#50 Breaking Down The Link Between Employee Experience and Customer Experience
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69% of employees say they'd work harder if they were better appreciated. Companies that excel at customer experience have 1.5x more engaged employees than companies with a record of poor customer experience. 61% of employees agree that their primary employer needs to do a better job at listening to their feedback, which is the first step in all of this, isn't it? And

And on average, 62% of employees agree that they would work harder if their primary employer treated them better. If you continue to pivot to CX without thinking about employee, you're just going to reach your plateau of it's not going to get any better. Your NPS will not improve. You know, your churn rate will continue to not improve. Like those things will not improve if you don't get E right.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, we have a very special guest, Tiffany Bova, who is an advisor, speaker, and author of two incredible books, The Experience Mindset and Growth IQ.

Tiffany has held executive roles in sales, marketing, and customer service in startups and Fortune 500 companies, and is someone I personally deeply admire for her work in helping companies transform and grow through connecting the customer experience to the employee experience.

So Tiffany, so wonderful to have you on the show. Oh, thank you for having me, Laura. And thanks for the kind introduction. I mean, the topic of customer experience and employee experience is something that I personally nerd out on completely because having built and led customer experience teams, it's

I deeply know how we need to have our employees feeling good so that they can build trust with the customer as well as the company. And so I'd love to kick it off by talking about your latest book, The Experience Mindset, which really emphasizes the importance of balancing employee experience with customer experience. And I'm just really curious to know what inspired you to write this book? Well, I'm going to...

Spend a little bit of time on this because I think the journey is important. Look, I have talked about customer experience now really with some level of intensity, if you will, since about 2008.

At the time, I was at the Gartner Group and my area of coverage was sales transformation, the impact of digital to the way brands market and engage with customers. That led me to this, if you will, topic of customer experience.

While I had led sales marketing and customer service in the past, it wasn't like I was like, we have to journey map and we have to look at all the... I was not quite that mature of a marketer back in the early 2000s. But when I was at Gartner, I was part of this team that made the prediction that said that the chief marketing officer would spend more than the chief information officer on technology.

And we said that in like 2008 and everyone was like, absolutely not, not going to happen. Now, if I double click on that, it wasn't that we believed they were going to spend more on tech just for the sake of tech.

We had a theory, a hypothesis that experience was going to become that next battleground as technology became more embedded into the way companies, right? You have to think this is like at the beginning of lots of companies getting on e-commerce and actually having a footprint on the web. And there was not one click back then. And we did not have so much power in our pockets, in our smartphones, sort of BlackBerrys. And we're just leaning into that. So it was a different time.

But we believed that technology was going to change that experience equation, specifically digital.

And so what did that mean? So I started to pay attention, right? And every conversation is, are you thinking about the customer experience? Like, what are you doing? Design thinking was coming in and journey mapping. And, you know, what were CMOs wondering about? It wasn't just search engine optimization and it wasn't just about optimizing the website. It was really about how many clicks and what is that experience of buying online and then maybe having to do something with a human, that online and offline connection.

So it put me on sort of this 10-year journey of really digging into customer experience. And my first book, Growth IQ, was 10 Paths to Growth. And the very first path was customer experience, like live and die on the hill of the customer, right? This is why it's important. Like this is where companies are going to win or lose in the market. And I had nine other paths to growth. And in a 55,000-word book, I think I mentioned the word employee five times.

And it was in passing. And it was, you know, the Richard Branson quote or the Herb Kelleher quote, like, if you have happy employees, you have happy customers. If you get that right, you get greater growth. And I kind of just blew past it.

Because really at the end of the day, I was not an employee culture person. It was not my lane. My lane was sales marketing, customer success, and growth. Fast forward, I leave Gartner, I joined Salesforce. I got a first-hand front row view on the power of culture, on innovation. And when those two things are right...

greater growth rates happen. So I went to our CMO at the time and I said, I'd like to prove it. I've read a lot of research about what happens when you get CX right. I've read a lot of things around if you get employee experience right, retention goes up, happiness, satisfaction, engagement, all those things go up. And when that goes up, you have happier customers. But I couldn't find the connection of if you got them both right, what would growth rates achieve? So two years later,

Lots of research later, lo and behold, we actually were the first to prove this causation between what aspects of employee experience have the greatest impact at that moment that matters when an employee touches a customer on customer experience. And if you get those two things right, what happens to the growth rate? And so it was a 1.8x time faster growth rate if you got those two things connected. And that kind of kicked off

This whole new understanding of CX in isolation was not going to serve anybody, that you needed to have a mindset that you have to look at both sides of the experience coin, one employee and one customer, but it is the same coin. That was a long answer to your very short question. It's great.

