How Employee Experience Shapes Brand Perception

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1:02Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz and my guest today is Tiffany Bova. She is a global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Growth IQ. Over the past two decades, she has led large revenue producing divisions at businesses ranging from startups to Fortune 500. 100. She's also host of her own podcast called What's Next with Tiffany Bova. But today we're going to talk primarily about her latest book, The Experience Mindset, Changing the Way You Think About Growth. So welcome to the show, Tiffany.

1:41Thank you for having me, John. I'm thrilled to be here. So when people talk about experience and growth, I think today they quite naturally think about customer experience because marketers are very, very attuned to that idea. But you actually take the emphasis on customer experience to task a little bit and kind of say that focus is actually contributing to what we've talked about lately, the great resignation, quite quitting and all those other things. So tell me, let's hear your thoughts on how you feel that emphasis on customer is taking away from the employee experience. Well, let me answer that with a little bit of history, because I think, especially with an audience that are marketers, right, have been doing this for a long time, I need to set a little bit of context.

2:27So as was mentioned, John, I've been at Salesforce a little more than seven years, but prior to joining Salesforce, I was a research fellow at Gartner for a decade, covering sales transformation, the impact of digital to the way brands market and engage with customers, and really looking forward around the role of, if you will, experience in the way brands compete. So I was part of the team that made the prediction that the chief marketing officer would spend more on technology than the chief information officer. And we did that all the way back in 2008. And when we said it, everyone went, you know, absolutely no way, not going to happen.

3:02But, you know, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and Salesforce all went out and bought marketing technology companies, right? The stack to get access to that budget. But we didn't say that because of the fact we thought marketers needed to be spending money on technology. And by the way, this wasn't about like online marketing, right? Or SEO optimization. This really was buying the stack. They were having their own UI designers, developers, they were getting their own infrastructure. I mean, it was a big investment. We really believed that customer experience was going to be the next battleground. Now, Now, you know, in 2023, people are going, well, you know, that's nothing new.

3:39Like Tiffany, like we've been doing this a while, but remember this was 2008. Yep. And it was, you know, we actually then advocated for the chief marketing officer to get a seat at the executive table really around this experience. Do we create a new role? The chief customer officer, the chief customer experience officer, whatever you want to call it. We were kind of in the thick of it, trying to figure out how and where does this play? And it was kind of this, right? your customers your true north you know live and die on the hill of your customer it's we're customer centric we're the most customer obsessed company on the planet however you want to say it but along the way what we did was we spent billions of dollars reducing the effort of the customer in to do business with us in order to increase their experience they had with us right from when I first stood up my very first e-commerce site, literally was in 2001.

4:32I was Eloqua or Eloqua's beta client and Constant Contact's beta client. So I've been kind of on this journey for a minute. And I will tell you that it was 10 clicks to buy something. Now it's one click or one voice. We've made it really easy. But the intended or unintended consequence of all that investment and customer is we've left the employee behind. Yeah, you could maybe even say that making it easier for the customer came at the expense of making it harder for the employee to serve the customer in some cases. Well, yeah. So, you know, let's just take let's just take customer service as an example.

5:10Right. We've moved from trying to make call centers a cost center to make it more of a revenue generation engine. Right. So we have sales ops, we have marketing collaboration with sales, we have sales qualified leads, but does marketing enablement, sales enablement also get leveraged in the call center? Or does the marketing team really focus on the connection with the sales team and don't do the same level of enablement into the call center organization as an example, right? Right. So now a customer calls in and I have a question and the call center agent is like working through the script. They don't know about a promo that marketing has just done online.

5:53You know, they don't know which products to upsell and cross sell or what's the best for this customer. They're not able to have access into the data of what the customer actually bought from us, you know, or bought from them, like, you know, whatever the case might be. So then the call center agent is completely ill-equipped. And what's the result of that? A bad customer experience. And most marketers are responsible for net promoter score and customer satisfaction in many ways. So if your frontline team doesn't have what they need, it shows itself in those experience metrics on the customer side.

