Show Notes

• Growth at all costs is not a long-term strategy
• Origin of the 10 growth paths
• A sure-fire recipe for disaster
• Customer Experience (CX) as a growth driver
• Business growth vs. sustainable growth
• The keys to successful growth
• The 11th growth path
• Consequences of focusing on the customer solely
• Factors that contribute to job satisfaction
• Companies that are getting CX and EX right

Connect With Tiffani Bova

✩ Website – https://www.TiffaniBova.com/
✩ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/TiffaniBova
✩ Twitter/X – https://twitter.com/Tiffani_Bova
✩ LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/TiffaniBova/
✩ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/TiffaniBova/

Additional Resources
✩ Book: Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business
✩ Book: The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth

Summary

Tiffani Bova is one of the world’s leading experts on business growth and transformation. She is the author of two bestselling books, GrowthIQ and The Experience Mindset, and is a highly respected keynote speaker. Tiffani reveals how the most successful companies grow revenue by strengthening both employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) simultaneously.

Full Transcript

Brian
Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field, so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success.

Tiffani Bova is one of the world’s leading experts in business growth and transformation. Over the last 30 years, Tiffani has been a trailblazer across multiple industries, specializing in driving top line growth, sales transformation and enhancing customer and employee experience. Tiffany’s distinguished career includes executive roles in sales, marketing and customer service for both startups and Fortune 500 companies, as a pioneer in developing Cloud-based solutions and channel strategies. She has helped some of the world’s largest technology companies, including Microsoft, Cisco and Amazon, expand their markets and generate billions of dollars in new revenue streams. Tiffani is also the acclaimed author of two Wall Street Journal bestsellers, “Growth IQ” and “The Experience Mindset,” and she is ranked in the top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers 50. Her expertise is sought by top companies throughout the world. Tiffani is also a highly respected keynote speaker, having delivered over one thousand keynote presentations to over 550,000 people on six continents as a recognized thought leader on business growth, customer experience, digital transformation and the future of work. Tiffani has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, Bloomberg, MSNBC TV, Yahoo Finance, Inc and Forbes. Tiffani is an amazing thought leader who Forbes says reshapes our perception of growth, and I’m thrilled to have her on the show. Welcome Tiffani, and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence.

Tiffani
Well thank you so much for the very kind introduction.

Brian
Tiffani, we live in an instant gratification society, and I believe this quick fix mentality extends to business. Public companies of course, face continuous pressure to increase quarterly profits and most companies, big or small, public or private, think that bigger is better and that top line revenue growth, of course, leads to bottom line profitability. It seems like the conditions that we have today might lead to hasty decision making, chasing numbers, or executives or business owners looking for a silver bullet growth strategy. Does that approach ever work?

Tiffani
Well, it has worked. I think that the challenge is that there is definitely a fork in the road happening around the conversation of growth at all costs; it’s all about growth and then how do we grow in a more thoughtful, predictable, sustainable way, not only for the organization but for the people who work there and then the customers they serve and the communities they work in. Those are two very different things, because if you’re just like, growth at all costs, it’s like, let’s just burn out our people. Let’s churn out more products even if they’re bad, it doesn’t matter if they get returns. We’re just growing, growing, growing, like, that’s all that it’s about. We know that’s not a long-term strategy. It’s the other side of the coin of cut your costs [which] is also not a great strategy for growth. Now more and more it’s, I understand. If you’re a publicly traded company, it’s a very different approach than if you’re a privately held small business or medium business and you’re able to make decisions without the public markets judging you and having impact on your stock price. That’s also different as well. So if you’re listening to this and you’re not public, then it’s this thoughtful, methodical, let’s make sure that we have what we need in place. Now, not being slow, not being not responsive to the market, but just being more mindful of how to achieve sustainable and repeatable growth where everybody can handle it.

Brian
You’ve spent the majority of your career in this very space helping companies grow in the face of competition and ever-changing market conditions in your first book “Growth IQ,” which, by the way, I highly recommend to our listeners and viewers, and will certainly include information about both books in the show notes. You reveal what you call “ten simple but easily misunderstood paths to growth now.” Ten isn’t a big number, but how are companies supposed to decide which strategy is the right one to improve business and drive company growth?

