Thinkers50 Curated LinkedIn Live with Tiffani Bova | The Experience Equation

Salesforce’s Tiffani Bova, author of the bestseller Growth IQ, reveals the findings from her latest research and the experience equation.

Tiffani Bova is considered one of the pioneers of cloud-based indirect channel programmes, Bova reinvented indirect “go-to-market” tactics in several hardware and services businesses. She is a global influencer in customer experience, digital transformation, business model innovation, and the future of work. In her 2019 book, Growth IQ, Bova explores and explains 10 paths to business growth.

Transcript:

Des Dearlove:
Hello, welcome to the Thinkers50 on LinkedIn live. I’m Des Dearlove.

Stuart Craner:
And I’m Stuart Craner, and we are the founders of Thinkers50, the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking, and sharing the leading management ideas of our age.

Des Dearlove:
Our belief in the power of ideas has been the foundation of our work. Since we launched the first ever global ranking of management thinkers, in 2001, and we’ve published a new Thinkers50 ranking every two years since, and it remains the premier ranking of its kind.

Stuart Craner:
So we’re excited that 2021, a year in which fresh thinking and human ingenuity are more important than ever, is also a Thinkers50 year. Nominations are now open for both the ranking of management thinkers and the distinguished achievement awards, which the Financial Times accurately calls the Oscars of management thinking.

Des Dearlove:
We will soon have the awards shortlist to savor. And then the year’s finale on the 15th and 16th of November, we’ll bring all the excitement of the new ranking and the naming of our Thinkers50, 2021 award recipients.

Stuart Craner:
Our theme this year is ideas with purpose, and our guest today perfectly fits this description. Tiffani Bova is the Chief Growth Evangelist at Salesforce, and the author of the best selling book Growth IQ:
Get Smarter About the Choices That Will Make or Break Your Business. She’s a Thinkers 50 ranked Thinker.

Des Dearlove:
And today Tiffani is going to be telling us and bringing us up to date on her latest thinking and research, which makes sense of customer experience and employee experience and how their combination delivers growth.

Stuart Craner:
So please send in your questions for Tiffani at any time, and also let us know where you are joining us from today.

Des Dearlove:
Right? So let’s get started, Tiffani, your latest work seeks to make sense of what you call the experience equation. What is this and why does it matter?

Tiffani Bova:
Well, thank you both for having me, it’s an honor, not only to do this LinkedIn live with you, but to also be a member of the Thinkers50 list. So thank you for having me today. So here’s what I’d say about the experience equation. It was a hypothesis I used to say on stage all the time, that I didn’t think it was a coincidence that where I work at Salesforce was one of the best places to work around the globe. I think in 17 countries, it’s number one, the remainder of them is in the top three or top five. One of the most innovative companies in the world and the fastest growing enterprise software company. I didn’t think that that was a coincidence. So I went and asked our former CMO, Stephanie Buscemi, “Hey listen, I’ve got this hypothesis. What do you think about trying to prove it out?”

She said, “let’s go prove it out.” So we did some work with Forbes Insight and lo and behold, we had some amazing returns on our surveys, as well as the conversations with executives. This one was just North America based, and we’re just in the middle of doing it globally. But in North America, we absolutely found that the connection between employee experience and customer experience led to faster growth rates. And that’s what we’re really trying to prove out. And I think while obvious, that of course happy employees would lead to happy customers would lead to greater growth rates. You’d be surprised how many didn’t actually pull that all the way through to how it can impact profit and as well, the growth of the company.

Stuart Craner:
And the Genesis of this, Tiffani must go back to the Growth IQ book. I presume.

Tiffani Bova:
Well, Growth IQ was based on 10 paths to growth. And it was through the years of my advising companies as a research fellow at Gartner, as well as being a practitioner in sales, marketing, and customer service. What did we do to grow the business? And how did I advise the thousands of customers and companies that I had globally, on how they can be better and smarter at growth. And within those 10, I focused my very first path on customer experience, but I did not include a path on employee satisfaction or employee experience. And now that I look back, it was probably a miss for me, so this has been an opportunity for me to continue the work of really focusing on helping companies find ways to grow. Faster and smarter, but do so in a way that aligns to their corporate values, their culture, and as well, what it is that their customers need from them.

