It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.

—Warren Buffett

Something I think that gets lost in the fray is spending a lot of time as marketers, as service people, as business leaders, extrapolating what we think people want. Unfortunately, we don't often make a real effort to walk in their shoes, meaning, going through the actual process as though you're the customer. And by the way, in our everyday lives, we often are the customer. Ironically, we seem to have a kind of convenient amnesia when it comes to this fact. We erroneously believe that we couldn't possibly be providing a terrible experience for our customers because we put so much effort and spend so much money in making the experience great.

But truth be told, the digital experiences we deliver to our customers, employees, and others are in many cases sorely lacking in basic human empathy. They don't allow for the things that we as humans get stuck on, get frustrated by, or simply desire. Instead, we deliver a lot of pain and frustration. That is all the more reason to apply empathetic design to our customer/employee-facing digital systems, humanizing the experience. Let's consider seven ways to do just that.

Be the Customer

If you haven't actually been a customer of the thing that you're trying to sell—a product, a service, whatever it might be—then you shouldn't start any new digital initiatives, especially large, complex, and expensive ones. And I would argue that you shouldn't start the small, simple, and inexpensive ones either.

All design approaches should start with reference to real current experiences to identify the moments that matter—what works, what frustrates, what could be better. That, in my view, is the number one way to determine whether your process—or more important, your experience—is broken and where to direct your focus to fix it.

We advertisers and marketers have long claimed we were being empathetic when we spitballed ideas in a darkened room, or when we pursued heavy-duty research projects and segmentation. We'd spend anywhere from 8 to 16 weeks conducting quantitative and qualitative surveys spending hours in rooms with focus groups talking to people. That was fine—we'd invariably end up with a lot of insights that we hadn't always anticipated. We could then tease out insights because we had so much data—more than we had even a few years earlier. It was a bit like Moore's Law on steroids.

So, how can we take a step back and start with what that end-to-end experience is, including all the things that go wrong? We always tend to assume everything is going to go right, and of course that's rarely the case. Do this, and people will buy that. Put an item in the cart, and we've got something that will pop up and tell the customer there's another product they might want to buy to go with what's in the cart. We do those kinds of things, and we think we're done and can move on to the next challenge.

Not by a long shot.

In truth, what we've done only provides flat processes and experiences that go nowhere because they're not truly empathetic. They don't take into consideration that maybe, 4 times out of 10, someone makes a mistake in ordering, and here's what that looks like. And by the way, we make it really hard for them to fix that mistake without having to jump through a whole bunch of hoops. Or they can't find something, and they quit the site in frustration.

How can you really know what customers go through if you aren't experiencing your site for yourself as a customer? I personally make a point of doing this. When I start a new engagement with a new client, in almost every case, I begin the engagement by visiting the client's site and pretending I'm a customer—experiencing what customers go through, both the good and the bad.

For the longest time, I thought we could apply our analytic methods and tools, look at the data, see what the behavior is, and then divine what is actually going on without taking a step back—that is, going through the process end to end and notating what that felt like, and what went right and what went wrong. That was a mistake.

Now, I start every client interaction with, “I actually shopped your site—the content is confusing,” or “I couldn't find an item because this link was circuitous,” or “When I went to buy something and I made a mistake, I couldn't easily fix it and that was frustrating,” or “You gave me something that took four weeks when I thought it would only take seven days, and you didn't tell me in any meaningful way through messaging how to manage my expectations.”

I see it time and time again, even with organizations that are really good at building some pretty decent experiences. They still get some of this stuff wrong, and I can't help but think that it's because they didn't put themselves in their customers' shoes. I will sit down with a PowerPoint and show a client—without even using a finger on a keyboard for coding—what I think a good experience might be. We go here next, click that, and just animate it. The decks turn out to be very long, but they do help me and my clients visualize what things could be, where those moments that matter are, and what you might need to do to get over those.

And that's the big piece here; you've got to go through it, you've got to be the customer—even when you're serving somebody else. But, explains Ragy Thomas, founder and CEO of Sprinklr:

It's not going to happen because somebody mandates it, it's going to happen because there's an enabling piece of technology and the company shifts its thinking. So, two things have to happen. One, is the company has to go from brand-centric to customer-centric. And two, there has to be an enabling piece of technology that allows you to go from brand centricity to customer centricity. And every CEO who doesn't become customer-centric will be replaced by a CEO who is customer-centric. We're talking about a 10-to-20-year transformation, at the end of which we look radically different.

I might suggest that customer-centrism is not enough—brands need to become life-centric and strive to understand the context of their customer's journey as much as the immediate need.

John Legere, the former CEO of T-Mobile, was famous for having a phone line installed in his office specifically so he could listen in on customer service calls. Not just once or twice a month, or even once or twice a week, but often for three hours a day. In this way, he could hear for himself what T-Mobile's customers had on their minds—the good, but most often the bad (it was a customer service line, after all).

While Legere's approach was a step in the right direction,it didn't really get to the heart of the customer experience. The twist on that is going full force and being the customer, because that changes your perspective from “I can look at things and see that some of our customers are frustrated,” to “Now I can really feel what it's like being one of our customers.” There's a big difference between those two perspectives.

Knowing what it feels like is visceral, and it's the visceral feelings I find to be the most empowering because we're humans. And as humans, in many cases, we act because of the visceral and emotional feelings we experience. What we often do to be practical and tactical about it is create storyboards for the walk-the-mile piece. Show people what happens next, where the inflection points are—the moments that matter. A customer can't get what they want in the time they want because they can't find it. Consider what would happen if you sent someone an invitation, but then you made it hard for them to buy or research the thing you invited them to buy.