Tiffani
It came out of a few things. One, as you mentioned my career over the 30 years in technology, I was a practitioning leader, meaning I was a sales rep who carried a bag and then kind of moved up in the ranks, and eventually took over marketing and customer service. I was early in this thing called the World Wide Web, in the Cloud, and then I spent a decade at Gartner Group as a research fellow and analyst and advisor for some small startups as well as the largest technology companies in the world. So I had this very unique lens of, I’ve actually done it. I’ve grown, I’ve not grown. I’ve had hyper growth, I’ve had growth stalls. I’ve had new products that were incredible, I’ve had new products that have flopped. I mean, I’ve sort of experienced it firsthand. Then I was advising companies and I got to see on a global basis that regardless of industry or sector or region or size, very similar things were faced. The difference was how much assets, access to capital, how large the organization was. Again, that public-private lens, but the fundamentals were the same. So I said, if I were to back up and say, of the four or five thousand conversations I’d had with clients over the decade as an advisor, was there a commonality? And sure enough there was. But what it also reminded me was, when I was early in my advising career someone would ask me a question. Brian, let’s say you came to me and you went, Oh, Tiffani, we are having a really tough quarter, what can you tell us that we can do this quarter to turn around our top line revenue? I’d be like, oh, bop, bop, bop, this is what you need to do and it was usually one of these three: hire more salespeople, spend more marketing dollars, cut costs. It’s kind of the three levers that businesses would pull. Then kind of year four of my ten year tenure, I was like, I probably was not doing anybody any good by just rattling off that I knew the answer. I backed up and I said, hold on, tell me, what are your customers now, what’s working, what’s not working, what products you have? I started to try to uncover what is their current formula and from that – I called it the context – what is your starting point? And then I said, okay, it has to be more than those three growth paths, if you will. So I said, let me look back in time, what have been the strategies? I modernized a lot of growth strategies that had been around for 50 or 60 years, and I modernized them using technology. So there were four, which was the Ansoff matrix: sell more to your existing customer, sell what you have to new customers, sell new things to existing customers, sell new things to new customers. It’s kind of the four, its a two by two. I said, let’s start with that, and then the other six kind of showed themselves based on what I’d learned in my own career and then what I was advising. It was these ten and the second part of that was how do you combine them? Then the third – and probably one that was unexpected for me – was the order in which you make those decisions and execute on those different growth paths actually has meaningful impact in your ability to be successful. I was surprised by that. It was something I had never really brought up before, until I dug into those ten growth paths. It was context, combination, and sequence, and then wrapped around those ten various ways in which your business could grow.

Brian
One of the things that I really appreciated about the book “Growth IQ” is that you, in the formatting of the book, so eloquently share the stories of 30 incredibly successful organizations, from Sephora to Red Bull to Lego and Netflix. I could probably name ten others off the top of my head, not all 30 I don’t think. I think one of the temptations for business leaders when we read those case studies is to try and sort of reverse engineer the success stories and copy strategies in an effort to duplicate success. And again, I think that’s part of our instant gratification, the world in which we live we want to go find something that works; copy, cut, and paste it someplace else into our own business in order to duplicate that success. What should we look for as we’re studying the growth strategies of these companies that can help us to steer our own companies to success, rather than just looking at something specific that one of those 30 companies is doing, and because it sounds like a good idea, try and incorporate that into our business or apply that as a growth strategy?

Tiffani
One of the things I call out very early in the book is copying another company’s growth strategy is absolutely a recipe for disaster, and the reason I say that is because the context of their business is fundamentally different than yours. It’s not possible. They don’t have your customers, your products, your culture, your tenure, your history, your partnerships, your communities, like that. You are not the same. You may say, we sell a widget, they sell a widget, so we’re the same. It’s like, okay, fundamentally, maybe in a piece of the business you’re the same, but your culture’s not the same. The way you make decisions may not be the same. That’s a very common mistake, that I’m going to reverse engineer what a Netflix did, or I’m a drink manufacturer, I want to copy what Red Bull did. Or, I want to do a streaming service so I’m going to copy exactly what Netflix did. Well, it’s impossible for you to do that because you didn’t start out with DVDs. Their growth strategy was born out of that. Amazon’s growth strategy was born out of books that then moved into other areas and other areas and other areas. So you have to be careful in just copying the growth strategy. Secondarily in what you just said, the stories that I did, the whole purpose of them, the 30 ten growth paths; two positive use cases of each growth path and then one cautionary tale of each growth path so you can actually see a company where it didn’t work. I give you an example of this is where someone did something and it worked. Here is a company where they tried to do it and it didn’t work and here’s why. I actually deconstructed in each of those growth paths: what was their context, what growth paths did they combine and in what order did they do them? Each story is a moment in time, not the entire history of Red Bull or not the entire history of Netflix, just a point in time, so that you would know, okay, well this is a point in time for me. What does my business look like right now. What could I take from that? And instead of me going on and on and on with 60,000 words and 260 pages about what I thought I felt; I’m a storyteller, so why not let the stories tell the story I wanted to tell about each of the growth paths, and then I can just add a little bit of framework around it and some color around it and direction around it. But I think to your point, Brian, it’s more so than the content of the book, people really appreciated the structure, like you could bounce from one growth path to another, and it was exactly the same structure: positive use case well setup, positive use case, positive use case, cautionary tale, here’s what to look out for, here are the combinations of the growth paths, next path. It just was very methodical.

Brian
It was methodical, and I thought it flowed very well because of the way that you structured it, I definitely appreciated that as well. I wish we had time to learn about all ten growth paths, but I’d like to unpack just one of them in this show, and that’s customer experience, which is the first path that you write about in the book. I don’t know if it’s the most important path, but I think it’s the most important path for the customer and it’s also the foundation for most, if not all, the other paths. I think it also happens to be, by the way, one of my personal favorites, and we’ve had a number of guests on the show whose businesses exemplify customer experience. Of course, Horst Schulz, co-founder of Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, and Jesse Cole, founder of the Savannah Bananas, are two guests that come to mind. Tiffani, can you share what is customer experience (CX) and what’s the correlation between CX and revenue growth?

