Tiffani Bova: The Power of a Remarkable Employee Experience

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Guy Kawasaki and this is remarkable, people. Our mission is to make you remarkable. Today's guest is Tiffany Bova, Salesforce's global customer growth and innovation evangelist. Tiffany 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 has 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. Tiffany has been acknowledged as a top sales and marketing influencer by various publications and was named to Thinkers50 2019 Global Ranking of management thinkers. She authored the Wall Street Journal bestseller Growth IQ and recently published her new book, the experience changing the way you think about growth. In this interview we will discuss the critical importance of employee experience. 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 Tiffany Bova.

In the history of tech, has there been a better example of shady ex than Twitter since Elon Musk has bought it?

Well, I would say probably not for the customer and the employee, sort of both. That was a double whammy.

Can you explain what is going on there? Like, well, actually 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?

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, 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, right? Like I'm just, I woke up today and I just want to be shitty, right? Like 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.

But Tiffany, 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 completely different situation.

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 gotta 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.

In what sense did it change?

The noise has gotten louder. There's a lot of things in my feed that I 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.

Wow. Listen, okay, so we jumped into the deep end of the pool and with a 25 pound dumbbell tied to your leg or at least go to the shallow end for the pool. Yeah. Okay. And just explain the concept of customer experience and employee experience and how the two are linked.

You know, this is not a new concept. 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 and P companies, the amount of mentions of customer versus employee is like 14x of like customer, customer, customer, 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. And the employee will figure it out. And I think the pandemic shined a light on those lack of investments between the two.

So you say that customer experience boils down to reducing customers efforts, that is making things easier. So what does ex boil down to.

Making the role of an employee easier? I'll just give you a example. I'm sure you won't be surprised by it. But if a call center agent that you call and you wait 20 minutes to get on that phone, why are you waiting 20 minutes? Because the calls are taking longer. Why are the calls taking longer? Because they have to log into 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 20 minutes or doesn't get their question answered or they're forced to a chat bot on its screen instead of talking to a human. If I were to say that it is reducing effort for the customer on experience increases it. Right? Reduce effort. We have a better experience on the employee side. Unfortunately, the result of those efforts for the customer has been greater effort for employee and worse experience for the employee.

Okay, so what are the key elements that we need to fix here?

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 a 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 sort of long term growth. And so if you just sit on outdated tech and you go well, how Is that possible? Like, Guy, you and I've 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.

Wait, back up for a second. You said outdated tech was tied for employees leave. You mean turnover.

No, no, no. So tied for number one by employees was. Tied for number one was employees leave too often, and the second tide for number one was outdated tech.

No, but when you say leave too often, you mean go out to lunch or quit and go to another company.

Quit and go to another company. So it's super disruptive to the employee base. Right. 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, quote, unquote, 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 side.

And to your point, maybe a lot of those people are walking out of the door because of the Shetty Ex, right?

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. Are not happy, which. That's a whole nother 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.

And where was money in this ranking?

You mean like salary?

Yeah.

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.

Okay.

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, right?

Yes.

And is that useful or is that PR bullshit?

I think it's highly useful. And I'll give you a couple of examples. I'm sure you've. Well, I. I don't know, Guy, have you ever watched Undercover Boss?

Sometimes, yes.

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. Okay, okay, okay. Then when you watch the show, right. 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 60, 90 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.

So Tom Peters reemerges as the visionary he always was.

He's just retired. He's just retired, so you got to give him a little props. Yeah.

We actually had him on this show, so he was great. And he has a whole new thing about managing by zooming around too.

Yes. He wrote the forward to the new book. So I was honored to have him do that.

So you advocating that ex and CX are equally important, or are you supposed to go all in on one? Or, like, what's the balance here?

Yeah, that's a great question because, look, 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 15 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. They didn't. You know who's going to be manning this? How do we take the video call? Who do we transfer to?

Who?

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 my flag in 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% 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 like, well, 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.

Okay, so who should theoretically own ex in a company?

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 I mean literally, like the average enterprise has. This was 2021 number. It's 900 or so unique applications. The average enterprise, 900 unique applications. Yep.

Really? And hundred.

And now it's 1150. Now it's 1150.

What?

And the 900 number? Sit on the 900 number for a second. Only 20, 24% of them are integrated.

Better to be a barista.

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 hr, we've got it. And then you definitely want to have, whether it's the chief Customer officer or the marketing or 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 50 metrics that are tracked for somewhere in the company. That's a lot. And what's tracked for employee? It might be 3, 4. 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 50 50, 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.