But the journey is that, you know, people who are very customer experience focused may not have line of sight or an understanding of employee. And people who are taking care of employees may not have line of sight to customer. And that is what really the research found. And I'm so happy that you went all the way to research it because it's something that I know everybody,

I've intuited. I know a lot of my peers and customer experience into it. A lot of my peers on the people side of things into it. We know that happier people create happier customers. At the end of the day, we are all humans doing business, right? And if we create trust human to human, we are more likely to be able to

build loyalty, build retention and build better businesses. So I'm so happy that you went through with doing this research. And I have a couple stats that I pulled from your website around this that I just wanted to share. And maybe you have them top of mind and you want to share like what are some of the key findings that you had? I'll let you share and then I'll fill them in with others. No, no, no, please. I'd rather hear what you thought was interesting. Please go. 69% of employees say they'd work harder if they were better appreciated.

Companies that excel at customer experience have 1.5x more engaged employees than companies with a record of poor customer experience. 61% of employees agree that their primary employer needs to do a better job at listening to their feedback, which is the first step in all of this, isn't it? And on average, 62% of employees agree that they would work harder if their primary employer treated them better.

And I think that this just highlights, like I am a customer experience consultant. I work with a lot of teams on building their customer experience. And the first thing I always go to is the employee experience. And I often have this look of like, why?

that I'm faced with? And what is the connection? We're here to build the customer experience. Why are you talking about the employee's experience? But I know that if we focus on the employee's experience, the customer experience will come. And it's really a great place to start. And so I'm curious to know from your perspective, obviously, everyone should go and read the book, but what are some practical steps that organizations can take to really

create this balance of EX and CX within their orgs? Well, I think we have to start with what was the goal of the kind of CX movement in the first place. I'd say in my perspective or my kind of lens is we wanted to reduce the effort for our customers to do business with us in some way. So let's just pick online. You know, when I stood up my very first website all the way back in 2000, literally, we were arguing. It was like eight clicks to buy something back then. E-commerce was very different.

And then it became, you know, Razorfish came out and said, no, no, three clicks is the magic number. Right. And so it was three clicks to buy something. So what did we do? We spent a lot of time and energy to reduce the effort that the customer had to put forward in order to buy something from us.

And in turn, that increased the experience that they had with us, right? Like less effort, better experience, right? If I, you know, to order anything or when you walk in a store, is it easy to find something? Like it's always about make it very seamless, frictionless, right? Reduce the effort. It increases the experience. But what we found through the research, unfortunately, is that many, right?

a majority of companies just lifted that effort from the customer over to the employees. So let's take that example. It used to be 10 clicks on the website. Now it's three clicks. Maybe it's one click. But in the background, a human is running around and doing 22 processes to actually place that order. That it's not happening automatically when someone clicks it. A human has to get involved. So

The customer's effort went down and their experience went up. But what happened as a result, the effort of the employee went up, their experience went down. And so we've constantly pushed the effort over to the employee. And I always say, I was working with a client who said it took them 22 minutes to do a return in a call center, 22 minutes.

It shouldn't take 22 minutes, but what is it? Data sitting in multiple systems. It's a half manual and half automated. Information is over here or over there. If it's over a certain amount, I have to go get an approval. I have to put the client on hold or the customer on hold. I have to do all these things.

The customer is angry, right? Because it's 22 minutes. The employee is frustrated and all of that could be eliminated going back to, right? But it was, no, all the customer has to do is call and we answered in 10 seconds, right? Our SLA is to answer the call in 10 seconds, check, check.

but then it takes 22 minutes to fix the problem. So, you know, I think that just that understanding of, are we just moving tasks over to employees away from customers because our metric, our KPI is NPS score, or it's our CX score, customer SAT score. And we're ignoring the fact that

Simultaneously, we're tanking our employee satisfaction. And unless your call center agents are happy or are able to do their jobs, you're always going to be battling the fact that your customers aren't going to be happy with that engagement. And I think at the end of the day, even if we think, okay, we're removing this effort from the customer, customers still feel it. Like you said, it only took them 10 seconds to get the phone answered, but it still took 22 minutes for the return to happen.

And so even though, yes, the customer doesn't have to click through to get that done, it's still something that they are experiencing and they're speaking to an annoyed person on the phone.