Tiffani
This is a…might take a little bit of a story on this one. Customer experience was the first growth path on purpose. In my tenure, especially at Gartner, I always said customer experience was the next battleground, and in 2007 or 2008 I was part of the team that made the prediction that we believe the chief marketing officer was going to spend more on technology than the chief information officer. Everyone thought we were crazy at that time but what ended up happening was Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, lo and behold, all went out and bought all these technology companies to get their hands on the budget that the CMO was going to spend on, knowing that it wasn’t about search engine optimization or just the website. It was about customer experience. It was about the fact that we knew – in this digital world – how customers engaged, how easy that was or how hard that was, how they felt when they worked with a brand online was going to need to feel as good as it possibly could versus this human interaction in a sales motion or at a store or retail store, or something like that or at a hotel, like with Ritz Carlton. And so we started talking about customer experience being where everyone should start to focus. At that time, there was no chief customer officer, there was no chief marketing officer sitting at the C-suite. They tucked under the CEO or the COO but now all of a sudden, it got a seat at the table, and so we were really part of that movement of trying to get people there. I was a believer, and 80% of customers say that the customer experience is as important as the products and services that they buy. With that said, it was first because it was kind of like it has to be your true north; live and die on the hill of the customer, they’re the ones that pay the bills, all the things that are said about customer experience. Fast forward. First book comes out. In “Growth IQ” I mentioned employee maybe five times. I think in totality, let’s call it 200 words – maybe I’m giving myself some grace there. I started working at Salesforce and I saw firsthand the power of employee and culture on the ability to, number one, innovate. Which that innovation and the speed of that innovation comes from employees being willing and engaged in their experience, which then lent itself to be one of the most customer-centric organizations and the fastest growing enterprise software company. So could I prove that customer experience is not possible without a very strong employee experience? Now again, the ten growth paths, the eleventh growth path I missed was employee experience (EX), that wow, if you take the Ritz Carlton example, it’s one of the major stories in my second book, “The Experience Mindset.” He endorsed my book – and it was a story in the book – he was very early in understanding that the connection between a happy employee and a happy customer leads to greater growth rates. So we actually proved causation. We were one of the first, if not the only, to prove that causation between, it’s not possible to improve CX past a certain level unless your employee experience is also in line. Those two things had to be together. It was a complete miss in “Growth IQ.” So while I started with customer experience, and I agree it’s a very popular topic, and many people write about it and talk about it, but it’s one side of the experience coin. The other side is that we spent billions of dollars around the globe to do two things: reduce the effort for the customer in order to increase their experience. Fair, right? (Brian: Yeah.) Okay, sure, but what we did was we lifted and shifted that effort away from the customer to who? To the employee, the employee, right? Because if you reduce the effort for the customer, you’ve taken things they had to do away from them. Where does that go? It still has to get done, you could automate it or you could have people do it, and really, unfortunately, a lot of times people end up doing it. So now the effort for the employee went up. So guess what happens? Their experience drops. You get burnout. You get quitting. You get a lack of engagement, which you know, every study shows that we’ve never been able to crack 38% or higher of extreme satisfaction with work globally. So people aren’t satisfied. If they’re not satisfied working, how do you ever expect a customer to feel like that experience you put on your website? They are the ones that deliver on the brand promise every day; not the spreadsheet, not the vision and value statement, not the message, not the we are the most customer-centric company on the planet. Nope, it is the employees. So I had to go back and write a second book because it’s technically the eleventh path I missed. I know that’s a long answer to a very short question, but I no longer talk about customer experience now in isolation, because then I would do all that work that I did a disservice, and we really showed that you will start to get diminished returns if you over-pivot to customer and forget your employees along the way.

Brian
You jumped ahead a little bit because…and I want to praise you for your second book, which I actually enjoyed and appreciated more than the first book because…again, the second book is “The Experience Mindset,” highly recommended for our listeners and viewers. I recommend that you read both, but if you’re only going to read one, then I actually recommend foregoing “Growth IQ” and just read “The Experience Mindset” for just what Tiffani said. In that book you link so well the customer experience with the employee experience and show that in today’s competitive marketplace it’s not just customer experience, it’s not the other growth strategies. It’s a combination of employee experience together with customer experience that will determine which companies come out on top and which ones fall behind.

