had two rounds of layoffs and yeah, it's a tough time.
So ultimately, but that's what I was saying. That's that “Why is it happening? What are the signals? Is it just because we had the layoffs?” I don't know. I haven't looked. But ultimately those are telling signs.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Shifting gears, how can or can ChatGPT and let's lump all AI into ChatGPT. How does Tiffani Bova think that you can use ChatGPT, if you do, to improve the employee experience?
Tiffani Bova:
So we are doing something called Einstein GPT. A lot of it is look, sales reps and customer service agents will write very similar, consistent, repetitive responses. So can we create that kind of response using AI instead of a human doing it so that we can focus the humans right on doing the more nuanced, complex kinds of responses and so I think that it has the ability to scale and augment and offload those repetitive tasks that take up time.
However, the caveat on this is I'm not yet a fan, so I'm sure you've played with it as well. I got asked a couple interview questions and so I asked ChatGPT. I'm like, let me ask and see what the answers would be. Would I say something similar? I'd say 75 percent of it was pretty good. I had to edit some of it.
Like “I wouldn't say this way” or “I don't actually agree that is before that” or whatever, small subtle stuff. But it got me started. It definitely got me started. And the smarter that it gets, the better I think it will be. But I do think it has the ability to scale misinformation and disinformation.
Part of the challenge in all of AI and automation that we've had just in sales and customer service over the years is like social selling at scale if you do it terribly, it's a really bad result. So I think that companies have to have a strategy, they have to figure out how and where to use it, and they need to put some guardrails in place as they learn through what will work and not work without degrading the level of service that is delivered.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, Tiffani, I'll tell you one author to another, I use ChatGPT every single day. I'm writing another book ... I'm not saying I copied you, but I'm naming my book The Remarkable Mindset.
Tiffani Bova:
Awesome, I'll take it.
Guy Kawasaki:
I like the mindset word. Anyway...
Tiffani Bova:
I'll take it. I'll take it.
Guy Kawasaki:
So let's say I think that in order to be remarkable, you need to really understand how to apologize.
Tiffani Bova:
Agree.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I have an expert in that. Her name is Lisa Leopold, and she gives me, these are the five things you need to do. But I will also ask ChatGPT, "How do I apologize?" And it may give me a six thing. And so I use it as a research assistant not to generate text.
So after this interview, I bet you, if you go to ChatGPT and you say, "Give me examples of companies that blew it because of poor employee experiences," it will give you a lot of examples that you can use in your book or speech.
Tiffani Bova:
Probably. And as it gets smarter to go out to the web, I could say in the last thirty days. Yeah, because in beta right now is going out to the web because that could have been like, I'm going to interview Guy Kawasaki. I want to know what three questions I should start asking him and it will go crawl. What's the last things you've been saying? We're not quite there yet but yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Funny you should mention that because I have tried to do that with ChatGPT, and the questions it comes up with are crap. Let's take an example. I interviewed Ginni Rometty who was the CEO of IBM.
Tiffani Bova:
Good call.
Guy Kawasaki:
And I said, what should I ask Ginni Rometty? And it gives me very sort of expected NPR like questions. Like “How do you see the future of technology? How do you manage a large company? What do you see as promising technology?”
It's like total bullshit questions. So I don't think it's good for that yet.
Tiffani Bova:
So there is a web version that will crawl the web that's in beta right now that will say, "Tell me what I should ask her based on her last three interviews." And then you can say “Ask her something that she hasn't been asked or asked a different way.” So you are right, it's not right yet, it's not there yet.
But these are great examples of how curious do you want to become and where and how you can use it. And I agree with you that sort of sixth thing or the fourth thing or the thing, I didn't think about it just makes you go, huh, okay, you may not agree with it, but if you agree with it, all the better. Thanks. That's the sixth one.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I could tell you right now for this book, I'm going to put in a section that is inspired by you citing you, and I'm going to ask ChatGPT, "Give me examples of companies that blew it because of poor EX." Now I know the examples you have in your book, but I'm looking for even more so I can build a table of examples and I guarantee you ChatGPT will help me. I guarantee you.
Tiffani Bova:
I'm sure. And I think that why it's important to know who's blown it's so if you are a leader of a small company and you want to grow or you're a leader of a medium or large company, what not to do? It's not about shaming people who have done something wrong. It's about what you don't want to do,
Guy Kawasaki:
But you know what not, oh God, so I'm going to Chat GPT, but right now I have Tiffani GPT. So Tiffani, give me some examples of companies that have blown it so that I can have examples for my book.
Tiffani Bova:
This is where it gets tricky, and I'm not avoiding this because I don't want to say it. It is because there are pieces and parts of companies that maybe... So we were talking about some of those brands before that it was the warehouse employees that really felt the greatest pain.
It was the baristas that really felt the greatest pain. Would you say corporate employees were feeling that unhappy or is it pieces and parts of the organization? So that's why it's hard to answer that full writ. Like “This company is terrible at it” because you could say from a customer experience standpoint, Macy's, right now, if you've gone to a Macy's store, it's so sad. You just go, wow. And the people that work there are just uninspired. And that's an existing example.
Or Bed Bath and Beyond is closing. It just filed bankruptcy. It's been in this death spiral for the last 12 months. How have those employees felt? It was a very specific situation or part of the company. So that's why I don't always like to call someone out. I like the positives.
I think Chewy does amazing work. I think Zappos does amazing work on both sides. I would argue that Southwest did an amazing job until these last two hiccups where employees have really bear the brunt of some of the infrastructure outdated technology problems.