Because that person now has to go through all these steps. And we have all had the experience of calling someone in a call center who does not want to answer our problem or help us on our problem. Well, I'll give you a great example that this was many years ago. I called into my telco, my wireless had gone down and it was a hard down. So I called and at

Literally 29 minutes, the tech on the other end of the phone was amazing. So let me start there. Went the extra mile, super patient. All of those things was really at 29 minutes, he goes, I'm sorry, ma'am. I have to hang up and I will call you back. And I'm like, oh my God.

Are they going to hang up and not call me back? And I'm going to have to start this process all over again with someone else. Sure enough, I hung up, called me back. It was a 90 minute call, but the second time at 29 minutes had to call, hang up and call me back. Now, why do you think that happened? Manager was asking them to do something. I don't know. Because they're not allowed to stay on the phone longer than 30 minutes. That was the process. That was the SLA. Yeah.

So, and I knew that that's what it was. Right. So I'm like, are you just not allowed to be on the phone longer than 30 minutes? So now a process got between a great experience. So, you know, and I know they record those calls that are really long. So I'm like, Hey manager, if you're going to, and this was years and years ago, I go, you know, Hey manager, if you're listening to this, like, just know that this is a stupid process that you should have just let this person go through 90 minutes. But had he giving me great service,

great support, solved my problem. Had just stayed on the phone the solid 90 minutes, he would have gotten dinged, right?

Right. So that is a process problem, right? That someone, you know, so going back to what you said in one of those stats, that if you ask your employees and they tell you, I'm having to hang up and call people back instead of just letting me like, you know, get an override. If it's really in a situation where the client needs me to stay on for 90 minutes, I don't want to get in trouble for it. Can we remove that? And then leader of call center doesn't hear it or sees it and doesn't care and doesn't fix it.

it tells the employee that they don't care enough to try to make their day-to-day lives better. But their responsibility is to make the day-to-day lives of the customers better. So what does that say? I don't care about you as much as I care about the customer. And I think that's the wrong message. And I also think that, I know I've seen stats on this and I don't have it in my pocket in this moment, but that affects the customer's opinion of the company. If a customer knows that the employee that they are interacting with is not being cared for,

the customer is less likely to trust that company because it's clear that they're not treating their people well. And so it all comes back. It all comes back to the customer experience,

The employee experience is just like the critical piece that has to be addressed. Yeah, absolutely. And then the question becomes, okay, who owns this conversation? Because the chief customer officer or the chief marketing officer, if you're in an enterprise, if you're in a mid-sized business, it might be your VP of marketing. You know, somebody owns kind of quote unquote customer experience. You know, the net promoter score or CSAT may be one of the KPIs that you're measured against. And

And then you have on the employee side, HR is like, well, I'm responsible for employees, but I'm responsible for attrition and, you know, onboarding and hiring and training. Performance reviews. But all super important. Like, don't hear that what I'm saying. But based on what we were just talking about, who owns that?

Who owns that? Who owns the process and systems and tools for the employee who actually has an impact on that NPS score or CSAT score? Because at the end of that call, what happens? You get prompted for a, give a survey, answer a survey, tell us how much you liked it, right? So now I've surveyed the customer, but do we actually survey the employee and say, how easy was it for you to close that ticket for the customer? How easy was it for you to do that return? Do we ask the employee?

I know we don't. Most of the time we don't because no one's paying attention to the ENPS or the employee satisfaction at that moment when they close that ticket or at the moment when they made the delivery. Like, you know, sure, we're hitting the SLA for our customer that we're delivering this product in two hours, but I'm driving in a truck and it's 105 degrees and there's no air conditioning. So I'm not having a good day, but I matched this SLA of two hours for the customer. So...

you know, good on us as an organization, but the employees aren't happy, right? Or I can order my coffee on an application and it's ready in five minutes or it's ready in seven minutes. But is the employee, the barista behind the counter, like, are they overwhelmed by mobile orders now? Yes. And so customer might be happy, although...

taking longer and longer to get that coffee drink. But the barista is not happy. So again, over-pivoting to one at the expense of the other is manifesting itself

across very large organizations. I just read one today that Volkswagen is thinking of closing a plant in Germany and the employees are like, you are not Volkswagen, we are Volkswagen. So you want to close the plant? The employees are the company, right? And so we have to think

where Volkswagen customers might be like, ah, the car is so great now. It's smart. We have hybrid. We have all these things. I love all the new features. Thumbs up. But are the employees happy? So we have to make sure this is not one is number one and one is number two or one is the primary. It is to give equal mind share and thought.

thoughtfulness and mindfulness around the decisions you make. If you make a decision for customer, what's the implication for employee? If you make a decision for employee, what's the implication for customer? If you're listening to this and I can get you to just pause for a moment, if you're on one or the other side of the fence to ask that question, then this has been a success. Something you're highlighting here is the silos in ownership of

employee versus customer. And when I get to speak to many incredible CX leaders on this show and something that I really see as a differentiator between a company that is really thinking about, and let's just talk about the customer experience for a moment, and then we'll get to the employee experience. But even in just the customer experience, if that is only owned by one team, it is not successful.

