This Week in Startups - How to understand customer engagement | Customer Basics with Salesforce’s Tiffani Bova | E1301

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

Startup Basics is BACK! This series focuses on one of the most important aspects of any successful startup: the customer. On episode two, Salesforce's Tiffani Bova joins to break down all things customer engagement: defining it, authenticity, blending automation with a human touch, social media strategies and more!

Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. We're doing our startup basic series. And in this series, we're going to just focus on customers. Because at the end of the day, when you build a startup, you're really working on three things. A team that builds a product that will engage customers. And that's going to be our topic today with me again, Tiffany Bova, who is the global growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce for the past five years. She's the author of Growth IQ, get smarter about the choices that will make or break your business. And she's the host of the What's Next podcast. Welcome back to the program, Tiffany. Oh, thank you, Jason. Our last time we talked about customer experience, now we're going to talk about customer engagement. What's the difference between experience and engagement?

Well, you know, it's not enough just to connect with your customers. You have to engage with them. And you may say, okay, well, what's the difference, right? Connecting may be, look, I've sent out an email. I blasted out 60 emails to 60 of my customers. and I connected with them. Engagement may be I'm adding value. I'm actually looking at what they've done in the past with me

and then saying, because of that, I want to engage you and maybe share with you what I think you might want next with me. Once you get from that sort of flat connection that I check the box, if you get that email that might be dear valued customer, is that engagement or is that connection? And that it's, you know,

dear Tiffany Bova, is that engagement or is that connection? And then if it's Dear Tiffany, I know you've done these five things with us over the last six months. Others like you, you know, might want to do or have done this. We think it would be really great for you. Here's the benefits for you. Okay, was that connection or was that engagement? Yeah. I'm feeling engaged just from the copy that you wrote there on the fly. On the fly, right? And so it's the one that you know me. You understand what I've done with you in the past. You've personalized it. You've added some value. I feel like in that case. case, you're engaging me in a virtual conversation.

And that goes a long way, by the way, to separate you from those that are just connecting, sending out those 60 emails with the dear valued customer is nothing like the one that I described last. And so I believe that that customer experience and that customer engagement is the new battleground because you can show up with a like product. And if you can beat them on engagement and experience, they're going to come back. So, you know, you go to a restaurant and it's the easiest one for me to do and you have, you know, really excellent food. Service was terrible.

Would you go back? You had just okay food and really amazing experience. Would you go back? And the answer there is, you know, and the great experience might have been they engaged you. They said it was your birthday or here, let me share the best wine to pair with this food. I'm not just taking your order and walking away. And that balance between those two things, we actually see from our research that, you know, customers are now saying 85% of kind of their decision making is based on the experience,

not only the product. And we think that'll get very even around 2024, 2025. So you have to make sure you lean into this engagement. That's fascinating. Because as a foodie, I'm like, you know, I'll take the bad service with the great food. But I do think I'm an oddball when it comes to certain things. There are people who will deal with horrific customer support, terrible, customer service because they love the product.

But there's other cases where we're like, you know what, I just love how this made me feel. I'm going to be more loyal to this brand. And it's everything from when you buy the product to when you have a problem with the product and how people sort of treat you, right? There's an emotionalness to engagement. How do you do that authentically? Because, you know, insert first name. insert first name and then variable product they use.

Insert first name, product they use, variable, how many months they've been using the product. You know, you kind of feel like you're getting worked a little bit. How do you balance the amount of time it takes to do this and to do it well? Well, customers will remember the experience, I think, with a brand much longer than the price that they paid for whatever it is that they purchased. So if I, you know, you're a foodie, Jason, and I said,

okay, what did you pay for that meal? You may go, I don't know, it was 50, 60 bucks, 30 bucks, 100 bucks, whatever. Well, how was the service? Oh, service was the guy, you just rattle it off. You know, it's like, you know, you're in an Uber. How much did the Uber ride cost you? I don't know because it hit my app and it automatically pays. But if I said, do you remember was the music loud?

Did they drive crazy, right? Were they too talkative? You remember that. And so, you know, I would say that even if it comes off very formuletic, right, in the sense that you just said, right? Enter the variable, enter the variable, enter the variable. You still feel like, I care enough about you to put the effort behind that. Yeah.

And when you don't make those investments and another company does make those investments, your customer goes, wait a minute, I'm able to get this over here at Brand A, even if it's in a different category. I know it's possible. And I'm not getting it over here. So they don't care enough about me to make the necessary investment. to deliver that kind of engaged service that this other brand does. And it used to be that we were held up in like like categories, right?

Retailer, retailer, retailer, doctor, dentist, dentist, you know, restaurant, restaurant. And now it's, well, I can get this from, you know, my coffee bar. Why can't I get it from my restaurant, right? Or I'm able to book a reservation and change it on the fly online. Why do I have to call my doctor's office? Why, you know, when I, you know, when they're going to be late and I know something's late, I get a communication, but when I go see my doctor and they're late, no one tells me, and I sit there for 90 minutes, like, my time doesn't matter.

But I know now, right, delivery of things, you can see where it is, you can see if it's going to be late, you can ask them to switch delivery locations. We know that that's possible, but when those brands don't do it, it's really, really obvious to your customers. Yeah, I think if you look at the on-demand companies, you know, Uber, Lyft, Postmates, DoorDash, Instacart. They've all done such an amazing job of making you feel almost overcommunicated. I feel like sometimes when I use Uber Eads, I'm like, I get it.

It's five minutes out. Okay, it's at the door. I have the app open on my desk. I'm watching my ramen come to the house. I get it. But over communicating is much better as a strategy than, you know, not over communicating. I think having people say maybe that was even too much communication is a win. Well, just think about getting a service appointment for, let's say, like, your refrigerator or your washer dryer or your TV, whatever.