6:24So it would seem pretty logical. I mean, if you think about it, I mean, most companies, the customer interaction is with their employees, with frontline employees in many cases. So it seemed pretty logical. happy employees make happy customers, but not that many people invest in something that seems awfully logical. Although I will say there are companies that are really good at it. Yeah. And I would totally agree with you. Look, I'm not the first to come up with this concept by any stretch. Herb Kelleher did it. Richard Branson has done it. I mean, there's a lot of people that understood, but when you hold up best in class customer experience companies, isn't it interesting that it tends to be those that are also really good on an employee?

7:05that you could argue just because you're really good on customer doesn't mean you're great on employee. Who is the most customer obsessed brand according to their mission statement on the planet? John, who is that? Customer obsessed brand. I don't know. Apple. So it starts with an A. The other one starts with an A. So that was the mantra. That was sort of what Bezos said, right? He was like, we are going to be the most customer obsessed company on the planet. You could argue that are their employees as happy as us as customers? You could argue maybe that's not the case, right? Or you could say Starbucks, really happy customers, less happy customers, back to happy customers, but now not so happy employees.

7:46So just because you're hitting on one cylinder doesn't mean you're hitting on both. So I was standing on stage and I made this comment. I didn't think it was a coincidence that Salesforce was a great place to work pretty much globally. one of the most innovative companies in the world and the fastest growing enterprise software company. So I went to our CMO at the time and I said, I'd like to prove that out. So we did a study with Forbes Insight and we went to publicly traded companies in the US and we mapped it out. We looked at net promoter scores, CSAT scores, attrition rates, right? Best places to work, you know, Glassdoor ratings, great place to work ratings, like whatever it was, right?

8:20Everything we could get our hands on, growth rates, churn rates. So all publicly traded for this obvious reason because it was publicly available information. Lo and behold, what we found when we mapped it out on a two by two was those brands that were really good on both accesses, customer and employee, had a 1.8 times faster growth rate than those that did not. So for a billion dollar brand, it was a$40 million impact. If you're a$5 million brand or a$1 million brand, you could do the math. So it was interesting. But what we didn't then know was what are the attributes of the employee experience that have the greatest impact on customer?

8:57And in just full transparency, a little caveat here, a little asterisk, I am not an HR expert. I'm not a people or talent expert. This book, The Experience Mindset, is about the intersection of those moments that matter when an employee touches a customer. So that's what I'm talking about right then. What were those aspects of the employee day-to-day that had the greatest impact on improving CX. And that's what we honed in on the second study, which was a global study across almost a year's worth of time. And through that, we were able to find sort of the key areas needed for improvement. And then we did a third one in retail specifically, a brand that has a thousand outlets, retail storefronts in the US.

9:36I don't know who it is, so I couldn't tell you even if I had that information, is that those storefronts that did really well on the employee side, saw a 50, 5, 0 % increase in revenue per hour per head for store employee, 5, 0. So, you know, they used to generate$42 an hour, you know, and now they're generating 85, 86,$87 an hour. So significant. How much of that, what we're talking about today, would you say is just leadership or is maybe just culture? So I'd say this, what we did was we asked the C-suite and we asked employees, obviously a series of questions, but then we outlined sort of the top seven or eight areas that were the greatest challenges to growth.

10:32On the employee side, tied for number one was team members were leaving too often. So it's disruptive to resiliency, flow, collaboration, right? The other tied for number one was outdated technology. On the C-suite side, it was number six. So that was the largest disconnection between what the C-suite thought and what the employees thought was outdated tech. So then we said, well, hold on a second. Let's like, right, let's double click. What does that mean? So 54 % of the C-suite, once again, globally, and it varied by region, felt that the technology they were providing was effective for them to do their job.

11:09Only 32 % of employees agreed, like all up employees. Only 23 % of customer-facing employees agreed that they had the right tech to collaborate effectively, do their job efficiently, be very productive, and achieve the goals of the organization. So we are greatly failing our customer-facing employees to the tune of 77%, 78 % of them aren't happy with the technology they're using to do their jobs. I've actually seen a lot of research on employees ranking like what's the most important attributes of their job and like salary is below what you just mentioned. Do I have the tools to do my job? You know, shows up higher than like, am I well paid?