Tiffani
I think you know what I learned through that…I was just reading another book that’s coming out here in a couple weeks that’s all about employee, and one of the quotes on there of the endorsement is from someone I highly respect. It was kind of like, move over customer-centricity and I’m like, oh no, because – I’m not going to say who it is or anything – but the point behind it was that’s not the point of experience mindset. The point is it isn’t [that] one is number one and one is number two. And the reason I say that was when I was thinking through the research and thinking about what was the title of “The Experience Mindset” going to be, I was having a conversation with Liz Wiseman, who wrote “Multipliers,” and we were talking about the research and and I said, I’m really stuck on this. I just don’t know how to position this in a way…and so we were talking. She goes, look, you have to be really careful, all of the sudden you’re going to be like now you want to get people who have really leaned hard into customer-centricity – customer is first and the customer is king and customer pays the bills, and all the things that are rightfully true – and then now you’re going to create this tension that well now employee experience has to go above that. And when we went out and did the research and asked the question, who owns customer experience like we just described, a chief customer officer or the chief marketing officer…when I went and talked to 600 or so executives around the world, and I said, who owns employee experience the way I just described it – meaning the tools they use, the training they use, the systems, the surveys, the employee advisory boards, communication, promotion process, on-boarding – HR goes, I recruit, I help with paying compensation. It was like the administrative side of HR, but the way I describe it, they’re like, I don’t do that. I go, who does it? Nobody. So if employees have 20 tools to do their job and I’m a customer service agent and I’ve got to go to five places to close a ticket or find out the data or to return a product or look for the right shipping address and the data is not right in all the systems I look at – I’m looking at Slack, I’m looking at Salesforce, I’m looking at Teams, I’m looking at this, I’m looking at service now, I’m looking in Oracle, I’m looking in whatever – nobody is saying, hold on a second. Our employees are logging into eight things to do their job. HR is not looking at that for sure. The CIO is like, oh, but wait, our customer only has to click three times to buy something from us, check, check, right? That is what we just said, reduce the effort. And so we knew right away that if I was going to try to position employee experience at the same level as customer, I was going to find resistance. It would become a land grab. Who’s the executive? What’s the title? How much sphere of control and influence do I have? And so I then said to her, no, no, it’s really about, I want people to shift their mindset. It’s about an experience mindset. And I went, stop. That’s the title of the book and so it was. If you’re going to make a decision on the customer, stop for a second and ask, what’s the intended or unintended consequence for the employee? If you’re going to make a decision for the employee, what’s the unintended consequence for the customer? And I’m not saying it’s ever going to be 50-50, it’s not ever going to be even, but right now, it’s so out of line. We’ve so over- pivoted to customer that that’s why we have this employee problem. Even some of the most customer-centric brands in the world, ie an Amazon or a Starbucks has employee problems. They’re not alone. I’m just picking them because they were in the book. But ultimately we’re really happy; I can get my Amazon shipment in two hours, same day, I can pick it up from a locker, great experience, blah, blah, blah. Are their drivers happy at 105 degree temperature with no air conditioning? No! Or Starbucks, the baristas are not happy. But are we happy? The mobile app is easy, but now we’re starting to not be happy. Why? Because the baristas are not happy. Things are slowing down. Our experience is getting impacted. And they’re on their third CEO in two and a half years for that reason, by the way, that reason specifically, the collapse of the connection between CX and EX.

Brian
If EX is so important, why do so many companies, big and small, fall short? I think most executives and managers would agree that recruiting and retaining talent, which requires, obviously, keeping those employees engaged, is important. No leader or executive would say it isn’t, and yet, most employees don’t seem to be engaged today. What’s missing?

Tiffani
When we asked first, it’s no one owns it, so no one’s asking the questions like I just described, that’s kind of one. Two, I’d say – and in no particular order – two, I’d say, we survey our employees, and like 87% of companies say that while they get back that data, they do nothing with it. So why ask? If you don’t have anyone owning it, you’re doing surveys, you find out information, and then you’re not actioning it, what it’s saying to your employees is you don’t care enough to action it.

Brian
Which is actually worse, by the way, than taking the survey in the first place. If you’re not going to act on it, don’t take the survey, because if you send a survey out, then employees naturally are going to have the reasonable expectation that it’s going to be acted on and so when we don’t…

Tiffani
Right, and then if you don’t act on it, guess what? Next time you send it out, they don’t care. They won’t answer, or they’ll just answer and check whatever number they check just to get you to go away. Okay, the third thing we found was, when we say that, look, every executive I talked to said, if it’s so painfully obvious, why isn’t everyone doing it? That was the first thing they’d say. The second thing they’d say to me is, who owns it? And then that goes back to what we were just talking about. So wrong question. It’s kind of like everybody owns customer experience, that’s what everyone says. Well, everyone has to own employee experience as well. So the ownership question was the wrong question. And then three was, what’s the ROI on this? I can tell that if my NPS score goes up, I see this result in my profitability, or I see this result in my top line sales growth. If my NPS starts to dip, I see it. So what’s the correlation on the employee side? We wanted to come back with things that were very tangible. I’m just going to go back to technology because it is the place where there was the largest disconnect between what the executives thought was happening and what the employees said was happening. It was 52% of executives [who] said that the technology that they have deployed was working effectively in the organization, which means – quick math from a state school – 48% no, it’s not working effectively for another day, but okay, 52% say it’s working effectively in the general employee population. 32% of employees agreed with that statement. Already we have a 20 point delta between what the executive said and what the general employee population said. But wait for it. Only 20% of customer facing employees said the technology they’re using allows them to collaborate more effectively, be more efficient and effective in their job, and allows them to do their work – 20% – only 20% of the people who are selling, servicing and marketing your customers, only 20% think the technology that they have deployed or that they are using is working effectively. Yet having come from Gartner, people spend trillions of dollars annually globally on technology, on everything around marketing and tech and sales and service. So why is that the case? Usually, it’s because the executives don’t actually use the technology [that] the frontline employees use. They don’t use it. They don’t log into Salesforce or they don’t log into ServiceNow or they don’t log into Adobe or Microsoft or they don’t use Teams. Their assistant does it for them, and they show up, whatever it is, and so they’re not having the day to day experience. The example I used in both books is Undercover Boss, the TV show in the US, where the executive goes out in the field and puts a disguise on and goes and works in the pizza parlor, or works in the retail environment, or picks up the trash, or goes to the sign making company, or whatever it is. And at the end of the one hour they’re sitting there and they’re crying, I didn’t know, I’m here to help you. You know, it’s like, how do you not know this is what’s going on in your business? Because they manage in the four walls, they get a spreadsheet, they get a dashboard, they only talk to the top customers. They have no pulse on what’s happening and so they think, well, we did a survey, our employee satisfaction is up, whoop, let’s go! And so this concept of, you’ve got to be willing, as an executive, to ask those survey questions, listen to the answers, understand where your people really have the greatest pain. We did it across a handful of categories with very actionable advice. It’s not only technology but it’s also around career development. There are things that you can very easily look and go, and I gave you the metrics to track, I gave you ideas on how to lean into this concept so that, once again, in this formulaic way gave you a way to go, okay, we are over-pivoted on customer. We may never be equal, but by gosh, we’re going to be better than we are now.

