Lessons - The Controversial Truth About Business Growth | Tiffani Bova - WSJ Bestselling Author

Summary

Success Story with Scott D. Clary - Lessons: The Controversial Truth About Business Growth | Tiffani Bova
Release Date: February 25, 2026
Guest: Tiffani Bova, WSJ Bestselling Author

---

Episode Overview

This episode of the Success Story podcast features a deep-dive discussion between host Scott D. Clary and Tiffani Bova on the critical—but often overlooked—interplay between employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) in driving business growth. Bova, drawing from her research and experience with companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Amazon, challenges the status quo thinking that growth is solely about optimizing CX, arguing instead for a holistic "experience mindset" that prioritizes both employees and customers. The episode brings rich insights backed by research, data, and real-world examples from some of the world’s most influential companies.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Do the Biggest Companies Truly Prioritize Employees? (00:00–01:50)

• Scott D. Clary opens by questioning whether top companies genuinely prioritize employee experience at the level necessary to ensure superior customer experience. He notes, "They're all going to say it till they're disrupted." (00:52)
• Blockbuster’s downfall is cited as an example of a company potentially missing employee-driven insights concerning market shifts.

2. Research Findings: The Mutual Impact of EX and CX (01:50–05:46)

• Tiffani Bova shares findings from a Salesforce and Forbes Insight study that quantified the impact of EX and CX on growth.
  • Companies excelling in employee experience saw higher customer satisfaction KPI lifts, and vice versa—“When you got those two things right, it was a 1.8 times growth rate. So for a billion dollar brand, it was a $40 million impact.” (04:55)
  • Notable quote:

    "If you do E [employee experience] strong, you still get a good growth rate. If you do C [customer experience] strong, you still get a good growth rate. ... But what I'm saying is you can get a faster multiplier... if you do both." —Tiffani Bova (04:30)

• Bova further observes that although executives say employees are their most important asset, most companies default to placing customers as the ultimate priority, often at the expense of employee experience.

3. The Customer-Centric Trap: Lessons from Amazon and Starbucks (05:47–07:18)

• Bova discusses Amazon’s mantra: “We want to be the most sort of, of customer centric company on the planet.” (05:49)
  • Amazon saw immense growth, but when the pandemic hit, employee dissatisfaction became front-page news—culminating in the company’s pivot to also focus on being a great employer.
  • Similar patterns are identified at Starbucks, where strong customer experience led to employee dissatisfaction and unionization efforts.
• Notable quote:

  "It's not a bad thing to be customer centric … however, it starts and stops with you have to make sure that the employees are equally engaged." —Tiffani Bova (07:10)

4. Who Owns Employee Experience? Implications for Businesses at Every Stage (11:50–16:19)

• Bova reflects on her time at Gartner and the rise of the Chief Marketing Officer as a key IT buyer, highlighting a trend where experience became the battleground for competitive advantage.
• She resists advocating for a Chief Employee Experience Officer, pointing out that in smaller companies, CEOs must wear many hats.
  • Notable quote:

    "For small companies, a CEO is playing eight roles. ... So what I want to have happen, regardless of the size of the organization, is when a company makes a decision to reduce the effort for a customer… What is the implication to the employee?" —Tiffani Bova (13:35, 14:22)

• Experience mindset: Bova emphasizes that before making a decision that benefits customers, leaders should pause and ask about the impact on employees. The focus is on seeking balance, not perfection.

5. The Pitfalls of Automation and Productivity-Only Thinking (16:19–18:44)

• Bova cautions against equating increased productivity with increased automation at the expense of human development:
  • Career development, trust, training, pay, and leadership modeling are all part of the employee experience.
  • As technology (e.g., AI and automation) expands, companies should use it to upskill employees and offload repetitive tasks—enabling staff to take on more meaningful, challenging work.
  • Notable quote:

    "If you focus just on productivity ... then automation is king, then AI is king ... and bots and all the things that can, quote-unquote, even ChatGPT, right, replace humans in some capacity. I think that there is opportunity to really bring the employee base along this journey..." —Tiffani Bova (17:35)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On leadership and EX/CX balance:

  "Herb Kelleher... was like, well, like, we take care of our employees, they take care of our customers. If we do that right, it takes care of our shareholders and it comes back." —Tiffani Bova (03:00)

• On being customer-first, but not employee-last:

  "So many executives will say, of course, employees are super important to us... But in the same breath, they would come back and say, however, we ask our employees to default to the customer above all else." —Tiffani Bova (05:18)

• On decision-making at every company level:

  "If you are making any decisions that impact customer, I just want you to pause... What is the implication to the employee? ... If I can get you to do that, regardless of size, then it's been a success." —Tiffani Bova (15:24)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–01:50 – Framing the challenge: Are big companies truly prioritizing employee experience?
• 01:50–05:46 – Research: How EX and CX intertwine for superior growth.
• 05:47–07:18 – Case studies: Amazon, Starbucks, and the pitfalls of customer-centrism.
• 11:50–16:19 – "Who owns EX?" and practical implications for companies at all stages.
• 16:19–18:44 – The dangers of productivity obsession and the promise of balanced tech integration.

---

Episode Takeaways

• Balanced investment in both employee and customer experience is directly correlated with faster, sustained business growth.
• Leaders should adopt an "experience mindset"—pausing to assess the employee impact of every customer-focused decision, at every company size.
• Automation and technology should empower employees, not replace them, to foster innovation, engagement, and long-term performance.

This episode provides actionable frameworks and fresh data to challenge conventional wisdom, making it essential listening for any entrepreneur, leader, or manager looking to build lasting, people-driven growth.

Transcript

[A]

In this lessons episode, explore how balancing employee experience and customer experience drives faster growth and long term performance. Discover why companies that invest in people outperform competitors. Understand how leadership decisions shape culture and productivity at every stage of scale. And uncover how an experienced mindset unlocks sustainable growth across organizations of any size. You know, you worked with some of the biggest companies in the world. I'm going to name names and like they're the names that every, like, so Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Oracle, AT&T, Dell and Amazon. Those are the top of the top. You can't, you can't really find. Maybe you can if you look hard enough, but that's pretty much on the list of every large organization of where you should go to to look for who's doing business properly and, and whatnot. Now, now if you ask all the leaders at those companies, they're going to say that they focus on their employees. They're all, they're all going to say, of course, yes, employees are, you know, the most important part of our business. It seems like such a. But are they really, are the biggest companies in the world actually focusing on their employees at the level at which you think is required to actually deliver the most impeccable cx? Because I would even say that you look at the companies that were disrupted and like the classic example is like Blockbuster. I'm sure Blockbusters thought they took care of their employees. But there was a miss, there was a miss there and then there was a miscellitude, you know, a lack of, a lack of understanding of how the market was shifting and a lack of understanding of how their model is being disrupted. And maybe that's because there wasn't enough voicing of this problem internally with the employees in terms of product or how they saw the company moving, I don't know. But how do you actually gauge whether or not a company does have an optimized ex? Because they're all, they're all going to say it till they're not. They're all going to say it till they're disrupted, right?

[B]

