Management & Leadership
![Tiffani Bova - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B07DYZPZZ3.jpg)
The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth
From the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Growth IQ comes a guide to enhancing customer and employee experience simultaneously for unprecedented revenue growth
In the war for customer acquisition, businesses invest millions of dollars to improve customer experience. They deliver packages faster, churn out new products, and endlessly revamp their UI, often putting greater strain on employees for diminishing returns. According to Tiffani Bova, this siloed focus on customer experience – without considering the impact on your staff – actually hinders growth in the long run. The most successful companies adopt an Experience Mindset that strengthens both employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) at the same time.
Based on exclusive research from two Salesforce-sponsored studies of thousands of employees and c-suite executives, The Experience Mindset details exactly how your company can adopt an Experience Mindset, at scale. It's not enough to know that happy employees equals happy customers. You must have an intentional, balanced approach to company strategy that involves all stakeholders – IT, Marketing, Sales, Operations, and HR – with KPIs and ownership over outcomes. In this ground-breaking book, filled with case studies of leading companies and never-before-seen research, you'll learn:
How people, processes, technology, and culture contribute to the "virtuous cycle" of EX and CX.Why the best companies have programs that minimize the customer's effort as well as the employee's effort (and how companies like Southwest and Best Buy get this right)How to effectively roll out technology solutions that boost both EX and CX (hard truth: only 20% of customer-facing employees believe technology makes their job easier. Employees want a seamless technology experience, just like your customers.)What metrics you can use to measure EX, CX, and ultimately, the effect of the two together. You can't improve what you can't measure.
Employees are the heart of your business. If you want to remain competitive in today's marketplace, investing in people is no longer a nice-to-have, but rather a must have.
In the war for customer acquisition, businesses invest millions of dollars to improve customer experience. They deliver packages faster, churn out new products, and endlessly revamp their UI, often putting greater strain on employees for diminishing returns. According to Tiffani Bova, this siloed focus on customer experience – without considering the impact on your staff – actually hinders growth in the long run. The most successful companies adopt an Experience Mindset that strengthens both employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) at the same time.
Based on exclusive research from two Salesforce-sponsored studies of thousands of employees and c-suite executives, The Experience Mindset details exactly how your company can adopt an Experience Mindset, at scale. It's not enough to know that happy employees equals happy customers. You must have an intentional, balanced approach to company strategy that involves all stakeholders – IT, Marketing, Sales, Operations, and HR – with KPIs and ownership over outcomes. In this ground-breaking book, filled with case studies of leading companies and never-before-seen research, you'll learn:
How people, processes, technology, and culture contribute to the "virtuous cycle" of EX and CX.Why the best companies have programs that minimize the customer's effort as well as the employee's effort (and how companies like Southwest and Best Buy get this right)How to effectively roll out technology solutions that boost both EX and CX (hard truth: only 20% of customer-facing employees believe technology makes their job easier. Employees want a seamless technology experience, just like your customers.)What metrics you can use to measure EX, CX, and ultimately, the effect of the two together. You can't improve what you can't measure.
Employees are the heart of your business. If you want to remain competitive in today's marketplace, investing in people is no longer a nice-to-have, but rather a must have.
Editorial Reviews
Praise for The Experience Mindset
"At a time when companies are focused on digital transformation, many leaders forget to consider the impact this change has on employees. This book offers a brilliant framework for maximizing performance improvement for both customers and internal stakeholders alike."
--Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist, Salesforce
"This simple philosophy guided our growth at The Ritz Carlton Company and it can guide yours too. Once you develop an experience mindset, you'll make every decision with confidence and never lead the same way again."
--Horst Schulze, Co-founder and Former President, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company
"The saying should go, "Happy employee, happy customer!" Tiffani Bova is exactly right when she writes that employee experience and customer experience are intrinsically linked. As she demonstrates, unleashing human magic leads to improbable results. Let this book be your guide."
--Hubert Joly, former chairman and CEO of Best Buy, and bestselling author The Heart of Business
"Implementing a positive employee experience and a positive customer experience takes wisdom and persistence. Fortunately, Tiffani Bova has both. This book is an invaluable, data-driven guide for leaders who are serious about growth."
--Amy Edmondson, Professor, Harvard Business School, and author of The Fearless Organization
"The top two issues keeping leaders awake are 1) attracting and retaining great talent and 2) stalled growth. This book gives leaders a playbook to address both challenges with one simple, powerful solution."
--Keith Ferrazzi, #1 New York Times bestselling author and executive team coach
"Growth guru Tiffani Bova makes a compelling case that when managers invest in the employee experience, customer success is a natural-and proven-byproduct. If you want to improve the experience for your customers and employees alike, read this book!"