Des Dearlove:
Okay. So if we can drill down into this research a little bit, let’s just try and understand the correlation. You are saying it goes, employee experience leads to better customer experience, which leads to better growth. It doesn’t necessarily go the other way. If you start with customer experience, does that pull through?

Tiffani Bova:
Yeah, correct. And what we found was that if we found companies that were either hyper-focused on employee or hyper-focused on customer. Like customer is king, customer experiences is the new battleground, which I have said for well more than a decade. That customers are what you have to focus on. It’s customer first, and people were very much aligned to that.

Whether it’s tracking net promoter scores, whether it’s looking at, how those experience are actually driving growth into the business. But we found that rarely would companies be focused on both. And you only can have one first. So I now say, employee first and customer centricity, those two things are the way to align the business. But as you said, Des, it does not work in reverse, right? It does not go from if you have a very strong customer experience, because it might just be completely frictionless commerce.

It could be that the products are, really just well designed. Doesn’t necessarily mean your employees are happy, but if your employees are happy, you have a much better opportunity to have happier customers. And this isn’t just about the soft stuff, right? Like, are they happy? Do they enjoy their job? It’s do they have the tools that they need? Are they enabled to do what they’re supposed to do every day? Are they empowered to make decisions on their own and make them quickly? Are the processes too restrictive to allow them to do what’s best for the customer as well? Like what they want to do, day to day. And so employee satisfaction and employee experience is more than just, are they happy? It’s more than just culture. It’s more than the technology they use or how you collaborate or what your company’s values are. It’s all of those things. And so I would say this, the definition of experience, both on the employee and customer side is completely different than it was say, 18 months ago.

Des Dearlove:
So what, what surprised you about the research, Tiffani?

Tiffani Bova:
I think it was what I just said, that lack of focus on both. That so much of my conversations have been about customer experience and why it’s important and why it’s important to focus. As I said, it was the first path in my book, Growth IQ. So I felt it was really important, and those that were really honed in on that, saw faster growth rates. They also had less churn. They had more loyal customers, they were more likely to forgive them. There’s lots of power behind delivering really compelling experiences. On the employees side, I knew that you had to have happy employees, because you just don’t want to be hiring and losing employees day in and day out. But tying those two things together and then hearing the fact that so many did not have any connection points between the two, meaning, they didn’t have shared metrics between potentially the Chief Human Resource Officer and the Chief Marketing Officer, that owned customer experience and maybe employee experience. And rarely did they ever pull the CIO or the IT organization into that conversation, to get the three of them together, to align around what’s the vision and strategy for keeping our employees not only satisfied but productive.

And then what’s our strategy on how we can improve the experience customers have with our brand. And how we do that in concert, and I think that that’s what was the most surprising to me, is that very few did that.

Des Dearlove:
Now you alluded to the fact that the world has changed in the last 18 months. This equation possibly has changed in the last 18 months. In this post-pandemic world, we like to think it’s post-pandemic anyway, or this new world that we are in, what is changed about the employee experience and what people value? Because it feels like there has been a seismic change in terms of what we expect as employees and the whole employee experience, indeed. So from your side, what do you feel has changed?

Tiffani Bova:
Yeah, and I think that that’s the point. I was having this conversation with a colleague of mine. We were talking about, “Hey, what do you, what do you think the definition of employee satisfaction, employee experience might be?” And that’s where we really landed is maybe 18 months ago, it might have been, “I could just talk about my own organization, that I work at is, it might have been the floor we have for wellness, the coffee bar, we have a yoga studio, we have a meditation room. We have all of these perks when you’re in the building. We don’t have any of those right now. And so that experience may not be in the office. And so how do you recreate that experience when people are working from anywhere, that’s one aspect of it.