Yeah. So what happened was I was standing on stage in Canada a number of years back and, and I said that I didn't think it was a coincidence that Salesforce was one of the best places to work around the globe. You know, if we're not number one, we're sort of in the top five. Ish. Right? Pretty pretty much globally. We're one of the most innovative companies in the world and we're the fastest growing enterprise software company. In the cloud specifically, for sure. Those are not sort of accolades that Salesforce stood up one day and said, these are the things we are. This is really sort of what the market has, you know, given us from awards and things like that. So I didn't think it was a coincidence. So then I said, you know, look, I'm not the first one to say it. Herb Kelleher, you know, the former CEO and founder of Southwest Airlines was like, well, like, we take care of our employees, they take care of our customers. If we do that right, it takes care of our shareholders and it comes back and we could take care of our employees. Right. Is sort of this flywheel effect. Richard Branson has said it right. Take care of our customers, I take care of our employees. We do that, we can grow. Nothing new there. Going back to almost what we were just talking about with growth iq. But I hadn't seen proof, I hadn't seen proof sort of from growth rates on those companies that do those two things really well, how much faster they grow than the rest of the market. So we did a very sort of small US only based project, Salesforce and Forbes Insight. And we took publicly available information of like net promoter scores and glassdoor ratings and customer satisfaction scores and churn rates and then revenue and revenue growth. Right. We took it had to be publicly traded for obvious reasons because we just wanted to go out and try to prove this out. And sure enough, what we found was that companies that did employee experience well saw a lift in KPIs on customer experience. Okay. When we looked at customer experience, we saw a lift in KPIs for employee experience. Right? So if you have happier customers, right. They're not yelling at your employees. Your employees don't feel like eight hours a day. They just get yelled at on their customer service line. Right. Or something like that. But when both of those things happened, one of them was sort of a 1.3 times growth rate. One was a 1.4 times growth rate. When you got those two things right, it was a 1.8 times growth rate. So for a billion dollar brand, it was a 40 million dollar impact. So we knew we were onto something. Now, if you do E strong, you still get a good growth rate. If you do C strong, you still get a good growth rate. So I'm not saying you can't get growth if you're not doing both well. Well, but what I'm saying is you can get a faster multiplier, if you will, a greater multiplier of growth. Rather, if you do Both. Right, so back to the original front start of that question you had. Yes. Executives intuitively understand this. And I would say that most, through the second body of research we did said, if it's so obvious, why isn't everybody else doing it? Like, it's really obvious, Tiffany. Like, this isn't anything new. I'm like, I know. However, like, tell me, who owns employee experience? So many executives will say, of course, employees are super important to us. I care about my people, I care about my employees. And through the research, it showed that that's what they would say. But in the same breath, they would come back and say, however, we ask our employees to default to the customer above all else. So this default of, I am interested in the success of my employees, but we're always going to say that our customers are a true north. We're a customer centric company. It's customer first, sort of whatever rule, you know, sort of mantra you want to have internally. And, you know, I'll give you sort of one example, you know, the most customer centric company on the planet, that was their mantra. Who was it? Do you know who it is?

[A]

I don't know who it is.

[B]

Amazon. Amazon. Okay. So that was their statement. We want to be the most sort of, of customer centric company on the planet. And did they grow? Absolutely. Like, did they, you know, knock out industries? Absolutely. Did they create entire new categories? Absolutely. Fair. Right? But then what happened? The pandemic hit and who wasn't happy anymore? Employees. And the second that happened, it was really right when Jeff Bezos was stepping down as CEO, it sort of was added that we want to be the core, greatest employer on the planet. So now you have this balance, right, of if we're going to do this, we have to do that. And when employees, that sort of unhappiness, if you will, with employees really showed itself during COVID Right. Great. Resignation, quiet quitting, unionization, even Amazon in

[A]

particular, a lot of negative stories about how they treated their employees.

[B]

And now they want to unionize. Right. And they're not alone. So you have stories. Starbucks really well known and held up as a very strong customer company. Right. I mean, no complaints really from customers. But then what happened? Employees started to get unhappy. Then what happens? Right? Then they want to unionize. And so I can say that it's not a bad thing to be customer centric. Obviously, I've been touting that one statement of being customer centric for, you know, almost 18 years. So. So I would say that that is a good thing. However, it sort of starts and stops with you have to make sure that the employees are equally engaged.

[A]