It needs to be something that's lived and breathed throughout the organization. And I think it's the same thing on the employee side of things that every leader has to be thinking about. How do the employee experience and customer experience play together here? How can we be improving both of them simultaneously? Because if we do it in silos, then there's just an after effect on the other side. And it's not really being thought of holistically anymore.

which I think is what the problem is here. And I'd love your thoughts on that. Well, so we asked the question, who owns employee experience the way I've just described it? And it was almost 70% said nobody. That was a global survey, enterprises of all sizes in all industries across the globe. Nobody owns it the way I just described it. HR has pieces of it. IT has pieces of it. Marketing has pieces of it. Learning and development has pieces of it, right? To your point, everybody owns the customer experience.

And you may say, well, everybody owns employee experience, but the way I just described it, right, that it's a systems problem. It's a process problem. It's a technology problem. Might be a training and learning problem, right? That touches multiple roles, right?

And the connection between those executives, like back when we made that prediction about the CMO having a greater budget, the CMO was not sitting at the executive table. We were fighting for the chief marketing officer to sit at the ELT, right? The executive leadership table. They usually reported to the COO or they reported to the CEO, but they were not sitting at the table. Then all of a sudden when customer and digital transformation became top of mind, they got a seat at the table. But is HR sitting at the table?

Or is HR tucked under the COO or the CEO? It's the same journey we did for customer, to your point, we have to do for employee. We journey map the customer. We should journey map what it's like for a call center agent to close a ticket. Removing friction. 100%.

you know, removing those silos. By the way, I'm not a fan of getting rid of silos. What I am a fan of is building bridges between them because I do believe there is value in having people very focused. But those bridges are really at that system layer, the data layer, the process layer, the skill layer, like that's where we have to have the bridges. But right now there is way too much

And by the way, it's paid dividends. But one of the things I say in the book is you're going to start to get diminished returns if you continue to pivot to CX without thinking about employee. You're just going to reach your plateau of it's not going to get any better. Your NPS will not improve. You know, your churn rate will continue to not improve. Like those things will not improve if you don't get E-right.

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I want to talk a little bit about employee effort that you brought up because I think that's something that it's...

I mean, as customer effort is difficult to track, employee effort is also difficult to track. But how can companies go about actually tracking their employee effort so that it's something that they are focused on and so that people are thinking about and kind of building those bridges across teams because they actually have a metric that they can stand on? Great question. So there's something called customer effort score that's been out for a number of years.

CEB really kind of was groundbreaking in that area and Gartner bought them. And so let's just pick customer effort score. So, you know, it's kind of like a net promoter score, but let's just use this call center example we've continued to use. The customer would get a survey, three quick questions, like how easy was it for you to get this ticket, you know, closed?

you know, how easy was it for you to make this return on a scale of one to five? You know, right. You're very specifically asking, or it could be one question where you're asking about that very specific where NPS is kind of like, how do you feel after that? And would you refer us? Like it's,

Let's get away from that because that's like asking your employees, would you refer for somebody to work here? Like that's kind of that, well, you know, our employee satisfaction is really high. Like that's not telling you about their day-to-day job. So now let's go back to that. So now I want you to, at the end of that ticket, that 22 minute call that you actually push a survey to your employee and ask them that effort score, scale of one to five, how easy or hard was it for you to close that ticket? And all of a sudden the leaders start to see it's like a one.

Like it was really hard or a five, right? It was really, really hard for me to close this ticket. And all of a sudden they're like, wait a second, what is up? And then you could correlate that to say, how happy were our customers after that call? And you can see that that pulse that you're doing on NPS, maybe that that has been declining and effort has been increasing on the employee. We go back six months,

That effort score has been going up. Guess what happens? The customer experience score, net promoter scores is declining. There is a connection between the two. So if you're asking that, ask employee effort at the end of doing something, a task, delivering the product, doing a return, doing a marketing campaign, creating a newsletter,

Whatever it is, whatever their job is, closing the books for an accountant, getting a contract written up, getting a scope of work done, getting a quote out the door, whatever it is, how hard was it for your employee? And if you start to see at a scale of one to five, five being hard, everything is hard and effort is high. You better start paying attention because attrition will happen. Disengagement would happen. And when that happens, right, then you just have people collecting paychecks.