It used to be, you know, the service person will show up between noon and six. Yeah. And you're like-noon in six. Right, or noon and four. Yeah. Or noon and three. Point B. You would say, what time are they going to come if you were in New York and you're using a certain cable provider and they would say, we'll be there at Tuesday.

And you'd say, what time? And I'd say, Tuesday is a day, not exactly a time. All right. let's talk about social media specifically in engagement. People get pretty hot on social media. They'll use things like Twitter, Facebook as a way to vent or the App Store reviews or Reddit or whatever message board happens to be. What's the proper way to use social media to diffuse these situations and to maybe turn

somebody who's a real detractor, you know, either neutral or into an advocate again? Yeah, great question. I mean, you know, when I was flying, I had an issue with an airline and I was using the, you know, Wi-Fi on the plane and I sent a message and it didn't get answers. So I just went to Twitter and I just, you know, at mentioned them and said, you know, I'm having this issue. And I got a canned response. It was right away. It was instantaneous. So it checked the box on speed, responsiveness, all those things that might have been the metrics.

Yeah. But then once I asked the second question, it went silent. And so, you know, it was automation then did not up, you know, sort of give me. then the opportunity to have a human come in and actually engage with me. So the challenge with social media is if you're going to use technology to use that very quick response of automated response and it's way off the mark, it's super obvious it's off the mark. And if it's close to the mark and you can tell it's kind of AI, let's say in an automated fashion, and then the human asks a secondary question, you can't go silent, right? Yeah, it's almost worse. It's like such a let

down. They're like, oh, well, you're having a problem with our airline. We're right here in your DMs. And it's like, oh, great, here's the problem. It's like, silence. It's like almost worse. Yeah, but, you know, what they could do is also, you know, that's one, just in responsiveness, but two is transparency. Hey, we made a mistake. Like, this is what we're going to do. But if you try to deflect and act like it wasn't a problem or not respond, you know, that's the kind of thing that now, you know, customers are looking at? Are you transparent? Are you being authentic? Are you trustworthy as a brand? You know, we've been through a crisis of trust, you know, politically, socially, et cetera, over the last couple of years. All these institutions. Right. All of it.

And the Edelman Trust Barometer has been challenged going down, down, down over the last couple years. So it's not just one thing. It's just collectively. And so, you know, as businesses can become transparent and even something like, how do you use my data? what do you do with it do you share it do you sell it like that has a level of trust and transparency same with social media right if they if you post something and they answer um do they you know own up to whatever the mistake was do they clearly you know sort of respond to you and even if they take it to direct message it doesn't need to be aired to everybody but are they doing it in a way that you feel like right they're solving your problems and um look it's a slippery slope if you go down

that route you know you have to be open you know as a a leader to be willing to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly. And what are you going to do to respond to it? And especially if you're in the middle of a crisis where trust has been broken, someone breached, cybersecurity, all those things that are going on, you have to come clean really quickly because people, it's just, they're way too aware of what's happening now. And if something is said, you know, that is not accurate, what are your plans on correcting that, you know, throughout, you know, the social media sort of spear and having plans in place knowing that at some point it's going to happen. It's what you do

when they do happen that matters. Yeah. What do you think of these brands that are, I don't know, maybe full contact for lack of a better word, there's like Stacombs and Wendy's, and they say, you know what, we're going to have a lot of personality with our social media. We're going to be playful or we're going to be full contact. We're going to engage people. That seems like a very high level of, you know, a risk perhaps, but it also seems like it does come with a reward. Do you think that's worth, you know, walking that tightrope or do you think it's better to play it? No, I think it's worth walking that type rope, but that comes from the leaders and the vision and the values around how are you going to be transparent and trustworthy. And even if it isn't good news, like,

what are you going to do? Now, I don't mean just tongue and cheeks sort of pass it off and act like make it everything a joke because even those brands that are, a little more edgy in that way and are a little more on the risk takers. If something pops up that they need to really take care of, they do that as well. But they also don't take themselves so seriously, you know, on social media that they let it define who they are. It's just an extension of their brand. And so who is your brand? What is your brand? What do you stand for? What do you want your employees to stand for, especially on social media? And then what are the do's and don'ts of that and then you kind of have to let it, you know, just organically happen with some oversight.

So once again, you know, having people responsible for it. If you're a founder, you only have five people and you want to push out social media. You know, you have to make sure somebody is paying attention and that's their remit because once again, as we were just saying, if you just ignore it, then social media is never going to become a viable avenue for you to connect and engage with your customers. Yeah, you definitely need to put the cycles towards it, take it seriously because you're going to start engaging people. They're going to, it's going to set an expectation, right? And then if you screw up or you're too cavalier, it is a tight where, a tight rope,

it is a needle. You have to try to thread and it requires focus and it requires time. I think a lot of people make it an afterthought and they don't give people enough time to actually think it through. And it does take time. People think it's, oh, you're just goofing off on social. It's like, no, you're on a, you know, soapbox talking to your customers and potential customers take it seriously. Okay, I think we covered that topic as best we could.

And I hope the audience got great value out of it. When we come back for episode number three, we're going to talk about customer management and the role of digitization in large companies and all this data and how to manage all of it. When we get back on startup basics. Thank you so much to Tiffany and the team at Salesforce for helping make startup customer basics possible. Go to Salesforce.com slash twist to apply for Salesforce for startups. Qualified startups will get 50% off their first year of Salesforce essentials, 90 days of free support, coaching access, and much more. Once again, that's Salesforce.com slash twist to apply for Salesforce for startups today.