11:49Well, yeah. So let's just take it from a marketing perspective, right? A marketer sends a sales qualified lead over to the sales team. Okay. Well, first and foremost, do they even agree on what a defined qualified lead is? Right. Start there. I can say no. Yes. Pretty emphatic no. Right. Sellers are like, it's ready to close. Right. Marketers are it's warm. And I've run both sales and marketing and I've argued with myself about this. So, you know, it's the struggle is real. Next, marketing is using one technology system. Sales is using something else. So they might give it to them in something that then the salesperson has to enter that information into the CRM system.

12:26then they're working that lead right and then they need to go and now they're going to send a white paper or they're going to send a video link but they have to go to another system in order to grab that content right to draft that communication and send it out and then what tracks the click through rates and download rates is another application and then marketing goes back and has this you know feedback loop which is not automated and then it has to go ask sales and we could go on and on only 28 of a salesperson's time is spent selling and half of them will miss quota so if we're not giving them enough time to sell it's in the systems and processes not necessarily the tech i mean i'm not saying technology doesn't have room for improvement obviously i work at salesforce it's not lost on me but technologically we just don't have a problem technology can do pretty much anything we'd like it to do on the marketing and sales side it's the people in process side, going back to your comment a few minutes ago, people, culture, like, are you willing to do the work that you need to, if you've journey mapped the customer, which you would do in marketing, have you journey mapped what the employee has to do for the customer, what they want you to do, right?

13:35And these are the kinds of things that are very mindset focused, right? Where if you're going to do something for the customer, what is the intended or unintended consequence for your employees. And now let's hear a word from our sponsor, Marketing Made Simple. It's a podcast hosted by Dr. J.J. Peterson and is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work. In a recent episode, J.J. and April chat with StoryBrand certified guides and agency owners about how to use chat GPT for marketing purposes.

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14:55Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create, and you can have them today. Check it out at dtm.world slash certification. That's dtm.world slash certification. Where does employer branding fit into this equation for you? You know, as a marketer, primarily, I have seen companies that have great employee experiences. It's a great place to work. I've kind of pivoted to the fact that let's tell the market what a great place this is to work because, frankly, that's a good marketing message as well. So how does that fit into the conversation of employee experience? Yeah. On another study, not as part of this research that I did, we had one again from Salesforce called the connected customer.

15:40And it actually asked customers when deciding on a brand, what's important to the customer. And it wasn't just like, you know, was the product or service great? 88 % of them said the experience they provide is as important as the products and services they sell. So experience matters, which to anybody listening to this particular podcast, you're going to go, yeah, tell me something I don't know, right? We know that, right? But what else also it said was, how do you treat your employees? How do you treat the planet? Like, what's your stance on things? You know, it is now broader, sort of the role of brand in decision-making, especially when you're talking about a high dollar value item, not a transactional, like, you know, I'm buying toilet paper.

16:25You know, you may actually say, hold on a second like is it recyclable you know the inside right is the paper bamboo is it what are we cutting down 10 million trees to you know you may care about that and then you may choose to use a different brand so consumers are and b2b and b2c are starting to make decisions beyond the normal brand is the product and service good is the price fair right it's now these other things so i would say to you how companies treat their employees so what we saw over covid right getting fired over zoom or you know we've seen all the videos right where make big faux pas then you've got a pipeline of open roles does someone want to go work for a leader like that you've just totally hurt your ability to retain and attract talent or people going i'm going to leave like i don't want to work here right and then that gets disruptive to what we were just talking a few minutes ago so let's throw another wrench in there i mean what is all the remote work from home you know done to even, you know, this concept of employee.