They're not collaborating. They're not engaged. They're not willing to go the extra mile. Who suffers? The business, most importantly themselves, but the customer ultimately will feel the pain. And that's something that will impact you in the long run as well. Yes. If I'm a customer experience leader and I'm hearing this and I'm saying like, yes, we need to track employee effort. We have to connect the employee experience to the customer experience.

How would you recommend a CX leader to influence the executive team to start thinking about this? Because I've been in this position before where I'm like, my customer service team has to have five tabs open to answer one ticket. This makes no sense. How would you recommend that leaders influence their executive leadership team? Yeah. So I would get with your call center manager, right? Your customer success manager or customer service, whatever their title is. It's

And say, hey, you know, we learned a lot when we were journey mapping customers on the website. Would you be open to doing the same thing? Because we've started to notice that our net promoter score has started to decline as it relates to like returns. I'm being specific, right? And so let's just journey map. A call comes in.

From that moment all the way to closing a ticket. So it could be I'm making a return. I want a credit card refund. I was double charged, you know, whatever the handful of the top five call center drivers are. And then let's journey map it.

And let's understand where and if we might be able to collapse that time because we see the times are going up or to reduce the steps. And then we identify three or five things. And then we pull in IT and we sort of map it out for them and say, is there anything we could do at these three critical points to integrate these two software applications? You know, back in the day, it's so easy to do API integration now where before you needed to hire people, it was very expensive. Right.

Obviously, as I mentioned, I was at Salesforce. There's a lot of pre-integration now happening between sets of tools. There was acquisitions made and AI underneath to really try to drive what we're talking about here. But if you're in a smaller business, they might have multiple tools that are not talking to each other. And so if you can highlight that and show the improvement it would give and how much time it would carve off and increase the amount of calls and touches that they could do, it's

and actually allow your call center people to focus on maybe upselling and cross-selling and not just dealing with really upset customers. All of a sudden now you have the three stakeholders. It would be your call center,

Whoever owns customer experience and whoever owns IT. And in most cases, it's three different people. If you're a really small organization, the CEO might have those roles reporting to them, which then almost makes it easier because the CEO can say, this is what we're going to do. We're going to journey map. We're going to uncover, and then we're going to integrate. It's easier when someone can direct all roles.

If you have to have roles agree and then who's the owner, you know, and who's making the decisions. That is why I called it the experience mindset. Yeah.

because it was not about grabbing more power and it's about your title and whoever's paid the most has the, it is really putting that experience at the center. So I would say, if you're listening to this and you're responsible for customer experience, and you know that your NPS score or your customer satisfaction scores are declining, could you identify that maybe it's something happening on the employee side? Let's remove that the product is not working or something happened on the

product side or the supply chain side, because that's a little harder to fix.

But if it is an employee-driven item to get with IT, because that's usually where it happens, and start to try to shape that out and work with your colleagues. And so in the book, I actually recommend an employee advisory board, which is individual contributors from each of the customer-facing parts of the business, including finance and legal, because they do pricing and they do credit cards and they do contracts.

And let the individual contributors actually talk about what are the two or three big hit items that are needed at the employee layer to allow them to do their job more efficiently, reduce effort and increase their experience. And then they have to make the recommendation up level to the executives. And now it's the responsibility of the executives to go get that done. But an advisory board will help. But if you don't have that kind of representation,

rigor right now, I'd say start where I said, right? Really journey map something, look for those pain points, get your counterparts and peers together in a room, map it out and get it fixed really quickly. Yeah. And I think something I hear, I hear two things in what you're saying is like, pick one thing, pick something small that can kind of exemplify the greater picture and map that out and show it. And I'm also hearing experiment.

Like, okay, we see that there's a thing here. What can we try to improve this one part of the picture and try that on and then go from there and kind of build on it? I mean, I think something that I know a lot of CX leaders that I work with or I coach, they're like, I see the vision and no one gets it. And so we need to kind of come back down to earth a little bit and say, okay, what's the first step of this that we can really...

look at, experiment around, nail, and then we can move on to the next step instead of just shooting for the stars right away, which is great. And I love that, but it's hard to bring people along for the ride when they're not on the same page. Yeah. And I'd say that, listen, through the research, but also from my own personal experience, you know, when I kind of, when I started on this journey on this thing called the World Wide Web way back in the late 1990s, actually, you know, kind of early 2000, there was maybe a half a dozen or dozen marketing technology products.

a lot of back office, right? And so, you know, now there's over 40,000. I mean, it's just insanity. So in 25 years, we've gone from, you know, a dozen to 40,000 or something like that. So it's not a technology problem. It tends to be a process problem. And we've split the hair of marketing and customer experience in a hundred ways, meaning a hundred different applications touching pieces and parts of every aspect of this.