And having Notion is a success story partner. Now, every week I'm juggling podcast prep and newsletter deadlines and agency work. And one thing that used to eat all my time was compiling status updates across all these different projects so I could see where everything's at. Now with Notion's new custom agents, that's just handled. Now I set up a status update agent that automatically scans my team's progress. It pulls everything together and sends out a report without me even having to touc. What makes Notion different? Notion is an AI powered connected workspace for teams. Notion brings all your notes, your docs, your projects into one space. It just works. It's seamless, it's flexible, it's powerful, and it's actually fun to use. And with AI built right into it, you spend less time switching between tools and apps and more time creating great work. And now with custom agents, the busy work that used to take hours runs itself. Most AI still waits for you to prompt it. But Custom Agents runs on schedules and triggers. So one person just sets it up and it becomes a shared resource for the whole team. Think of them like AI teammates with a specific job. So try custom agents [e-mail] story that's all lowercase letters. Notion.com story to try custom agents today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Granola is a success story partner. Now here's something I used to do after every single meeting. Sit down for about 15 minutes trying to reconstruct what, what just happened, who said what, what. We actually decided what I'm supposed to follow up on before next week. And when you're running calls all day and you have podcast guests and you have client check ins and you have team syncs, that adds up fast. You either spend half the meeting furiously typing and you miss the actual conversation, or you're present in the meeting, but then you're scrambling after. Neither is a good option. Granola completely changed that for me. It's an AI powered notepad that works through your device's audio, so there's no bots joining your call, no awkward setup, nothing weird. It just runs quietly in the background while you take your rough notes like normal. And when the meeting is over, you get clean, structured notes. What was decided, who owns what, what's next? Now, the first time I saw the output, I genuinely thought, this is what my notes should look like. You get to actually be present in your meetings and you still walk Away with everything documented. Try Granola for free for three months at Granola AI Success. That's Granola AI Success. Get your time back. Framer is a success story partner. Now you could be a solopreneur. You could be an entrepreneur. You could be somebody just sitting at home who's trying to start a business out of their house. But you know the drill. You need good design to create a website to get your business off the ground. But good design is expensive and you can't afford to hire a designer for every single landing page social post. But you also can't afford to look amateur. And I've been there. You need to move fast, you need to look professional. But you also need to not blow your budget on five different tools. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites. And it's now redefining how we design for the web with the recent launch of design pages. A free canvas based design tool, Framer is more than a site builder. It's a true all in one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site, Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. And the best part is it's actually free, not a trial free. I'm talking unlimited projects, real vector tools, 3D transformations, everything you need without the nickel and diming. So if you're ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool, start creating for [e-mail] design and make sure you use code success story for a free month of framer pro. That's framer.com design and use promo code success story framer.com design promo code success story Rules and restrictions may apply. A good experience and you actually touched on a point there and you didn't go into it. So I'm actually, I'd like you to go into it. Okay. When you ask the question, who owns the employee experience in an organization? So I want, I want to break it down for somebody who's a smaller company as well, a CEO that's just struggling to, you know, get to make it a little bit more than a million because at that point it's just like a, a glorified job. But say they're trying to get the $10 million and they have a small team, a little bit outsourced, a little bit internal, they have some full time, you know, double W2 hires all the way through to, and maybe just walk through the different levels of what, you know, X looks like all the way through to Fortune 500, Fortune 100 who owns the customer experience throughout that journey as the company evolves. And then actually I will ask you a two part question, even though I shouldn't, but I will. I want to know what good ex looks like at different levels.

[B]

Yeah, it is a great question. Right? Because I think this is where I tried to work pretty hard in writing the book to make sure that I wasn't advocating for a new C suite role so many years ago. I was part of the team prior to joining Salesforce. I was a research fellow at Gartner and I was part of the team that made the prediction that the Chief Marketing officer would spend more on it than the Chief Information Officer. And when we said that it was sort of 2008ish, everyone thought we were crazy. But lo and behold, Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP all went out and bought companies that were in that marketing technology stack to get a hold of those budgets that the CIO may no longer be in control of. And if the marketing Chief marketing officer was going to become the buyer, how do they create sort of that know, narrative to attract that new buyer to that technology that they now have? Okay. And it was really also about trying to get the CMO at the seat of the executive table. Not sort of reporting under the COO or you know, maybe under someone else in the organization, but really getting them a seat on the table because we believed that experience was going to become that new battleground between brands, especially when it is highly commoditized, transactional. Like what makes it different, it's going to either have to be a better experience or a better designed and developed product. And so the product development may be too expensive and out of reach for some. So if I can make sure my people are better trained and my customers have a better experience, I could win there. Okay, so in this scenario, in this case, rather for the experience mindset, I did not want to advocate that I need a chief employee experience officer.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

Because especially for small companies, a CEO is playing eight roles. Like he's the CEO, cmo, CRO, Chro, like he's kind of everybody or he or she is everybody. So what I want to have happen, regardless of size organization, is when a company makes a decision to reduce the effort for a customer in order to increase the experience for that customer. So, you know, in 2000 we were arguing about making sure that you could it's three clicks to get to the cart to buy online. In 2000 we were arguing for three clicks to buy. It's been 23 years and still I Show up at sites and it's like six clicks get out.