--Liz Wiseman, New York Times bestselling author of Multipliers...
"At a time when companies are focused on digital transformation, many leaders forget to consider the impact this change has on employees. This book offers a brilliant framework for maximizing performance improvement for both customers and internal stakeholders alike."
--Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist, Salesforce
"This simple philosophy guided our growth at The Ritz Carlton Company and it can guide yours too. Once you develop an experience mindset, you'll make every decision with confidence and never lead the same way again."
--Horst Schulze, Co-founder and Former President, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company
"The saying should go, "Happy employee, happy customer!" Tiffani Bova is exactly right when she writes that employee experience and customer experience are intrinsically linked. As she demonstrates, unleashing human magic leads to improbable results. Let this book be your guide."
--Hubert Joly, former chairman and CEO of Best Buy, and bestselling author The Heart of Business
"Implementing a positive employee experience and a positive customer experience takes wisdom and persistence. Fortunately, Tiffani Bova has both. This book is an invaluable, data-driven guide for leaders who are serious about growth."
--Amy Edmondson, Professor, Harvard Business School, and author of The Fearless Organization
"The top two issues keeping leaders awake are 1) attracting and retaining great talent and 2) stalled growth. This book gives leaders a playbook to address both challenges with one simple, powerful solution."
--Keith Ferrazzi, #1 New York Times bestselling author and executive team coach
"Growth guru Tiffani Bova makes a compelling case that when managers invest in the employee experience, customer success is a natural-and proven-byproduct. If you want to improve the experience for your customers and employees alike, read this book!"
--Liz Wiseman, New York Times bestselling author of Multipliers...
Readers Top Reviews
Dr. Joseph S. Mar
"The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth..." by Bova is a wonderful book about the dynamics of having both strong customer support and good rapor with employees. At bottom, employees must be happy to deliver good service to customers. The book explains the great importance technology plays in delivering an optimum experience for both employees and their customers. Technology can assist employees in monitoring the customer experience, as well as, surveying the environment the business operates.. Algorithms can identify outliers, as well as, maxima or minima conditions. In addition, AI can minimize areas of search from millions of data sets to a few dozen or less. Bova spends much effort in explaining how the corporate culture works. Basically, Is the structure itself very hierarchical with many levels ? Corporate culture is the sum total of beliefs, behaviors and internal practices. A company can live or die on how it manages its corporate culture.with much contention over turf? Is the structure organic with fewer levels and more horizontal communications and relationships? Bova's book has important dimensions for every business to consider to function optimally with a minimum of organizational duplication and internal strife! This book is for specialists in Organizational Design, Strategic Planning, Psychology and Human Resources everywhere!
Steve BrockDr. Jo
As Stevo’s Novel Ideas, I am a long-time book reviewer, member of the media, an Influencer, and a content provider. I received this book as a free review copy from either the publisher, a publicist, or the author, and have not been otherwise compensated for reviewing or recommending it. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This book is Stevo's Business Book of the Week for the week of 6/4. From the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of "Growth IQ" comes a guide to enhancing customer and employee experience simultaneously for unprecedented revenue growth. Like the eternal question about which came first - the chicken or the egg (there's an Amazon Alexa joke about this at the end of the review), in business it's which came first - the customer or the human resources department (these days, it's called EX for Employee Experience). No matter what the answer, the next question is always how much attention should each receive in order for the company to enjoy sustained growth? If you neglect the customer, your profits fall. If you undervalue your employees, you loose the best recruits and suffer increased resignations. Tiffani Bova's "The Experience Mindset" shows how to achieve the best ratio of CX and EX resources and move your focus where it's needed as you scale. But let it be stated up front: Bova cautions that your workforce must come first. Before now, she says, there haven't been enough studies about the best ways scaling companies should hire and manage the EX team. But it's now clear that you need the best and brightest serving your customers in order for them to line up with their wallets open, allowing you to expand resiliently. Companies, Bova says, must adopt an Experience Mindset that, instead of doing things "to" customers and employees, they use processes, culture, and technology to do things "for" them, making their lives and jobs easier. Examples of successful adoptions of the Experience Mindset include: Zappos shoes, Best Buy, Airbnb, Salesforce, Ford Motor Company, Consolidated Communications, Chipotle, and Volkswagen. Too many C-suite residents (including way too many Chief Human Resource Officers) believe that employee unhappiness is one of the prices of doing business, thinking that they will remain disgruntled no matter what improvements are made. If you know someone holding on to this belief, please make sure they get a copy of this book. And the Amazon Alexa joke about the chicken and egg: It's said that if you ask the device which came first, she will tell you to order them and see.