Brian
There’s certainly no risk. As you were talking a while back, I was thinking that maybe there’s risk of the pendulum swinging too far in favor of EX, but we have so far to go before that happens that I don’t even think we should talk about that as a risk.

Tiffani
Well, some companies are like, look, we are employee, we’re all about our employees. And by the way, that’s fantastic, because the result of that is your customers will benefit. But if you overdo for your employees and be like, okay, if we’re going to do this or that and if we do this for the employee, it means we can’t do this for the customer and if it’s the number one thing your customers are asking for, you can’t just do it for the employee, you’ve got to go that’s the question. All I’m saying to you is ask the question. One example I gave in the book was a bank who said, all of our customers are asking for video calls with wealth managers, with their banking people if they had a question, but I want to do it video, I don’t want to do it over the phone. And so they were like, we’re going to launch this – it was during the pandemic – we’re going to launch it. We’re going to launch it right away, where everyone’s working from home. So they go, we’re going to launch, have to launch it in 30 days. And they launch but no one went, hold on a second, does everyone at home have a good camera? Does everyone at home have high speed internet? Does everyone at home have a place which they can actually have a video call with a client and it’s not their kids doing schoolwork on the kitchen counter right behind them and everyone’s screaming and yelling. You had to kind of step through it. So of course, ten days in, all these complaints, they shut it down, and then everyone’s like, what happened? What happened? It was the right idea for the customer; completely set the employees up for failure. If you had only done it for employees and waited all this time and been like, let’s make sure everyone has a camera and everyone has high speed internet, and everyone has all the things that you need, while I agree with that, maybe you start with just a handful of people to do it, and you learn and you expand and you expand. But it was like, nope, big bangs, flip the switch, we’re all doing it. It failed. Answering for the customer failed on the employee. If they had done it just for the employee, it might have been something the customer actually didn’t want. So you need that connection. When you decide to do something for the customer, stop and ask have we done everything we need to do to make sure the employee is set up to be successful? If we’re doing something for the employee, what is the implication of the customer? And if nothing, great, move on, keep going and same for the customer. If it has no implication for the employee, great, move on. But it’s like if you keep adding to each of them and nothing leaves the plate of the employee or the processes aren’t fixed or the tools aren’t integrated, and you just keep adding and adding and adding and adding, employee engagement drops, willingness to absorb all the change drops, their ability to be excited about doing what they do every day drops, and then what happens? You have bad service for your customers.

Brian
There’s definitely a balance between the two. In your book, Tiffani, you cited a number of statistics that make a very clear case for improving employee experience, a couple of them are 69% of employees say they’d work harder if they were better appreciated. Employees most committed to their organization put in 57% more effort on the job, and are 87% less likely to resign than employees who consider themselves disengaged. This isn’t rocket science, and I know salary and benefits are important, but what other factors are you seeing in the current environment that contribute to job satisfaction? You mentioned one of them, technology, just having technology that help us to do our jobs. That’s one. Are there other things that stand out as being especially important?

