Today’s interview is with Tiffani Bova, the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Growth IQ. Tiffani joins me today to talk about her new book: The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth, what is an Experience Mindset, what’s the best way to adopt one, why it’s important to take a combined customer and employee experience approach, the research that accompanied the development of the book and what’s the payoff to adopting an Experience Mindset.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Customer experience (CX) leaders will become the engagement quarterbacks of the future – Interview with Mike Murchison of Ada – and is number 468 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month.

We are fast approaching PegaWorld iNspire which is Pega’s annual conference that will be held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, NV, from June 11th to 13th.

This year it will be an in-person event, for the first time in four years, and will bring together experts and industry leaders to demystify technologies like generative AI and intelligent automation

They will also illustrate how enterprises can practically apply these technologies to turbocharge productivity, improve low-code app development, and optimize customer engagement.

Check out PegaWorld.com to find out more and, hopefully, I’ll see you there.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with Tiffani:

• Tiffani’s new book: The Experience Mindset – Changing the way you think about growth is out today!
• Herb Kelleher said it …..happy employees, happy customers.
• While many companies are clear on the importance of a seamless customer experience’s impact on growth, the role employee experience plays is yet to be fully quantified or understood. This is often because leaders feel that they can only focus on one stakeholder at a time.
• The underlying big overarching message from the research was nobody actually owns employee experience where somebody actually owns customer experience.
• Everybody owns customer experience but also everybody owns employee experience.
• Steve Jobs: You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back towards the technology, not the other way around.
• 50% of executives felt that the technology their employees were using was effective in helping them collaborate and do their job. However, only 32% of all employees agreed all but only 23% of customer facing employees agreed.
• The concept of an experience mindset is if you’re going to change something or do something or improve something for the customer, I want you to take a beat, and say, what is the intended or unintended consequence to the employees?
• If you can just stop and ask that question, then you’ll get better and better at making sure you’re not over pivoting to customer and leaving your employees behind.
• The average enterprise has more than 900 apps and only 27% of them are integrated.
• 75% of all technological decisions are made in enterprises without any consultation with employees or people that are actually going to be using the technology.
• Tiffani tells one story of when she was running a call center and at the end of every month they were getting a huge spike in churn. They asked the customer service agents what was going on, fixed what they told them and reduced the call volume by 90% and we cut churn in half.
• Leaders fix problems if they see them.
• Data informs people, stories move people, but experiences compel people.
• Management by wandering around is going to help you see the actions of your vision, of your strategy and of your decisions come to life.
• Create an employee advisory board and run your decisions through them.
• Be much more intentional with respect to the employee, do things for them, not to them.
• Check out Chewy in the US, which is an online pet store. They are like the Zappos model, but for pets.
• Top tip: Next time you are sitting in an executive meeting, team meeting or one on one and when someone starts talking about customer, raise your hand and ask about the employee.
• Tiffani’s best advice for improving your customer and employee experience……Block out 30 mins a day to go listen to your customers and your employees.
• Be curious, disrupt yourself, get really uncomfortable because we don’t know all of the answers,
• Block off time every day to become a master asker and then listen.
• Tiffani’s Punk CX word: Rainbow colored mohawk in Piccadilly, in London, in the eighties.
• Tiffani’s Punk XL brand: Salesforce

About Tiffani

Tiffani Bova is the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Growth IQ. Over the past two decades, she has led large revenue-producing divisions at businesses ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 500. As a Research Fellow at Gartner, her cutting-edge insights helped Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, SAP, AT&T, Dell, Amazon-AWS, and other prominent companies expand their market share and grow their revenues. She has been named one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 twice. She is also the host of the podcast What’s Next! with Tiffani Bova.

Check out Salesforce, Tiffani’s new book: The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth, and her own site: tiffanibova.com.

When you are done with those links, then do say Hi to her on Twitter and Instagram @Tiffani_Bova and @tiffanibova, respectively and feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Image by Chen from Pixabay