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.

No, 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 him, what's your top five CX metrics? And then I'll ask, what's your top five employee metrics? They can rattle off the sea, right? 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, you know, 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. Like, I couldn't find the font library, I couldn't find the image library. I couldn't. I didn't know what to. You know 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 ticket, 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.

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, you know, vegetarian pasta, free dry cleaning, dental service, the portable garage comes and changes his or her oil while she's at work? What is happy in this sentence?

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, right? We're like, 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? Like, it's great to say, but could I prove it? So what we did was we did 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 1.8x faster growth rate than those that did not. So for a billion dollar brand, it was a $40 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 went dropped from 76% of willingness of employees to do these digital transformations down to 19%.

What?

Yeah, from 2017 to now. So it was like the willingness of employees has plummeted. So I posted it, right? I got a lot of feedback like, well, that doesn't make any sense. I'm like, well, 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. No one's logging in. No one's using.

Never. Never with Canva.

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.

As an aside, Tiffany, I just want you to know that I gave Mark Benny off his first job when he was a freshman at usc. So I deserve some credit for the work environment at Salesforce.

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.

That's something three of us share.

That's right. That's right. So I was going to say, and it's no coincidence I work here. It is a full circle moment.

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, you know, 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?

I think it's directional. I think it's directional. Right. 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 1 to 5. 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.

So in the real world, let's say someone is considering going to work for a place and let's say It's Glassdoor. Rating is 4142 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 ever worked for. What are you supposed to do with things that like so conflict each other in the comments?

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 like that, 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, right? And so it gives me the ability to know what quality 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.

See, you always mention these things and then a few minutes later I gotta go back because.

Go back, you know, that's all right.

Drinking out of a fire hose right now. So you mentioned Howard Schultz and Starbucks and I would throw Amazon in this same bucket. So what should people make out of this? Stores are voiding for unionization or an Amazon warehouse is voting for for unionization. Does that inherently mean that the ex sucks in those companies or there's just a handful of pissed off people who are trying to get unionized?

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 sort of 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 it. Got really crazy on what they were selling, right?

Stanley cups.

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 overwhelmed 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, right, the employees of those establishments to handle the volume. Now that was online because it used to be like 15% of it and now it's 99% of it because there was no other way to do it. Now it is that we were customer centric, you know, 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. Oh 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 10 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.

But wait, I didn't get the answer to my question. What does unionization signal 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 is that a way to quiet it? Who knows? Maybe we could all assume from the outside, but go ahead.

No, I was gonna say. So if you're telling me that organizations or locations that vote for unionizations are shut down and the people who are the union leaders were fired, I mean, it's hard to build the case. That's all coincidence.

Listen, I don't. I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I'm saying that ultimately you've seen, going, look at what just happened two weeks ago with that woman from Miller talking about the bonus on the Zoom call.

The one about get off the pity.

Train or get off the pity train. That's a really bad show of employee experience. But it was a little false she 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 mean, 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.

Dipping back into the Tiffany firehose a few minutes ago.

Yes.

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 X. So it's a part of a corporate life cycle that this change has to happen.

Okay, let's go to the Art of the Start.

The book.

Your book?

Yeah. Don't believe everything I write.

Okay, 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?

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.

You know, the trains running on time. So it's a different kind of person you need at a different time in a company's life.

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 gets 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 ask 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 ask 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, well in the first round of hiring, let's just make sure you don't end up with 900 applications with only 24% of them integrated. Let's not get there. Let's not get there.

Okay, point taken. How do you think remote work figures into ex.

Yeah, so when the pandemic first six to eight months after everybody went on lockdown and was working from home, it was like a 3,000% increase in the purchase of keystroke tracking software.

Not a good sign.

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, right? That is a I don't trust you. I'm hyper focused on productivity, etc. Now, I think the good that came out of that was more focus 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 18 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 miss that human interaction. So I hope hybrid is where we land where appropriate.

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 Tiffany. I'm just try 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.

So I, I asked two questions. When was the last time you caught an Uber ride guy or Lyft?

A seemingly simple question has a complicated answer. So when Uber went on its whole binge, where to me it was, 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 refuse to travel. So I know that's a long answer to a short question, but so.

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.

That's absolutely true.

Yes.

There you go. There you go. Proves the point. So now, since you don't have that one, usually what I ask on the back side 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?

No.

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 in a, when a customer is in focus, 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 and a nail salon, a surfboard shop. If you had someone working in a surfboard shop, and I went in Dubai and I didn't know anything about surfboards, and the other person's like, well, I like this one because I like the design. I'm like, well, okay, but what about my height, my weight I'm a long, you know, I don't surf big waves and they don't know anything about the product. That's a terrible experience.