Tiffani
Yeah, and I will call out the three stats you just gave. Those are very HR oriented, and this is where we have to be careful how we thread the needle. They’re valid, obviously, they’re in the book. They are very helpful for an HR leader to be like, we have to invest in these things. But it’s sometimes hard for someone to see the thread between what you just said and how that impacts the customer. They’re just like, okay, but we’re talking about customer experience. It’s like, okay, but if they’re not, we’ll pick on one where there’s lots of change projects that are happening in organizations. Back in 2018 it was like an average of two and now we’re at ten. For a human to change behavior takes about an average of 66 days before the behavior becomes a habit. So if you’re giving me ten things to change in a year, times 66 days, that’s 660 days. Last time I checked, there’s not that many days in a year. It’s kind of like a year and a half worth of time for me to change all these behaviors. And it’s 66 days, 66 days, 66 days, you know what I mean, like, it’s just back to back to back to back. Too much. I’m just going to dig my heels in and go, okay, I’m maxed out at three, the other seven I’m not even going to touch. Even though they might have changed and improved my role and made me happier and might have reduced stress and allowed me to collaborate better, I’m not even paying attention because I am maxed out. Some of it is training, some of it is career development. Everyone’s talking about AI; I’m nervous about it replacing my role. Well, if I learned how to use it in my role, and I saw a way that it could take away some of these tactical, mundane tasks from me, and I found more joy in what I was doing, and I could focus on more creative thinking, or on more work that required me to be more engaged with customers, versus just clicking ten things, I’m all in, so career development is another one. The alignment between the C-suite and the employees, like what I was just talking about; they feel so disconnected, forget just from a pay perspective, but just from they have no idea what I do every day. I never see them. I never hear from them. They never walk the call center floor. They never walk the warehouse. They never go in a truck again. Think “Undercover Boss,” like binge, watch five or six of those as a leader and you will understand what I’m talking about. How do you do that, to know what things you should be fixing? Because in the end, you then see the benefit it has to the customer, more importantly to the employees. There are four areas: people, process, technology, (PPT) and culture. I modernized PPT, which has been around for some period of time, and I added culture and separated it from people, because people is kind of the day to day; how are you organized, what are the things you just mentioned, am I engaged, what am I doing? But the culture is more of like, that’s just not the way we do it here. Like, if we’re going to do this, that’s not aligned to our values or if we’re going to do this, let’s make sure that we are doing it in a sustainable way. That culture is sort of the amalgamation, the entire totality of the combination of all the people, where the people could be individual. I wanted to call that separately, because people get confused with culture being this big thing where it could just be, am I psychologically safe, do they survey, do I answer, do they action? Is that a people or a culture? I’d argue it’s culture; that they just don’t look at surveys. That’s not a people problem, that’s a culture problem that the executives don’t value that input. So those are really the four areas that I that I really focused in on in the book.

Brian
You provide numerous stories and case studies – and we’ve talked about some of them – of companies that are getting EX and CX right. What’s one company that we can look to as a model for a great experience mindset, a company that gets customer experience, that gets employee experience, that incorporates culture in an appropriate manner, somebody who’s doing it really well?

Tiffani
Well, this is the question I always get. Here’s why I hesitate. Of course, I will answer, but I hesitate to answer because when I wrote “Growth IQ” and I included Starbucks, EX and CX was good. By the time I got to “The Experience Mindset,” CX was starting to wane, and EX was really low. Those points in time are always hard to say that consistently Unilever does this right, or consistently Salesforce does that, or consistently Ritz Carlton does this right, or Chewy, or Bonobos, or Walmart, or Microsoft, or you could just rattle them off. Then smaller organizations as well, it’s not only large organizations. But then there might be a point in time – like Southwest was a great example – but then they had that outage and it got really tough for customers. The employees really felt the pain. Everyone went like, that’s not the Southwest of Herb Kelleher. It’s totally different than it used to be and now they’re sort of getting back to where they were. But I would have bet that that would never have happened because they were so built on this connection between the flywheel of happy employee, happy customer. Get that right, you get shareholder value, which was Herb’s statement very early on in the founding of Southwest Airlines. So it’s always a point in time, very hard to maintain consistently stellar CX and stellar EX. There are a handful; you could argue that Zappos is a great example. You could argue Chewy is a great example. You could argue Chipotle is a great example. Now the CEO of Chipotle is the CEO of Starbucks, that was probably the reason why. So you will see points in time, but I challenge each of you to think about what was the last amazing customer experience you had? Could it be your dry cleaner or a local sub shop, or an airline or a hotel, whatever it was. Then ask yourself, what company was it and then second, why was that the case? Then see if you’re able to actually separate that experience from somebody helping that experience be better. You check into a hotel, it’s that experience of checking in, the room is clean, someone cleaned it. The bathroom is cleaned, the lobby, someone cleaned it, or they made your food. It was a cook in the back, the server was great and the food was great. That wasn’t the company, lots of things had to happen. So I always ask that because then you start to see the connection between the two. It’s very rare for you to have an amazing…almost impossible to have an amazing customer experience, even if it is completely digital, where an employee touched it, because an employee designed the website, an employee designed the shopping cart, an employee designed the product you’re buying that you keep going back for more of. Employees touch it, even though you may never engage with a human during your buying. Humans did the work on the back end for all intent purposes. It’s always hard for me to answer that and so I always toss back that points of time. I could rattle off a lot. What was the last best customer experience you had, Brian?

Brian
Good question, probably.

Tiffani
So first, let me just say that Brian is struggling to come up with a name.

Brian
You’ve stumped me.

Tiffani
Brian, what does that say? It’s like you consume stuff, you do stuff all day.