The other is that, when we did a survey about what do employees look for now in their employers, we found re-skilling, we found safety and wellness at work. We found that they wanted to have ways in which they could collaborate more with remote teams. All of a sudden, it very much shifted to this getting back to work in a safe manner, but also the opportunity to re-skill. And not that those things weren’t important before, but now they’ve bubbled to the top five. Which means from an employee experience perspective, “look, we’re like giving them all these perks, right? Coffee bars, free lunch, whatever it might be.” And now it’s about “listen, are our employees safe at work? Do they have what they need to be successful if they’re working from anywhere? Now, that’s a very different quote-unquote employee experience.

The flip side of that, on the customer side, is now you have something like contactless payment. We did some research and found that 90% of people still want to do contactless payment. Buy online, pickup in-store, appointment economy. I want to book an appointment to go to a store on high street, where I never would’ve had to have done that before. I might do it for a doctor, but I wouldn’t do it for a retail store. But now retailers are saying, “look, there was a lot of benefit there. If we create an appointment ability for our customers, we know how many people will be in the store. We can give them really true one-on-one service. They don’t have to wait.” That experience level has now been risen. It’s very different. So now the customer experience has shifted as well, around just a couple of those things I said, right?

The appointment, contactless payment, buy online, pickup in-store. Even the entire digital interaction of things happening via video, doing doctor’s appointments via video, or having an eye appointment via video. Whatever it might be that now you really see those consumer be behavior shifting, which means that that customer experience has forever changed as well. And the last thing I want to say on that is most of those examples I gave were kind of B to C, right? Business to consumer. And I get a lot of pushback when I say that, many companies may say I’m a B to B company, right? I sell to businesses. But now we have these super consumers that have been in home, not only in their personal lives, but in their business lives for the last 14/15 months. But depending on where you are in the world, those habits have forever changed. Which now means that the blurring of the lines between those two happens absolutely at that experience layer, right? Consumer experience is now bleeding into business, right? Let me Uberize my business, let me Amazon my business. That’s how you think about it.

It’s much more about the experience and the frictionless interaction than it is about that brand and you trying to become them. So that’s the difference between how experience and that definition has changed over the last year, year and a half.

Stuart Craner:
You’ve done some great sessions with Tom Peters recently, Tiffani. And Tom, for those who you don’t know is a co-author of In Search of Excellence Business Blockbuster in 1982, the first book that really created the business book market. And what’s depressing, really is that Tom was writing about customer experience and customer service in the early 1980s and I wonder, what do you learn from Tom?

Tiffani Bova:
Oh, so much. I love this story. Tom was, as you said, In Search of Excellence, co-author of it. And back in 1982, my stepfather gave that to me in probably 1983, along with Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, those two books. And while I might not have understood them at 17 years old as I would, when I read them now, it was the very first business book that I ever read. And fast forward some 40 years, almost 35 years. And I got an opportunity to meet Tom, he endorsed my book, we’ve become friends. And I get this opportunity to interview him. And he says it a lot better than I, right? He says like “people, what else is there?” Like business is about people. It’s all about people, right?

And he’s very clear on why that is, but it’s also about bringing out the excellence of those people, as a leader, showing up in an excellent way, right? In search of that excellence, but also enabling and empowering your people to be their best selves as well. And so I think that that is a great foundation, right? It was all about that employee and, as well, about the customer. When we started doing the conversation, I immediately reached out to Tom and said, “Hey listen, I’m thinking about this. Let me forward you this research that we have. What do you think back, like tell me back what you think.” And what he said, and what many have said is, that we found that those companies that did, those two things, right? Aligned employee and customer, found a 1.8 X growth rate. So for a billion dollar brand, it’s a $40 million impact.