Yep.

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, you know, a handful of employees, it's equally as important, if not more so because you only have a handful. 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 for if you're looking to accelerate growth, don't just only exclusively think about the customer.

Up next on Remarkable People.

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 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?

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A big mahalo to you for doing this. You're listening to Remarkable People with 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.

There you go. There you go. There you go. Honestly, I'm not surprised. You know, we've just had two rounds of layoffs and it's a tough time and 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.

Okay, shifting gears. How can or can chat GPT and let's lump all AI into chat GPT. How does Tiffany Bova think that you can use chat GPT if you do to improve the employee experience?

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 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, you know, I'm sure you've played with it as well. I got asked a couple interview questions, and so I asked Chat GPT. I'm like, let me ask and see what the answers would be. Would I say something similar? I'd say 75% of it was pretty good. I had to edit some of it. Like, I wouldn't say this this way, or I don't actually agree that 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. So 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.

Well, Tiffany, I'll tell you, one author to another, I use ChatGPT every single day. I'm writing another book. Not saying I copied you, but I'm naming my book the Remarkable Mindset.

Awesome. I'll take it.

The mindset word. Anyway, I'll take it.

I'll take it.

Let's say, I think that in order to be remarkable, you need to really understand how to apologize. Okay, agree. 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? Well, and it may give me a sixth thing. And so I use it as a research assistant, not to generate text. 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, probably.

And as it gets smarter, to go out to the web, I could say in the last 30 days, because in beta, right now is going out to the web because that could have been like, I'm going to interview Gaia 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 there yet.

But yeah, 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 Ginny Rometti, who was the CEO of IBM, and I said, what should I ask Ginny Rometti? And it gives me very the 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 technologies? Like total bullshit questions. So I don't think it's good for that yet.

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 ask her something that she hasn't been asked or asked a different way, or in her answer, it actually gave us something else. So you're 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.

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, right? 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, I'm sure.

And I think that why it's important to know who's blown it is. So if you're 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.

But you know what? Not like duh, guy, but. So I'm gonna tap Chat GPT, but right now I have Tiffany GPT So Tiffany, give me some examples of companies that have blown it so that I can have examples from my book.

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. Right? Because you could say from a customer experience standpoint like Macy's right now, if you've gone to a Macy's store, like it. It's so sad. Like you just kind of 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. Like 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 bared 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 the of of all companies that have opportunity for improvement.

Pardon my ignorance, but what is Chewy?

Chewy. It's like the Zappos of pet food. That's the best way to describe it. So literally they know your pets 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.

Okay, so you successfully avoided giving me the hall of shame.

Yes, okay, I did.

Now give me like hall of fame oh my God guy. And don't use Salesforce. Oh my God. This company just has the greatest ex or this company showed the greatest turnaround in ex in the history of business.

Well, 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.

Ritz Carlton.

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 6 on one side of the street. Ritz Carlton on the other side of the street. Both accomplish the job. Correct. I need a place to sleep when I'm not at home. Why do people pick one over the other?

Well, price might have something to do with that, but.

But you only could charge that kind of price if you got that kind of experience. You couldn't charge $425 for a Motel 6.

Well, but some of it is because Ritz Carlton has a pool and Motel 6 doesn't. It's not. It's not the employee.

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.

Okay, so let's say that I'm listening to this and oh my God, Tiffany 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?

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.

Will you just explain how employee advisory board would work? Who's on it? What do they do? Who do they report to? To who sees it?

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 would actually, when they were going to change something in the environment, that employee advisory board 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 would 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.

Okay, you got any closing remarks why people should buy your book?

First, I'd say you should buy it because guy is going to borrow the word mindset. That in and of itself.

I'm borrowing it from Carol Dweck.

Yeah. Yep. Who I borrowed it from. So it's just a downstream borrow. Yep. But I'd say you can follow me on social media. I'm pretty active. The book comes out June 6, 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.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Remarkable People with Tiffany 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 employee experience. Remember, happy employees make happy customers make happy. You read her new book, the Experience Changing the way you think about Growth to learn even more. Hi, I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. My thanks to the Remarkable People team. That would be Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff C, Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magana, and the drop in queen of all of Santa Cruz, maybe all of the Pacific Coast, Madison Nismer.

They are, I hope, happy with the.

Employee experience of Remarkable People. Until next time, mahalo and aloha.

This is Remarkable People.