Furthermore, in 2018, the average enterprise would sort of have two digital transformations a year. Now we're up over 10, which means that the employees are having to absorb a lot of change. So they are digging their heels in and going, I'm tapped out. Like I have no more capacity to take any more change in. And so if you think about the Gallup survey that says, you know, extremely satisfied at work has never in the US has got never gotten above like 36%.

Yet we've thrown all this technology. So pretty much our people aren't happy. We want greater productivity. We want more out of them. We want them to be able to be shapeshifters in, you know, I know how to use AI today. I know how to use this tomorrow. You're not going to invest in training. You're not going to invest in skills. You expect me to just sort of be able to take everything you're put at me, um, without a whole lot of support or guidance. It's just impossible. Burnout is real. Um,

It's our responsibility as leaders and those that can really flip this mindset and work hard in an organization that if we can get people more engaged, naturally lots of great things happen. It's not just about CX. It's about growth.

It's about profitability. It's about better service to the customers. It's about more meaning and joy with your employees. It's about serving your communities better. It's about building resilient organizations. All these things people like me talk about, it starts and ends with people. And so if we just get way too fixated on...

you know, technology and the new shiny thing in the corner, we forget about the fact that we're asking people to do a whole lot more with not a whole lot more time and not with a whole lot more understanding of what and how to do things. So that's, that was really why I felt I needed to write that book. It was a mea culpa to the fact that I missed it completely in my first book.

It was sort of an acknowledgement that being at a company that was a great place to work, one of the most innovative in the world and the fastest growing enterprise software company, that there was something there that I could uncover, but still an organization that needed to focus more on employee experience. So there is no end game here, like there isn't for customer experience. So

I just think that philosophically having this conversation and, and getting people to just pause for a moment, like I said before, uh, I think we'll go a long way to try to make these things, uh, more, uh, more of a reality than just, I get it. Oh, someone else is saying and pounding the drum like, yes, yes, yes. But then Monday morning, nothing changes. Yeah.

Yep. Amen, Tiffany. I am so, so with you on this. And the technology conversation is something that is so important and so relevant today as we bring AI into the fold. And I'm curious to get your thoughts on how AI is both benefiting the connection between EX and CX and also the risks around it. Because I think there's two sides to that coin that are, it's a fine balance.

I'd love to get your thoughts. Yeah, I'd say I am a firm believer in human and tech. I'm not, you know, I am not a believer in tech exclusively or human exclusively. I think that the days of humans not using technology, you know, even if you say manual work,

still, you know, they might've measured something with a measuring tape and now they do it with a laser, right? The task still has to get done. The job still has to get done. The solution by which they do the job is what is changing and changing very rapidly. So I do not believe that AI will eliminate, eliminate a lot of jobs, but I do believe it will eliminate tasks and

which a lot of those tasks are boring and mundane anyway. So what, you know, like, do I need to go get a manual this and do that? And do I have to print out a list of clients and go down and call a hundred people today? Or do I want the system to push to me that here are the 10 that are more likely to do something based on these behaviors they've done over the last six months? I don't know about you, but I'd rather call the 10 that are more likely to do something than do it the way I did it 25 years ago and just randomly call a hundred people. Like,

I would rather call 10 that are interested in hearing from me than 100 that don't pick up or hang up on me or don't ever respond. So, you know, I think that that is the fear of it's going to replace my job. Like we don't have people sitting in elevators anymore managing the elevator.

It's probably a good thing, right? Totally. But do we need to send a human to go do something or can we send a robot? Does a human need to pack a box a thousand times a day or can a robot do that? Does a human need to flip burgers all day long or can a robot do that? But if you could get the person out of the kitchen flipping burgers and have them really pay attention to what that burger looked like when it went out the door,

I'd rather do the, let's make sure it's put together nicely and it matches our quality control, but do I need someone flipping burgers? So I think that ultimately there are ways in which technology in all industries can make humans focus on those things that require critical thinking and require that kind of

you know, the empathy and the emotional side of it, which technology is not going to give us. But if humans are fighting to keep doing the tactical mundane tasks because it is a paycheck,

then I hope that they are willing to make some investments, to learn some new skills, to go and find some work that brings them far more joy than what they're doing on a consistent basis. I always think of AI as like a bionic arm and it means everyone gets one. Even the call center agent now has the ability to do things that were mundane tasks faster. And I think if we look at- If the company lets them. Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. Or they're trained how to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Completely. And I think that that's kind of the question mark is how are you utilizing AI for your employees' experience and your customers' experience simultaneously? Because there's a lot of opportunity. But as you said, the more technology we bring into the fold, the more people need to learn. And there...