So it’s significant. And so what he was thrilled to see is, we actually tied it to financial improvement, that it isn’t just for the sake of investing in people, because it’s the right thing to do, although it’s the right thing to do. But it also makes good business sense. So I posted up on LinkedIn a few weeks ago. “If the CEO says we’re going to invest in training” and the CFO says, “well, if we invest in this training and they leave, isn’t that a waste?” And the CEO comes back and says, “we have to invest in our people. If we don’t invest in them, that’s a waste.”

So ultimately sort of understanding how the investment in the people and the process and the technology leads to an improved customer experience, drives faster growth rates. And 1.8 X is nothing to shake a stick at, right? It can really give you a competitive edge. So he was thrilled to see that we tied it all the way through to a revenue number.

Des Dearlove:
Tom was never a shrinking violet, but he gets more strident as he gets older. Which, no wonder he’s lost none of that, that passion for people really, is how you describe and for purpose, so that’s great.

Let’s move on to another thinker, that’s well known to the Thinkers50, Rita McGrath. I saw a blog she wrote recently and she was saying, actually in lots of ways, customer service and the customer experience is actually getting worse. And we all have the experience, it is the technology to some extent, we can’t actually get hold of another human being. You can transit through an entire company organization and never speak to another human being. Let’s say it can be extremely frustrating. I mean, where does that fit with this? Because sometimes the technology, we aren’t moving in the right direction.

Tiffani Bova:
Yeah. And second REA posted that I immediately direct message to it. I said, “oh, we have to talk about this.” Right? Because I think that in many situations, people are nervous of technology replacing humans. And in some cases that may be the actual situation. But ultimately this is about the power of human and tech. I think that is the new power couple. And so when speaking specifically about customer service, when the pandemic first hit sort of April/May of 2020, and customer service call centers, like all of a sudden shut down, and everyone was working from home. You have customers who still want to be serviced. You have business that still want to serve customers, but you don’t have people in call centers. And so, very quickly, you had to respond. So we had a lot of clients that deployed kind of customer service bots, to be responsive online, right?

To chat very quickly, maybe answer very rudimentary questions, direct people to FAQs, direct people to links. So that you could quickly serve them while only a handful of people that were working in the call center are up and running in their home call center. Right from their kitchen or their living room or their bedroom, wherever it might be. And so using technology in that way to augment the human, always in the angle of improving that customer or experience. But also on the employee side, right? If the bot or the technology can take care of those very low level questions that are very transactional, you can scale that much faster than you can by hiring people. The other thing on customer service and technology, right? Leaning into that customer experience, is the fact that this is much more about, how do you let customers create more intimacy with you in a self-serve way, so that you can scale it overall. That requires a very different thinking mindset, which is, is your customer service organization a cost center, or is your customer service organization, a revenue generation engine?

And based on how you answer that question, I can ask an executive very quickly, is your customer service organization viewed as a cost center? And if they happen to say, well, yes, like that’s how we see it. I know immediately that they’re not very customer-centric, because if they were, they wouldn’t say, “look, you only can be on the phone for five minutes. You have to answer the call in the first two rings, or 30 seconds. We have to resolve this case cannot go longer than five minutes.” That’s very internally people process oriented. And I, as a customer might need 20 minutes of your time, but metric is five minutes. So you’re going to either get me off the phone, quickly or say, “you know what, let me follow up with you.” And then maybe don’t follow up with me or you rush me off the phone, or you stay on the phone with me for 20 minutes and then you get in trouble from your manager.

And so that’s that rub of the employee, right? Being empowered to serve the customer. The customer having expectations, you’re going to solve my problem in one engagement, versus I have to chop it up because you only can stay on the phone for five minutes. And so, that’s why technology, to me, if deployed correctly, because the basis of our comment was it’s getting worse because of technology. And I would say, it’s not a technology problem, it’s a people process problem. You have to make sure you’re deploying the technology with the human in a way that the employee and the customer feels like it was still a very positive experience, more streamlined, less friction. All of those things, and so that’s where I think the confusion happens, that if it’s just viewed as a replacement, it’s never going to be as good as a human. But if you put it as being able to augment it, that’s where you really can improve both right? Employee satisfaction and the customer experience. So I can’t wait to continue the conversation with Rita.