Brian
Yeah, and here’s what I’ll say, which is really interesting, because it plays into your point. (Tiffani: Correct.) The couple experiences that come to mind are recent negative experiences with companies that used to provide very positive experiences. I hesitate to even call them out.

Tiffani
Don’t use the name, but what was the bad experience? What caused the bad experience?

Brian
Car experience, car dealer experience. Being used to stellar customer service, stellar CX, a phenomenal product, very high level product and stellar service, and then no longer getting that service. In this particular case, it’s change of ownership, and so you have culture change and the experience isn’t the same. Another, hotel experience, similar experience; high level, very well known hotel, traditionally, historically, very high level of service and that service diminished. A really easy one is Delta Airlines, and I shouldn’t have used their name, but they’re in the news. I love Delta, I live in Detroit, so Detroit is a Delta hub. I am a raving fan of Delta Airlines still, but there was an incident that happened in the spring that didn’t really go well for Delta and didn’t go well for Delta’s customers, of which I was one of them at the time, stranded for three days because of the CrowdStrike software update and that fiasco. So you’re right about that point in time. I want to ask you about that, because you’re right. As we look at businesses historically there was a book written years ago, I’m not sure exactly when, one called “In Search of Excellence,” Tom Peters. You know Tom and you know the book and you also know that none of those companies in the book are excellent anymore. Most of them aren’t around anymore, to your point, but I wonder…for a company, let’s say a small, family owned business or even a large company that’s been around for a long time…there are lots of very large companies that have been around, and companies that have withstood those pressures and the waves of maybe EX not going well or CX not going well, but they ride through that storm. Zappos is a good example. Zappos has been around for a long time. They’ve been exposed to lots of competitive pressure from other shoe companies, from the Amazons of the world, and and yet they still maintain a high level, at least the last time I checked. I’ve attended Zappos Culture Camp so I really had insight into both EX and CX, and they’ve gotten it right, and maybe they won’t have it right forever. I mean, Tony Hsieh isn’t around anymore and maybe that makes a difference in a lot of cases, especially a founder or a leader really driving that positive change. If that person is no longer in the picture that can be enough to disrupt something that’s going well. How do we guard against that as an executive or a business owner?

Tiffani
Well, if you use the examples you gave – let’s just pick Delta, since you used the name – if you…were you a frequent flyer of Delta?

Brian
Oh sure, I’m a Diamond Medallion.

Tiffani
Okay, so you’re a Medallion, all right, so your bucket of loyalty is full. They’ve treated you well for a really long time so when something goes wrong, you pull from that bucket. If the bucket is empty, you have nothing to pull from. But if the bucket is full, like the car dealership, maybe it’s the change of ownership, I’m going to give them a pass, I’m going to give them a second try because you’re pulling from that loyalty bucket. I’m on American, I’m a Key on American, so I’m committed. They’d have to do something really crazy to get me to go, because I’m five million miles in at this point or something. But ultimately, it’s like, oh, it was just a bad day or you just kind of have to go, well, it wasn’t really their fault, I realized. But if you have nothing to pull from, you will move on. If the food was spectacular and the service was terrible and you’ve never eaten at that restaurant before, would you go back? Absolutely not. Okay. If the food was spectacular and the service wasn’t good, and you’ve gone a hundred times and it’s always been great, would you go back?

Brian
Sure, and I have, that’s a good example, because we all eat out and have encountered that.

Tiffani
Okay, so go back to your car example. If they had sent a note and said, hey, we appreciate the fact that you’ve been a loyal customer of this dealership for 20 years and we’re new owners. We’re going to be working through some things. Please be patient with us. Here’s an email address in case you have a bad experience or please let us know if something goes wrong. Then they get with the employees that are still there and be like, look, we’re going to be working through some things so if someone comes in and their car’s supposed to be done at noon and it’s not going to be done until the next day, let’s just give them a ten percent discount, proactively call them, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, would you have had a different experience? (Brian: Of course.) Of course. So it goes back to if you know that is what is going to happen. If the executives are aware that their people are unsure, it’s a new owner, things are different, I got a new manager, I’m feeling angst, I don’t know what to do, the things that we used to do have been taken away from us, we’ve been stripped of all of our ability to do things for clients. Now it’s very corporate, it’s very bop, bop, bop. Think Ritz, if you read the book, everyone at Ritz that’s an employee is given $2,500 to give to people who stay at the hotel if something goes wrong; a $20 breakfast credit or a drink or a free night, or whatever it is, if something goes wrong. Imagine if they took that away from the employees. They’d be like, whoa, what happened? You get someone, another hotel chain, that goes in and buys it and takes away that culture from Ritz, it would be very detrimental to the brand, hence why they don’t have loyalty programs and all kinds of things for that reason. I’d say that that’s why there is a way through. But if that owner of that dealership knew that what made that business so good was the people and the way the culture was run, and then they bought it and they destroyed that, then growth goes like this and then you won’t go back, and employees will leave, and then all of a sudden, you bought this dealership that has nobody working there and no customers, because a business is nothing more than the people, so you have to get that right. Asking those questions we’re talking about could have prevented that dealership problem. Now, the Delta one, on the other hand, like where I think they missed was, what could they have done in communication? What could they have done? They couldn’t do everything. It was really one of those kind of black swan events, hard to prepare for. But after covid, hopefully a lot of that scenario planning has been put in place in major enterprises, especially ones in the supply chain, and that move people, and health care, and those kinds of things. So I think that was a miss, their communication – what I heard, because I’m not a Delta customer – was not as great as it could have been. Even if you didn’t like what they told you, they could have at least told you something.