That's why it's always tough to just blanket answer that question. I'm not avoiding, I'm not trying to be political, I'm just saying it's just not fair to call someone out when there are pieces and parts of all companies that have opportunity for improvement.
Guy Kawasaki:
Pardon my ignorance, but what is Chewy?
Tiffani Bova:
Chewy? It's like the Zappos of pet food. That's the best way to describe it. So literally they know your pet's names. And when your pets pass away and you cancel the subscription, employees will draw pictures of your pets and send it to you.
They send you condolence cards. They are hyper focused on CX with a huge angle on E. That's why I say they're very much similar to the Zappos kind of mentality or mindset. Chewy.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so you successfully avoided giving me the hall of shame.
Tiffani Bova:
Yes. Yes. I did. So now give me hall of fame, and don't use Salesforce. “Oh my God, this company just has the greatest EX.” “Or this company showed the greatest turnaround EX in the history of business.”
You could pick international. I think Zurich Insurance has done an amazing turnaround, really focused in on employee experience five or six years ago.
I'd say Chewy is a great consumer brand that has gone the extra mile and modeled what good looks like in empowering employees to do their job and also to provide this remarkable level of customer experience. Zappos is pretty consistent, you could say Nordstrom is another one, really aligned around employee and customer.
Guy Kawasaki:
Ritz Carlton.
Tiffani Bova:
Absolutely, Ritz Carlton. And they're a case study in the book. They're grounded on the golden rules that Horst put together initially when the company was really founded and it was employee first. He was dead set on that employee journey in picking the right people and training them so that they could deliver those great experiences.
Four Seasons, but now look what you see. Job to be done, stay at a hotel. Motel six on one side of the street, Ritz Carlton on the other side of the street. Both accomplished the job, correct? I need a place to sleep when I'm not at home. Why do people pick one over the other?
Guy Kawasaki:
Price might have something to do with that.
Tiffani Bova:
But you only could charge that kind of price if you got that kind of experience. You couldn't charge $425 for a Motel Six.
Guy Kawasaki:
But some of it is because Ritz Carlton has a pool and Motel Six doesn't. It's not the employee.
Tiffani Bova:
No, but it's both. It's both. It's both. It's the experience, the rooms, the bed, the sheets, the towels, the pool, the restaurants, all of those. That's all part of experience and that's why you're able to charge what you charge.
Where the other one is a good enough experience and the right price point for you. So you're always able to add a premium if you're able to deliver those better experiences.
Guy Kawasaki:
So let's say that I'm listening to this and “Oh my God, Tiffani Bova has converted me. We've been focused too much on CX and we've been not focused enough on EX.”
So what's the first few things I should do?
Tiffani Bova:
First would be do an inventory on what you're tracking today. Because what you're tracking today has an impact on the behavior of your executives. So that list of top three or five CX metrics and then top three or five employee metrics.
Next thing I'd say is understand when the last time you surveyed your employees was and understand what they said. And did anyone do anything with the top pain points? And then same thing for the customer, which that is more likely happening than employee. The next is if you have customer advisory boards, you should have employee advisory boards.
If you journey map your customer, you should journey map your employee like balance on the four or five key efforts that you do now for customer, for employee, and it starts with that inventory. Inventory what you're doing today.
And then look for areas in which you can begin to slowly shore that up by involving your employees in this effort. If they feel you are asking and listening, they're more likely to be willing to absorb the level of change they're about to face.
Guy Kawasaki:
Will you just explain how employee advisory board would work? Who's on it? What do they do? Who do they report to? Who sees it?
Tiffani Bova:
Yep. So that idea actually came from Airbnb, which was one of the case studies in the book. Mark Levy was the chief employee experience officer. He was not the CHRO, and that was a new title back in the day when he was there.
And their employee advisory board was called their control center. And it had people from all over the organization, that when they were going to change something in the environment, that employee advisory board told them what would work, what wouldn't work, how to do it, recommended best ways to do it.
And that was their sort of guiding light of making sure that employees were invested in all the things that Airbnb was going to ask them to do because they did it on the customer side as well. And the interview process was also part of that.
They would have groups of people that we interview from other parts of the organization, not necessarily the hiring manager. So they made sure that culturally and to your point, had the same kind of mindset, was willing to do the things that they needed to do in the role, and that's how they stood up that employee advisory board or an EAB.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. You got any closing remarks? Why people should buy your book?
Tiffani Bova:
First, I'd say you should buy it because Guy's going to borrow the word mindset. That in and of itself.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm borrowing it from Carol Dweck.
Tiffani Bova:
Yep. Who I borrowed it from, so it's just a downstream borrow. But I'd say you can follow me on social media, I'm pretty active. The book comes out June sixth called The Experience Mindset. My first book is called Growth IQ, and it's always a pleasure to talk to you, my friend. Thank you for having me.
Guy Kawasaki:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Remarkable People with Tiffani Bova, the Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce. If you'd like to hear more about Salesforce, we also interviewed Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce in an earlier episode.
Hopefully you've gained an insight into the importance of EX, employee experience. Remember happy employees, make happy customers, make happy you.
Read her new book, The Experience Mindset, changing the way you think about growth, to learn even more.
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. My thanks to the Remarkable People team. That would be Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff Sieh, Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magana, and the drop-in queen of all of Santa Cruz, maybe all of the Pacific Coast, Madisun Nuismer.
They are, I hope, happy with the employee experience of Remarkable People. Until next time, Mahalo and Aloha.