Stuart Craner:
Got people joining us from India, Poland, Bangladesh, Dubai, UK, Peru. A good question from Erica Lucas, how can we encourage the closer collaboration between HR and sales and marketing, and what’s getting in the way?

Tiffani Bova:
Yeah. So right now what, most of the time, gets in the way is metrics. And so having silos between those groups, people often say break down the silos. I’m not a fan of breaking down the silo as much as I am bridging those silos. And that bridge between them could be sharing of data, which is one of the reasons that that collaboration doesn’t always happen, a sharing of a metric. So is it a net promoter score or customer satisfaction score? Is it a churn rate? Is it an upsell cross-sell number, whatever it might be, right? That aims those people, specifically sales and marketing, in the right direction, because of the metric. And how you actually set up the collaboration and potential handoff between those groups, the unintended consequence is the fact that the customer feels like they’re dealing with separate companies, when they deal with different divisions of your organization.

Specifically, I’m talking about sales, service, marketing. And so, how do you pull HR into that? How do you pull IT into that? Creating a working group that says, “okay, we have to work as a unit, always with this in mind.” That we are trying to grow the business in a profitable manner, make sure our employees have what they need to perform their job, in a productive fashion, right? And we want to deliver these compelling experiences.

So the decisions we make should be around that. That should be sort of that true north. But if you have sales, making a decision in one direction, marketing making a decision in another direction, and maybe HR making a decision in another direction, right? Just hiring the right salesperson, high-performing salesperson, in a broken process without the right technology, that amazing salesperson will still struggle. So you have to pull all that together. So most of it is the disconnection of teams and the silos. A lack of vision between from the top to really outline what’s important. Burnout and turnover tends to get in the middle of it, because you start to get a rhythm with teams and then people burn out and leave. And then the last one really is the fact that you just don’t have that connective tissue from a metric and compensation standpoint. So those are usually the top reasons why that doesn’t happen.

Des Dearlove:
Okay. I see Gina Cox is agreeing with you. “HR and sales can be bridged through data sharing, we have to work as a unit,” she says. We talked about the linkage from employee experience to customer experience to growth. The trouble is, as the company grows, that can put more pressure on the employee experience because suddenly we’ve got more customers. We’ve got to keep the standards up the whole thing. How do you make sure that remains a virtuous circle rather than a disconnect? There was a great line in the Forbes Report, you’ve got to get employee buy in or they’ll burn out.

Tiffani Bova:
Yeah. Well there’s so much that you just said there. And I think that, it is a challenge, that as the business scales and grows, you want to reinvest. So do you want to hire more sales people, spend more marketing dollars, launch more products, enter new markets. You’re going to make a decision on what you’re going to do with the profits, in reinvesting in the business. To continue to accelerate growth, or to maintain growth, whatever your goals are. But ultimately, if you’re going to have a hyper growth opportunity, that’s where employee experience really has to stay front and center. And it is especially now, even though people are like, “look, we’re more productive working from anywhere, working from home and not, commuting for two hours or the distractions in the office,” but we’re working longer.

There’s more burnout, right? There’s mental health issues. There’s all kinds of ramifications of this sort of working anywhere all the time. So you have to, as leaders, put in guard rails to make sure that your employees take the time they need to recharge. Make sure you have enough capability on the human side, going back to what we were just talking about. And if you don’t, how can you augment that with technology, to give the perception of scale on the human level, but really technology is picking up more and more and automating a lot of those mundane tasks for the humans. To focus the humans more on what they were hired to do. And so as you scale, you always want to be revisiting and not annually, or not every three years, or not during your strategic planning. Constantly assessing what’s the temperature of your employees.
I could just give us as an example at Salesforce. Initially we were surveying every single month and July, August, September, of last year, we started seeing a spike and burnout. People were burning out, anxiety was higher, and so the executive team stepped right in and said, “look, we’re going to make some changes. We’re going to give no meeting Thursdays, one Friday off a month. We’re going to set our Google calendars to make 20 minute meetings and not 30 minute meetings, and 50 minute meetings, not an hour meeting. Not to do more than three zooms at a time, in a row. We put all these rules in place to try to pull back on some of that pressure. And sure enough, we saw it start to level back off again. So you have to make sure you’re always keeping tabs on that employee and customer, especially if you’re in hyper growth mode, especially if you’re seeing that 1.8 X growth rate. That’s when burnout really happens, and so keeping a pulse on that cannot just happen once a year. It has to happen on a much more frequent basis.

