The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth - Hardcover

Bova, Tiffani

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059354269X ISBN 13: 9780593542699

Verlag: Portfolio, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A Wall Street Journal Bestseller!

From the 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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ranked for the last four years in the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, Tiffani Bova is a leading thinker who Forbes says “reshapes our perception of growth.”

As both a practitioner and academic she offers a unique perspective and has helped lead the tech industry through several evolutions over her nearly 30-year career as Salesforce’s former Growth and Innovation Evangelist, and previously as a Research Fellow at Gartner and a sales, marketing and customer service executive for start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. She is the author of two Wall Street Journal bestsellers: GrowthIQ and The Experience Mindset.

While at Gartner, her forward-looking insights and guidance helped some of the largest technology companies in the world including Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, SAP, AT&T, Dell, Amazon-AWS, expand their market share and grow their revenues. She was a trusted advisor to multiple senior executives who were responsible for shifting from on-premise to as-a-service business models resulting in new billion-dollar divisions.

In the late 90’s and early 2000s she was a pioneer of cloud computing, she previously led direct and indirect sales, marketing and customer service for two of the largest web-based start-ups in the US and spearheaded a newly formed division of a Fortune 500 company to $300 million in revenue over two and a half years.

Tiffani has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, Bloomberg, MSNBC-TV, Yahoo Finance, INC and Forbes. She is also the host of the podcast What’s Next! with Tiffani Bova. More info here: https://www.tiffanibova.com/

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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 marathon sessions. The average call duration at most call centers is four minutes. The longest Zappos customer service call to date took place in 2016 and lasted ten hours and forty-three minutes. Now, not every call center agent should stay on the phone with a customer for ten-plus hours, but the mindset is what matters here. The rep knew he could stay on that call without worrying about an arbitrary metric or "getting in trouble" for spending so much time with one customer.

Stories like this one have become central to the Zappos culture. The company has never stopped raising the CX bar while also empowering its employees to go the extra mile for customers. Noting a drop in call volume at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company decided against furloughs. Instead, it launched a special customer service line for people who just wanted to chat about anything: future travel plans, TV shows, whatever was on their minds. (The idea was the brainchild of a Zappos employee.) Customer service reps were known to sometimes help callers source items beyond shoes. As pointed out in a statement on its website, "Searching for flour to try that homemade bread recipe? We're happy to call around and find a grocery stocked with what you need."

The reps also proved willing to help with more urgent issues. When David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System, struggled to find pulse oximeters online due to pandemic demand, he reached out to Zappos. To his delight, the company located a stash of the critical devices, shipped five hundred to Mount Sinai within days, and went on to donate another fifty.

I had the pleasure of meeting Tony Hsieh a few times over the years before his tragic passing in 2020. Our conversations were always filled with laughter and joy, and the mark he left on so many people will keep his legacy of "delivering happiness" alive for many years to come. Hsieh recognized that investing in customer service could create "stronger brand loyalty and leave your customers coming back for more." He understood that customers recall brand experience and interactions far more than they do other differentiating factors like price.

You are much more likely to remember service reps that went far out of their way to help you than the amount you paid for a pair of sneakers. This emphasis on CX correlates to consumers who are "very likely to purchase more from a company" regardless of industry (Table 1.1). As you can see, the "very good" and "good" CX shows significantly better results than the others.

A great CX experience is not defined by what you offer but how your customers feel when they engage with your products and services, your employees, and your brand, and how well you enable them to achieve the outcomes most important to them.

These interactions between a company's employees and their customers are truly significant as they are often the moments that matter. If the past decade is any indication, continuing to improve CX is unquestionably worthwhile. For example, mass-market auto manufacturers that improve CX by 1...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059354269X
• ISBN 13: 9780593542699
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Portfolio; https://www.wetones.co.uk/; ; 105 Golborne Rd; London; W10 5NL; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: M.E.G Cards & Gifts; 443000000000; paula@megcards.com; ; 48 Cloyfin Road; Unit 4, 48 Cloyfin Road; Coleraine; Londonderry; BT52 2NY; Irland