Robert MorrisStev
Years ago when Southwest Airlines was more profitable and had greater cap value than all of its nine competitors COMBINED, its then chairman and CEO, Herb Kelleher, was asked how his airline accomplished that: "We take great care of our people, they take great care of our customers, and our customers take great care of our shareholders." The results of all major studies of what employees and customers consider to be most important to them reveal that feeling appreciated is ranked either first or second. So, how to create employees and customers who are what Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell characterize as "evangelists"? Tiffani Bova provides a thorough explanation in her book. She prepares leaders in almost any organization -- whatever its size and nature may be -- to "grow exponentially by improving both [relationships], balancing improvement in employee and customer experiences in tandem in order to leverage a mutually beneficial combination of the two...Ultimately, the Experience Mindset is about fully maximizing the leverage points between a strong employee experience and customer experience to create a virtuous cycle of momentum that leads to significantly better growth rates...By strategically pursuing an exceptional, balanced experience for ALL stakeholders, you achieve a sum greater than the parts, magnifying growth many times over." It is no coincidence that companies annually ranked among those most highly regarded and best to work for are also annually ranked among those most profitable with the greatest cap value. As Bova makes crystal clear, superior employee experience (EX) and superior customer experience (CX) are not separate but related. Rather, they are [begin italics] interdependent [end italics]. These are among the passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to indicate the scope of Bova's coverage: o Raising the CX Bar (Pages 3-6) o The Characteristics of Superior CX (7-9) o The CX Dilemma (12-14) o Raising the EX Bar (21-24) o The Characteristics of Superior EX (25-27) o The Results of Employee Dissatisfaction and Disengagement (31-34) o World-Class EX Drives Industry-Leading CX (43-46) o The Tension: A Crisis of Prioritization (50-52) o Diverging Views and Priorities of Executives (57-59) o The Experience Mindset in Practice (68-71) o It's Personal (86-89) o An Unlikely Partnership (95-97) o Technology Transformation to Improve Processes (106-109) o The Silo Effect (109-114) o Design Thinking (114-118) o The Connected and Integrated Workforce (133-136) o Technology Is a Team Sport (138-140) o Start with the Culture (145-150) o The Five Key Elements (150-154) o CX Metrics That Matter and EX Metrics That Matter(173-179 and 180-188) Bova makes excellent use of several reader-friendly devices th...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
Customer Experience
Let's begin with a little bit of history. Though many of you are likely familiar with these broad strokes, taking a step back to understand how a maniacal focus on customer experience developed will shed some light on how we got to where we are today. The First and Second Industrial Revolutions were typified by an increase in production capacity and output. Companies were labeled as "product-centric" or "product-led," competing on the basis of their advanced products, irrespective of whether people wanted these product improvements. The Third Industrial Revolution, which began in the 1950s, welcomed advancements in telecommunications, the rise of electronics, and the development of computers, forever changing how businesses operate.
With new capabilities to track and solve customers' problems, meet their new demands, and provide increasingly better service, the experiences customers had with brands improved. With a growing global supply chain, there was also an increase in the diversity and availability of goods and services. Equally as important were new ways for customers to shop and buy products and services online. As a result, not only did their purchasing behaviors change, but their experience expectations continued to increase with the new capabilities technology provided, such as e-commerce.
In response, companies shifted away from a product-led model and focused instead on the customer. As compared to a one-size-fits-all model, specific customer data could be captured and used to create a better experience for a diverse set of customers and their needs. Embracing this attitude meant that new products, features, and functionality could be traced back to a real customer problem. Customer-centric companies also offered customers value at every interaction, based on their actual interests and desires.
This philosophy quickly caught on because it made logical sense: Customers are the source of revenue. Without revenue, there is no company. What's more, focusing on the customer, though myopic, works. Like hopping on one leg, it will move you forward, albeit slowly.
Becoming more customer-focused required an accompanying attention to customer experience. Providing positive CX then became the prime C-suite approach to strengthening competitive advantage. It wasn't that products no longer mattered; they did, and they still do. They just don't matter as much if great customer experience isn't there as well.
And today, with the Fourth Industrial Revolution upon us-pushing technological capabilities and uses to a whole new level with AI, IoT, Web 3.0, and the metaverse-customer experience is valued more heavily than ever, and for good reason. According to Salesforce, 88 percent of customers feel that the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services (2022), up from 84 percent in 2019. Obviously, CX is vitally important.
Every company should strive to provide an incredible experience to the customers or businesses it serves. As discussed in the introduction, instead of doing something to customers, or to businesses, you must do something for them, reframing your thinking from B2C and B2B to B4C and B4B. To do so, you must first recognize what makes a memorable customer experience.