Stuart Craner:
No meeting Thursday sounds like a good idea. Good question from Norma, “since so many of the good goods and services customers buy, come through a channel or influenced by a partner, how does the partner get integrated into the customer experience?” So I guess the thing there is the customer is quite complicated and multifaceted now.

Tiffani Bova:
Great question. And if you know anything about me, I grew up in the indirect channel. I worked for value added resellers, selling technology very early, and stood up some of the very first cloud resale programs, to sell with and through partners for some of the largest tech companies in the world. And so I am a firm believer, it was a path in my book, it was actually two partnerships and competition. Is two ways to really turn the dialogue growth, and so you have to think if you are selling with, and through partners, that that experience is now a little more complicated, right? Because you have brand partner, that experience between the two, and then you have brand partner end user, or customer retailer, business, whomever it might be. And you want that experience to be good with your brand.

And so while you may not have visibility, all the way through to the supply chain, you want to make sure that if that customer decides to reach out and communicate with your brand directly, that it is a seamless interaction. Does it mean you pass it back to the partner? If it does, make that seamless. If they can come to you, then you want to keep your partner in the loop. But selling through and with, in some parts of the world, it’s two and three tier distribution, right? It goes from original equipment manufacturer or someone who’s a vendor goes to one supply chain, one distributor, another distributor, and eventually to the end user. I mean, that even gets more complicated. This is where data is really critical, but sometimes in that supply chain, the data is not always readily available. So if you don’t have access to the data, if you have access to have line of sight all the way to the end user, you have to create some kind of community that allows that customer to connect with you and not necessarily to bypass the partner or to disrupt that relationship.

But you want to make that connection available as long as you can stay in touch with that original partner that did the deal. So yes, it’s more complicated, but it just requires focus. And the same way you would map out a direct engagement with a customer, you need to map that out on the channel as well. And you may learn that certain kinds of partners or channels are no longer as effective for you, that you can’t maintain a strong experience for both the partner and the end user. And so you either may want to eliminate that channel, augment that channel, enhance that channel or find another one. But that is a great question because so much goods and services, especially in the CPG space has to go through partners or retailers that may not be the original manufacturers. So great question, more complicated, but possible.

Des Dearlove:
Okay. We have a question from Gina and she says, “I’m hearing that training is not keeping up with the technology assisted customer service delivery. What recommendations would you have or do you have?”

Tiffani Bova:
Yeah, that’s another great a question. I think that training is another one that we saw in the top five of what employees, right? It was kind of that whole re-skilling and training. So understanding what your people need to do in order to keep their skills sharp. Now, just-in-time training, when they’re in an application, something like Salesforce, where they’re trying to get a deal going from one stage to another stage, there’s just-in-time training that might come through, as a video or we have a free learning management platform called Trailhead. You can go to Trailhead and learn about the difference between machine learning in AI or AR and VR. What’s the fourth industrial revolution. You can get a lot of that training, but then you can get training things like, how to do a deal opener, how to write a better, more compelling email, how to have a good video meeting, how to be a better storyteller, whatever it might be, whether you use our technology or not.
And that’s really about investing in training, not only our own people who are in our ecosystem, but anybody who’s looking to re-skill themselves. And so training has to be part going back to how do you get HR involved, right? Well, who’s your head of training, what are they training? Are they just training that kind of speeds and feeds training? Like how did enter into your CRM system or how to put a quote together, or how to use a particular technology. Or is it really training on the skills side? You know, how to be a better communicator or how to even learn how to listen better. There’s all kinds of ways in which training can be deployed. But once again, if you say we’re employee first, then training should be a huge part of that. That’s an investment in your future.