[A]

So yeah, no, so I. Yeah, okay, right, okay.

[B]

So yeah, yeah, just let's pick that up. Right. So back then in 2000 when we were reducing the amount of clicks for the customer to buy in the background, the effort for the employee actually went up. Because back then it wasn't automated. Like we didn't have the power of these one click shopping carts and payment with things like PayPal or Venmo or Apple Pay or whatever it might be. Ultimately we didn't have those things so we had to kind of manually get things done. So what do we do? Decreased effort for customer, increased experience, unintended consequence. Increased effort for employee, Decreased experience for employee. And over the last 20, 20 years or so that has gotten even further out of balance where we've so over pivoted to customer, we've kind of left employee behind. So if you are a small business entrepreneur, medium business, large business, and you are making any decisions that impact customer, I just want you to pause for a second and say, okay, hold on, I think this is the right thing to do for the customer. What is the implications to the employee? And I don't care what size you are. Right. Or I don't care what role you're in. If you're going to change a process, if you're going to add a new application in the environment, if you're going to pick a new vendor and it's really good for the customer, how good is it for the employee? And that's why I called it Experience mindset. Because I need you to shift your mindset away from exclusive, focusing on customer and giving a little bit of pause to make sure you're not negatively impacting employee. Will it be 50, 50? Probably not. But if I can get you to just stop and say, hold on, what's the implication to the employee? We've changed this. Have we trained them? Did we change the processes? Have we given them five more things to do a day versus, you know, reducing things? If I can get you to do that regardless of size, then it's been a success.

[A]

And that also. So when you add on a new process, you work with a new vendor, that could also mean hiring somebody to support. So that's not always so. So you can optimize for customer experience as long as you basically scale out or optimize internal processes so that your employee does not suffer that much considerably. You have to make sure that their day to day does not vary is basically what you're saying.

[B]

That's the goal.

[A]

If they're maxed out, right? That's the goal. So to match it at capacity, you know, if, if, I mean, of course in some, in some cases it's going to be. You can actually increase their workload slightly because maybe they do have a fair amount of free time and they're not really optimized as an individual, but that's okay. But if they are optimized as an individual, then you're either hiring someone else out to support them, or you're upskilling them, or there's something that you're doing within the organization to basically let this new process land softly on the people that are actually going to be responsible for.

[B]

Absolutely right. And so if someone is at 100% capacity, you can't just add more and expect them to do more. Right. And so, you know, the long argument is, oh, AI is going to replace, you know, employees and headcount is going to reduce and all of those things. You said something there where if someone wasn't at capacity, you know, what do you do? Well, you do you reskill and retrain them so that they're doing more challenging work and offload some of the mundane, repetitive tasks to technology so that they can get that career development because that plays a huge part in their employee experience. It's not just about technology, it's not just about pay, it's not just about training and opportunity. It's not just about trust within the organization. It's not just about, like, I know what I'm doing every day and the C suite is telling me and I see them living it and so I have something to model after. It's all of those things. And so, you know, you have to make sure that it's not just about automation, it's not just about technology, it's not just about, you know, making time more efficient. We don't want to just focus on productivity of the human because then if you do that, then you really make the mistake of saying, well, productivity, if that's what it is, then automation is king, then AI is king, then machine learning is king, and bots and all the things that can quote, unquote, even chat, GPT, right, replace humans in some capacity. I think that there is opportunity to really bring the employee base along this journey as we start to embrace more and more different kinds of technology.

[A]

Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, Check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.

[B]

Sam.