The Experience Equation
The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get your employees to love their job.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
The Experience Equation is Bova's post-Growth-IQ correction: she wrote ten paths to growth and left employee experience out. Joining Salesforce made her suspect it wasn't a coincidence that one of the best places to work was also the fastest-growing enterprise software company. She partnered with then-CMO Stephanie Buscemi and Forbes Insights to test the hypothesis, and found brands with higher employee satisfaction had higher customer experience scores and 1.8x faster growth rates. The mechanic is combinatorial: unhappy employee plus happy customer is bad, unhappy plus unhappy is bad, but a happy employee facing an unhappy customer has a shot at turning it around. The research also found brands are typically hyper-focused on CX or EX, rarely both — the fix is forcing the CHRO and the CX owner onto a shared agenda.
Origin
Bova omitted employee experience from the ten growth paths in Growth IQ and calls it her miss in full vulnerable transparency. Arriving at Salesforce — best place to work in 17 countries, one of the most innovative, and the fastest-growing enterprise software company — she formed a hypothesis and asked CMO Stephanie Buscemi to help prove it. The resulting Forbes Insights study became the foundation of her next book.
Core principles
- 01Employee experience and customer experience are one system, not two departments.
- 02Brands with higher employee satisfaction post higher CX scores and faster growth.
- 03A happy employee facing an unhappy customer is the only combination that can be turned around.
- 04Most organizations are hyper-focused on either CX or EX, rarely both.
- 05The culture decisions you make at 3 employees are the ones you live with at 75,000.
How to run it
- 1
Test the correlation in your own business
Look for whether the teams with the happiest employees also produce the best customer outcomes and the fastest growth. Treat it as a hypothesis to prove, not a slogan.
- 2
Audit which side you're hyper-focused on
Most brands go all-in on customer experience or all-in on employee experience, rarely both. Name honestly which one your investment and metrics actually reflect.
Watch out Claiming to do both while only measuring one is the common self-deception.
- 3
Put HR and CX on the same agenda
Sit your chief human resource officer (or whoever owns hiring) down with your CMO or chief customer officer and get on the same page. In most companies this meeting has never happened.
Pro tip The question is not just who do we hire, but what is their experience once hired.
- 4
Design the full employee lifecycle, alumni included
Extend the experience design past hiring and employment to the alumni stage — you want leavers referring good people and boomeranging back.
- 5
Set the commitments while you're small
The decisions, systems, processes, culture and feeling you install at 5 or 10 people are what scale. Make them deliberately at the point when they're still easy to implement.
Pro tip Look at founders who baked commitments in on day one and never had to retrofit them.
Watch out You cannot get to $50M or $100M while churning people because it's a bad place to work.
In the wild
Bova pitched her hypothesis to Salesforce CMO Stephanie Buscemi and ran a US study with Forbes Insights linking employee satisfaction, customer experience scores, and growth rates.
→ Brands with higher employee satisfaction had higher CX scores and 1.8x faster growth — a $40M impact for a billion-dollar brand, and meaningful even at $1M.
Marc Benioff committed Salesforce to giving 1% of employee time, 1% of equity, and 1% of software on day one, when there were only three employees and it was easy to do.
→ The commitment scaled with the company to tens of thousands of employees because it was designed in before scale made it hard.
Zappos pushed the model to its limit — no roles, no rank, no authority, with everything organized around the customer experience even if that means an agent sits on the phone for eight hours.
→ Cited as the far end of what full EX/CX alignment can look like in practice.
Common mistakes
Treating EX and CX as separate departments
When HR and the customer experience owner never share an agenda, the company optimizes one at the expense of the other and forfeits the compounding growth effect.
Stopping the experience design at the offer letter
Focusing on who to hire while ignoring what the experience is once hired — and after they leave — costs referrals, boomerangs, and brand advocacy.
Deferring culture until you're big
Systems, processes and culture are cheap to install at three people and near-impossible to retrofit at scale. Waiting means churning people, which caps growth.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders scaling past the point where they can personally touch every client and every hire.
Not ideal for
Solo operators or businesses with no employees.
From the transcript
“The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get your employees to love their job.”
“Brands that had higher employee satisfaction had higher customer experience scores, had faster growth rates — 1.8x faster growth rates.”
“If you have a happy employee dealing with an unhappy customer, you have a shot at turning it around.”
From the episode
Tiffani Bova: Growth Hacking Your Business
Tiffani Bova