And then if you’re customer centric, are you doing things that actually have impact to your customers? So if you train your field sales on how to ask better questions and uncover any other situations, your customer’s going to have a better experience. So it’s about training more broadly, especially on things like the soft skills. Going back to Tom Peters, like he basically believes what else is there? You know, it is really about the soft skills because that’s the people side of the business. And it’s definitely not something that’s taught in school. It is something you have to learn in the day to day. So training, big investment in it, I’m a huge fan of it. I think if you don’t invest in yourself, no one else will so create your own self training curriculum, but then go to your employer and ask to either take external classes, or go back to uni or whatever it might be. But ultimately re-skilling and training is critical going forward.

Stuart Craner:
So where does this go next? Tiffani, have you, you got a book, a new book coming out. People keep asking me “when’s the next book to follow up from Growth IQ?”

Tiffani Bova:
Yeah. So we’re talking about it right now. We think it’s going to be something around this employee and customer experience. We’ve got some great work that we’re doing at the moment that’s uncovered a gap and a white space. In a lot of the conversations, there’s been a lot of books about both of those topics, but we really wanted to try to bring it all the way down to what we found on organizations not connecting those two, tying it back to a really strong growth rate. What does the maturity of companies that are focused on this look like, why should they do it? And then how they can actually go back and do it, as well as examples of those that have been super successful in aligning those two things, as they look for growth.
So that’s probably what’s going to happen, but over the last year, if I had been able to sort of get it all together, I would’ve begun it earlier. But hopefully in the next six months or so, we will start putting pen to paper and begin the process one more time.

Des Dearlove:
Okay. We have a nice comment, nicely summed up from Norma. She says “the soft stuff is the hard stuff.” So true. Tiffani, your life must have been turned upside down by this whole pandemic. I mean you’re somebody who was always traveling all the time. How have you adjusted? And are you raring to go again, to get back on airplanes, trains, and cars and get back out in the world?

Tiffani Bova:
I am, today is the day actually, I’m in southern California, that we come out of the official sort of shelter in place order, 15 or 16 months later. So today’s the day everything opens back up at a 100%, which I’m very excited about.

Yes, in 2019, I flew 275,000 miles or 600,000 kilometers and gave a 100 keynotes in 6 continents and met with hundreds of clients and then boom, 2020. I landed from Sydney on kind of March 11th or March 10th, got in a day before the US shut down that international travel link. And so it has been a different year, I’ve learned a lot, there’s been a lot of social issues that have come to the forefront. So I’ve spent a lot of time sort of educating myself about those things.

But, ultimately I can’t wait to get back on the road and have these amazing conversations in person. And while I get to do more of them, last year I did 185, I’m doing more. I miss people. And so this is a great way, obviously LinkedIn live’s and doing things with Thinkers50, is a great way to stay connected. But I surely cannot wait. Hopefully I will be in London, in-person, in November for the next Thinkers50 awards. Let’s shoot for that.

Des Dearlove:
Absolutely.

Stuart Craner:
We look forward to that. Tiffani, we’re we’re out of time today. Check out Tiffani’s work at tiffanibova.com. The report we were talking about is the Experience Equation, published by Forbes Insights in partnership with Salesforce. Some amazing research and really interesting statistics, which will certainly make you think. So that was a taster of Tiffani’s fantastic work, where technology meets humanity. Next week, we’ve got a Lisa Cohen, so we have hope you can join us then. And thank you very much, Tiffani, and everyone who’s joined us today. Thank you.

Tiffani Bova:
Thank you everybody. Thanks.