There's really a balance to it. I think we need to pick our battles and say, this is the thing that we're trying to solve and bring in the right tech, let people understand how to actually use it, train them on how to actually use it because it is not just another SaaS tool. In many cases, it's a different mindset and how we approach AI and we need to empower people to actually find different ways of doing things with this new technology. So I think it's...

I don't think there is like a straight answer to how do you implement AI in CX or any department, but there's a mindset to it is my opinion. Yeah, but I'd also say AI is just embedded now in so much of what we do. It's not something separate.

So I want to make sure, right, like if you think about CRM as an example, it's not like CRM plus AI. It's like AI is embedded in CRM now. So it should be thinking. You're not going, oh, well, now I have, right? It's maximizing the capabilities of what technology actually has to offer us. AI is another layer in the power underneath what it is we're getting. But AI is only as good and as smart as the data it's looking at.

So if you are an organization and you're thinking about maximizing AI to improve customer experience, if your data is bad, what comes out of AI is going to be bad. So data...

Data might be the new oil, but AI is the refinery and insights is the petrol that powers the business. So you need insights. AI is going to give you something, but it may not be perfect, right? There's hallucinations on it. There's all kinds of things around it. Is it your own large language model that you're using? Is it your own data sets that you're using? Is it public data sets? All of that has implications into your ability to really leverage AI at its maximum potential.

And so that is philosophically, you know, okay, if we are going to leverage and use AI to improve our productivity and our customer experience and our employee experience, is our data clean?

Is our data all in one place? Is our data shared across our various technology sets? Do we have one data set? Do we have multiple? Is there connection and API and data lakes? I mean, I'm using all these terms. But ultimately, however good your data is, is how much your AI can learn and start to give

give you those predictions and give you those insights for you to do something in your business or in your day or in your next step or in your next action or in your next call or your next email or whatever it is. But if that data is bad,

AI is not going to help you. So this becomes that it's kind of like, well, that's going to fix everything, right? Or this technology is going to fix everything. And then it brings with it complications like, well, now we have Zoom and everyone can work from home. And look, we've seen that then it was like, well, come back to the office. You're going to work hybrid. And look, it opened up this box of, I don't want to come back to the office. And so now will AI be like, well,

I used AI and it told me that this was the information. I sent it out. I didn't know the data was wrong.

Right. And so, you know, ultimately there, it is not a singular panacea answer to AI is going to solve all of our problems. It will not. It will not. That's what I mean by there being a mindset around it is like, we're using technology differently now where the inputs matter more because like AI can take off a lot of our, can take a lot off of our plate, but we have to give it the right ingredients.

And it's kind of shifting our focus to, oh, what are the ingredients that we're putting in? I know a lot of companies do not have their data ready to start putting it into AI and they are doing it anyways. And the output is not great. I see that as a consumer and it's like, okay. Look, having a single source of truth is an amazing aspiration, very hard to execute. The largest of organizations have

The spider web of data they may never get through. If you're a small business and you're listening to this, you are in a much better position to take advantage of AI because you don't have all this legacy, bad habit, bad, dirty data, all that stuff. If you're a startup and you're listening to it, make the right decisions out of the gate because when it's time for you to scale, if you've got good data and you're maximizing AI, you're going to be...

way ahead of the curve. So the larger you are, the harder it is to do sort of what we're talking about because you've got a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of silos, a lot of fiefdoms, a lot of, you know, all of those things, right? Yeah.

medium size, you could still course correct. Small advantage. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's such a great point for everyone who's listening to this. And for those big companies who are struggling, I think it's just a matter of this has to be the focus rather than rolling out the new tool and saying like, we are now using AI. It's like, what's the preparation?

Because I think there's, we still have time to really, especially when it comes to CX, have AI powering our customer experience. Let's make sure that we're setting the stage for that to happen versus jumping into using AI to answer customer tickets when we don't have the data to do it yet.

This has been such a fascinating conversation. I didn't even get to most of my questions, but I've loved it. So Tiffany, we have two questions that we ask all of our guests at the end of each episode. And the first is, I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a company that left you impressed. So funny you would ask this. When I do executive dinners, I ask this. And it's interesting that usually the answers that I get are very consumer. So like the B2C side of the world, right? Mm-hmm.