Brian
For me, in that instance, I actually thought the communication was good under the circumstances, but also the very next thought that I had after that was it’s because of my status, and certainly not everyone was receiving that kind of treatment. The other thing is, in fairness, that was an incident, and so that’s different than a shift in business, or a shift in culture that caused a very strong company, a good company, a company strong in CX and EX, to morph away from that into less than the company that they were before. So it sounds like it really comes back to culture, ultimately, and I think the culture is about intentionality. You mentioned the communication that could have taken place from a car dealer, or communication that could take place at a restaurant if you have a bad experience and certainly there are enough books written about these topics, CX and EX either way, but customer experience, especially where we know that there are restaurants that have their antenna up, they have an awareness. When something undesirable happens with a customer, they have a way of reacting to that. Now, ultimately, the customer can either accept that resolution or not accept that resolution, but that’s far better than not even being aware of it, or maybe even worse, being aware of a negative experience and not doing anything about it, which is a recipe for that customer not returning, obviously.

Tiffani
I think within what you just said is…let’s go back to the dealership for a second. Whoever bought that dealership, did they just look at the financials? Oh, okay, service business is 80% profit, like our net promoter score is X, our revenue is Y, we’ve been growing X percent over the last five years, the kagger has been whatever it’s been, etc, etc, and they looked at it on the spreadsheet. That doesn’t give them the insight into the things we were just talking about; oh, the car is going to be late and so the service manager is able to give a discount, or do a free car wash or a free detail when that happens, so that the customer…it’s like, hey, your car is going to be late but this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to detail your car, I’m going to give you a $50 gift certificate for your next oil change or whatever it is. But they don’t. This new owner does not know the employees and how they actually operate, and how that kind of culture lends itself to all the things that they saw in the spreadsheet from a profitability and revenue standpoint that look like a good decision. I’m going to spend 50 million. It’s going to spit off five million of cash for me, whatever it is. They’re like, this is a good investment. But it’s not a good investment if you change all that, and your employees all leave and your customers don’t come back. So you have to be careful. That goes back to that bank example, you make decisions on one side. It’s strictly about growth, and growth at all costs. It’s about it’s a profitability driver. If it doesn’t fit the profitability, get rid of it, none of this stuff that’s like free, and don’t let employees make their own decisions, like we’re going to be very structured and all of a sudden the culture changes. Then when the culture changes, it just trickles downhill, and eventually it will show itself in a bad experience for the customer.

Brian
It’s not easy, is it?

Tiffani
No, and that’s why even when you ask that question of, who does it well, that’s why I called it “The Experience Mindset.” The mindset has to shift, that it has to be a balance. You have to look at it across all four: people, process, technology, and culture. If you only do two of them, it doesn’t work. If you only do three of them, it doesn’t work. If you only do one of them, it definitely doesn’t work. You have great technology, but your people are miserable, the culture’s toxic. Maybe we could…without naming brands, it could be a car company that also owns a social media company. You could do something like that, where then people make a decision; that’s okay, I want to work at a toxic environment because I’m totally into the innovation. That’s your own personal decision. But for the mean, the average employee is not going sign up for that. I think that that’s why it’s called mindset, that if I can get people – after listening to this or reading the book – to go, I never thought about it. Tom Peters in “In Search of Excellence” uses the acronym “management by wandering around” or MBWA. That is really “Undercover Boss” in its full flex. Tom wrote the forward for “The Experience Mindset.” It was the very first business book I ever read and then it was a full circle moment 40 years later; he not only endorsed my book, but wrote the forward, and it was the last forward he will ever write, he’s retired now. But what a full circle moment. I’m a huge fan of “In Search of Excellence,” if you’re looking for a book to read as well.

Brian
I’m a big fan of Tom Peters, and if you’re looking for something to read, read anything that he’s ever written. It will change your mindset, to use your word. Tiffani, as you know, our show is called LifeExcellence and I’m curious, what does excellence mean to you?

Tiffani
I try to just be a little better every day. If I’m feeling unsure or insecure or uncertain about something, it’s like I just want to be as excellent as I can at it and learn along the way. It’s not perfect, but always strive to be a little bit more excellent at whatever it is that you do, and most definitely find joy in it. I think those two things together, staying curious, find joy, and always strive to be a little more excellent than you were the day before at whatever it is that you do. I think that’s a great recipe.

Brian
I love that and I totally agree. Tiffani, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s wonderful to meet and get to know you, and I appreciate everything you’ve shared today.

Tiffani
Thank you, Brian. I appreciate it. I really had a good conversation. Thank you so much.

Brian
My pleasure. Thanks for tuning into LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting about today’s show with Tiffani Bova on social media and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at brianbartes.com. Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.