Raising the CX Bar
In 2004, Zappos's biggest challenge was customer service. Specifically, they were struggling to find the right employees to staff their call center. Though the online footwear retailer was an e-commerce company through and through, they realized that every new customer called them on the phone at least once on average. Handled well, that call could create an emotional connection and a lasting memory. Whiffed, it could lose that customer for good.
Tony Hsieh, Zappos's founder and its CEO at the time, had decided from the company's start to make service the company's main product. After all, customers could buy shoes anywhere. Hsieh believed they would only stick with Zappos if it "went the extra mile to WOW them," so he allocated the resources to staff the customer service line 24/7. Any similar company would have spent that money on advertising to drive awareness and demand. Rather than advertise, Hsieh wanted to make his customers so happy that they advertised for him via word of mouth, advocating on the company's behalf.
This was not the norm in 2004. Call centers were considered cost centers, not growth engines. But under Hsieh, Zappos looked at every interaction through a "branding lens instead of an expense-minimizing lens." This meant running and staffing its call center very differently.
For example, there are many stories of Zappos customer service agents staying on the phone for marath...
Customer Experience
Let's begin with a little bit of history. Though many of you are likely familiar with these broad strokes, taking a step back to understand how a maniacal focus on customer experience developed will shed some light on how we got to where we are today. The First and Second Industrial Revolutions were typified by an increase in production capacity and output. Companies were labeled as "product-centric" or "product-led," competing on the basis of their advanced products, irrespective of whether people wanted these product improvements. The Third Industrial Revolution, which began in the 1950s, welcomed advancements in telecommunications, the rise of electronics, and the development of computers, forever changing how businesses operate.
With new capabilities to track and solve customers' problems, meet their new demands, and provide increasingly better service, the experiences customers had with brands improved. With a growing global supply chain, there was also an increase in the diversity and availability of goods and services. Equally as important were new ways for customers to shop and buy products and services online. As a result, not only did their purchasing behaviors change, but their experience expectations continued to increase with the new capabilities technology provided, such as e-commerce.
In response, companies shifted away from a product-led model and focused instead on the customer. As compared to a one-size-fits-all model, specific customer data could be captured and used to create a better experience for a diverse set of customers and their needs. Embracing this attitude meant that new products, features, and functionality could be traced back to a real customer problem. Customer-centric companies also offered customers value at every interaction, based on their actual interests and desires.
This philosophy quickly caught on because it made logical sense: Customers are the source of revenue. Without revenue, there is no company. What's more, focusing on the customer, though myopic, works. Like hopping on one leg, it will move you forward, albeit slowly.
Becoming more customer-focused required an accompanying attention to customer experience. Providing positive CX then became the prime C-suite approach to strengthening competitive advantage. It wasn't that products no longer mattered; they did, and they still do. They just don't matter as much if great customer experience isn't there as well.
And today, with the Fourth Industrial Revolution upon us-pushing technological capabilities and uses to a whole new level with AI, IoT, Web 3.0, and the metaverse-customer experience is valued more heavily than ever, and for good reason. According to Salesforce, 88 percent of customers feel that the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services (2022), up from 84 percent in 2019. Obviously, CX is vitally important.
Every company should strive to provide an incredible experience to the customers or businesses it serves. As discussed in the introduction, instead of doing something to customers, or to businesses, you must do something for them, reframing your thinking from B2C and B2B to B4C and B4B. To do so, you must first recognize what makes a memorable customer experience.
Raising the CX Bar
In 2004, Zappos's biggest challenge was customer service. Specifically, they were struggling to find the right employees to staff their call center. Though the online footwear retailer was an e-commerce company through and through, they realized that every new customer called them on the phone at least once on average. Handled well, that call could create an emotional connection and a lasting memory. Whiffed, it could lose that customer for good.
Tony Hsieh, Zappos's founder and its CEO at the time, had decided from the company's start to make service the company's main product. After all, customers could buy shoes anywhere. Hsieh believed they would only stick with Zappos if it "went the extra mile to WOW them," so he allocated the resources to staff the customer service line 24/7. Any similar company would have spent that money on advertising to drive awareness and demand. Rather than advertise, Hsieh wanted to make his customers so happy that they advertised for him via word of mouth, advocating on the company's behalf.
This was not the norm in 2004. Call centers were considered cost centers, not growth engines. But under Hsieh, Zappos looked at every interaction through a "branding lens instead of an expense-minimizing lens." This meant running and staffing its call center very differently.
For example, there are many stories of Zappos customer service agents staying on the phone for marath...