Rarely is it kind of B2B. Yeah. But I'd say that it sometimes is the small moments that

So I was just in Dubai, like my engagement in order to set up transportation from the airport to the hotel was a little rocky. But in the end, like they went over and above to make sure that I was comfortable in that it was scheduled and because I was landing at like one in the morning, you know, so it was...

Um, uh, you know, and when I got to the hotel, they were waiting for me, you know, said, we, you know, I'm so glad it worked out. They were, you know, you know, said something every time I was in and out of the lobby. And so mind you big organization, but that concierge for that particular, um, engagement with me did not have to go that extra mile and did. So now is that testament to the brand? Yeah.

Can I say that that brand has always delivered that kind of experience to me? I would have to say, no, it's sort of that normal. I check in, I check out, I don't talk to anybody. You know what I mean? It's very hands-off. Was the app good? Okay, yeah, we'll give them that. But that human extra connection, and maybe because I just don't do that often where I need help at a hotel, but that was a great one. It was at the Conrad in Dubai. And so I'd say that

That I noticed, right? So I sent an email. It was the wrong email address. I called. Then I gave them my phone number. Then it was like they emailed me. I was literally taking off. Then they WhatsApp me. Like they tried to communicate with me in three ways, right? Email, WhatsApp, and a text message, making sure I knew everything was okay. They didn't have to do that, right? So I'd say that that was great. Those human connections go so far and they can...

almost overshadow the things that aren't working. If something's not really working and then you have a great human to human experience, that leaves you feeling amazing. And I love this example because I think a lot of companies, this is where like customer service is kind of the, they kind of tuck it away and it's like not that important, but really a great human to human interaction can make everything that wasn't working better.

Yeah. And the opening quote of my book, and I'll leave with this, is the fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job, period. And so in that example I just gave, that concierge loved what he did.

And it manifested itself in that extra mile in the, I'm going to WhatsApp you, text message you and email you. And then I'm going to make sure when you show up with that car drops you off and it's a third party car. It wasn't like, you know, the hotel's car. So third party car that the concierge would meet you to say, it was everything. Okay. We're really, we're really sorry that it was, you know, a little bit.

you know, but I was given the wrong email address by somebody who was having me come into town. So it wasn't their fault. It was just, that's what happened. And I kind of, I wasn't upset about it being a wrong email address because they handled it so well on the other side. Um, and then they went out of their way to make sure it was scheduled appropriately for me to get back and all of that. So if they didn't love their job, they wouldn't do it, you know, and you really, really see that outside the U S.

when it comes to that kind of service because they are so oriented around the customer, but they're also very oriented around their employees. So my last question, I feel like you kind of just answered it, is what is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should hear? And feel free to share what comes to mind for you. Don't get too disconnected away from that moment that matters. Like if you are a leader and you're sort of five levels above the call center rep,

I always say that, you know, if you ever feel you've really got a handle on your business, just binge watch Undercover Boss for, you know, a couple of hours and you will realize that even the best...

really have no idea what's going on in the day-to-day lives of their people. And not just on the customer side, right? Go out on a delivery, sit in the call center, go on a sales call, you know, sit in a finance meeting, whatever it is, so that you can start to have a much wider perspective on what it means to be able to deliver a good customer experience. Like I said, like finance as an example, well, or legal, like if the contract is really laborious and long and it's

you know, not flexible and all of those things, you maybe have no line of sight to it, but it creates this horrible taste in the mouth of a customer of like, right. That's a bad experience, but you just aren't even thinking about that. And legal is like, well, this is what we have to put in there. And so it's too bad. Right. It's kind of like, hold on a second, you know? So I'd say get out of your normal day-to-day life.

Go at that moment that matters where an employee in some way touches something that touches a customer, which is pretty much everything. A warehouse, supply chain, delivery, call center, sales, marketing, finance, legal, like website design, everything, packaging, shipping, logistics. Go see what it's like and do that for 30 days and then come back and go, okay,

What would I change? And if you come back and say, oh, I wouldn't change anything. I don't know what I'd tell you, but, you know, hopefully you would find a handful, if not a lot more things. Then it becomes your role as an executive to prioritize, be decisive and make change, but include your employees along the way. Completely. And I think that's the one thing I just want to underscore of this whole conversation. As you do that, think about both how the customers experience change.

or how the customer is feeling in that experience and the employee because they go hand in hand. So thank you so much, Tiffany. This has been a wonderful conversation and we are so grateful that you came on the show. Thank you for having me, Lauren. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce AI and data. And it is bright. Getting there?

It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work side by side with your team and turn your AI and data vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best. To learn more, visit sfdc.co slash professional services.