17:27I mean, it's really changed what the experience the employee has dramatically in a company and certainly changed the way in which communication happens and leadership happens and the way you even interact with employees. So how has that made a greater challenge? Yeah, and it's a great question because I think what we've definitely learned over the last two and a half years is it's, oh, everything is going to go remote. everyone's going to work remote like we're never going to go back to the office and we've seen right that isn't necessarily good either right you lose the collaboration you lose teaming you lose that happenstance conversation all the things we know right and also just mental health and well-being and all those things it's a complex question i don't like the top-down time to come back to the office i don't like the top-down time to stay home i like the hold on a second like by team, by group, you may have, listen, there are lots of people in the corporate world who never worked from home during all this because they had to be in the office because it was mission critical to, you know, keeping the systems up and running or whatever it might be.

18:32So, you know, and, or you had salespeople who were always in the field and not in the office, right? So like, I haven't worked from an office in 17 years, like long before pandemic. Right. And so, but I think that there is value in saying for our particular team, you know one week a month we're all coming in that's when we're going to do our this and that and then let people go and do their work if they want to come in and schedule it but during this time we are all going to be in the office and that makes sense to someone to go okay i get it i know why it's not a blanket mandate and it keeps me connected especially for the generation that has never worked in an office never had the opportunity to create these relationships getting that face time is critical to the long-term understanding of what it means to be a leader, be part of a team, you know, launch a product and execute on that.

19:23Those things are the subtleties that we've all had at our fingertips by working in an office for so long. Yeah. The blanket bandaid, unfortunately just says, we don't trust you. Oh, well that's listening, you know, so I actually say it in the book. It's like what we were just talking about the investments we made technically in customer experience versus the investments we made in employee experience, right? Pandemic hits, people, many are forced to go and work from home. And one of the very first things many organizations did was they went out and purchased employee tracking software. It was like a 4 ,000 % increase in sales, right?

20:03And some call center agents were having to leave their cameras on all the time. And not everybody has the luxury of having a private room by which they can work from and do video from. It might be their bedroom. It might be their kitchen. It might be their kids' room. I mean, you know, we don't all have the luxury of having a, you know, carved out space where we can work. So that just said, I trusted you last week. I don't trust you anymore. Right? Yeah. All right. So if I'm listening to this and I'm a company that thinks, oh gosh, yeah, we really have gone to all any customer service. We need to turn this around like words.

20:36What's the first act? Where's the first place to look? Again, so many employee initiatives come off as like, oh, I just read this new book and here's the new way. How do you actually bring this to light in a meaningful way without it just being an overreaction? Yeah. So as I started this conversation out, giving a little context of really advocating for their becoming a role for customer and the CMO to have this conversation around experience. In this particular case, I am not advocating for a new C-suite role, chief employee experience officer. That's why I called it mindset. That's why I called it experience mindset.

21:16My ask would be the next time you do or say something on behalf of the customer, like I've got a customer advisory board. Great. Do you have an employee advisory board? And I don't mean an ERG. I mean an employee advisory board that might talk about some of the things we've talked about. What are the systems and processes and integration and collaboration tools they're using to do their job? Are they working? If you're doing NPS, are you doing ENPS? If you're doing customer sat, are you doing employee sat? If you're doing customer effort scores, are you doing employee effort scores? Have you journey mapped the customer buyer journey?

21:51Okay. Well, have you journey mapped the employee's role in making that buyer journey seamless and frictionalism, all the words we buzz around on. So I'd say to you that this is an aircraft carrier subject, but right now it's kind of a speed bone of activities, right? It is a manner by which you can say, what are the things that we are tracking in CX and do we have a correlating EX? Yeah. That actually should be easy, right? Because you've already got supposedly a roadmap. Yeah. Right. And that's where it can start with just mirroring what you have for customer for employee. That is going to tell you a whole lot of things you don't know.

22:30Yeah. Well, Tiffany, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you like to invite people to connect with you and obviously pick up a copy of the Experience Mindset? Well, you can get the Experience Mindset wherever you buy books. It's in Audible and ebook, so whichever format you would like. You can follow me on social media. I'm very active on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and less so on Facebook, but I am there. But I'm always looking for feedback. If you work for a company that's gotten this right or things you've learned along the way, those are those amazing nuggets that I love to hear.

23:04So please share them with me. But thank you, John, for having me. Awesome. Well, again, thank you for taking time out of your day and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics. Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It's called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it at marketingassessment.co, not.com,.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today.

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