Understand What Data Is Sufficient to Drive That Improved Experience

What are the things that would make the experience better for your customers? For your employees? What would you have to do to get the right concept, the right person, at the right time? There's a whole raft of things that would enable that, starting with data. What data would you need to act? We consider these questions day in and day out, but we don't necessarily do it through the lens of empathy. We instead do it through the lens of process, or expediency, or efficiency, or what we think people absolutely need but nothing else. That gives us the minimum threshold to get something done.

So, let's say you've identified five moments that matter in the entire story for a customer, what data is just enough to make something happen? Do you have to collect more? Can you divine it from other things that are part of the organization? How do you knit that together so that suddenly, you have an equation that actually causes something to happen? That's one of the hardest things to do because what is just enough? Gene Cornfield explains that the eternal thirst for more data is often driven by chief marketing officers (CMOs). Says Gene:

The reality is that almost all CMOs are data-driven, it just depends on what data they're driven by. I have a little illustration called the CMO Brain that I did as a joke and shared with a few people.

My illustration shows the most primitive right-brained CMO, I call the Chief Makeover Officer. What's the natural thing you do as a CMO when you're new in your role? You change the brand—it's “We need a new brand.” They measure things like brand health and brand perception. These CMOs are driven by data, but it's typically about the brand.

A somewhat less-primitive, but still largely right-brained CMO, is the Chief Media Officer. They're concerned with reach, frequency, and awareness. They're still measuring things, but what they're measuring has more to do with media.

Then you start getting into left-brained CMOs. You have the Chief Metrics Officer who typically didn't grow up in agencies—they might not have even been marketers and their company might not even value marketing. You find this a lot in B2B. They're looking at leads generated, MQLs, SQLs, multitouch attribution, and maybe revenue. The focus is usually on more business data, less marketing data—or marketing data and business data.

You then have probably the most advanced left-brained CMO, which I refer to as the Chief Manipulation Officer. How do I learn so much about you that I can get you to do what I want? How do I ingest from social, and all these third party and second party sources, to build my customer 360, to get you to optimize for the outcomes I care about?I want to get you the right offer, but it's not about what you want, it's about how I can best manipulate you to do what I want.

And then you have the highly advanced right-brained CMO, the Chief Meaning Officer. They ask: “How do I understand what's important to you? How do I measure how well my team, my company, is actually performing for what's important to you?” They recognize that when people achieve a purpose important to them, they generate value for whichever company enabled them to do so. Sometimes that value is revenue, sometimes that value is share of spend. Sometimes it's lifetime value, sometimes it's market share, sometimes it's retention. But realize that all those growth-oriented metrics that the company cares about, every single one of them is a byproduct of a customer achieving something important to them, something meaningful to them.

The Chief Meaning Officer doesn't ignore business metrics, doesn't ignore marketing metrics. But their primary focus is on: “How do I measure what's important to my customers? Because logic says the better that an organization performs on the expectations, or outcomes important to its customers, the better those customers will perform on the outcomes important to the business.”

Usually, when we think about all the data we need to get the job done, we tend to go overboard—the equivalent of “We'll get a triple-cheeseburger with large side of fries and a jumbo chocolate shake with whipped cream and a cherry on top.” But when we get all that data, we're overwhelmed by it and that slows down the process.

But if you turn it around and ask, “To create a human experience with just enough data, what is that ‘just’ bit, and can we be much lighter in general as we create these triggers across the experience that we're trying to create?” And that is an interesting question. Consider the example of chatbots. More often than not, when an organization creates a chatbot and they put it out in the wild, people get frustrated because it doesn't do everything that they thought it would do. The problem is you're not actually talking to a human, you're talking to an algorithm, and an algorithm is not sentient.

So, what do you do?

Chatbots and other forms of technology are in many ways like children. To humanize them, you have to put them in a nursery and teach them. And you need a team that's designed to not just look at the data, but to look at how people are using it, and what they're getting—or not getting—out of the questions they ask. When you do that, you might find it necessary to change everything you've done and start from the ground up.

Understand What Technology Is Needed to Enable the Experience

As marketers, we may think we need a CDP (customer data platform), or some form of data repository, or a CMS (content management system). You name it, there's technology out there to meet most any need.

The fact of the matter is we get caught up in implementing really big platform decisions that could enable a whole raft of great experiences. But the problem is that people often aren't thinking about the contextual, human element here. Instead, they're thinking about things such as: How can I get more throughput through these systems? How can I take data and move it from one place to another? How can I create a campaign real fast? How can I customize content in an email and send it out? How can I trigger an event in an online experience?

What is needed is a CEP—customer experience platform—but not a whole new set of technologies. A CEP is more a state of mind and set of organizing principles utilizing the data and technologies you may already have in a way that that supports those moments that matter to your customers. Gene Cornfield offers an example of a situation in which the technology exists to create those customer moments that matter but are not being used effectively:

One day, I had the response to a client RFP due at noon. I was on the Acela train from Boston to New York, and we all know that Wi-Fi on the Acela is not always reliable. In fact, that day it was out. So, I tethered my laptop to my phone and there I was trying to upload this 10 MB document.

Partway through the upload, I received a text on my phone from my provider. The text said something like, “You've hit your bandwidth threshold for the month and we're now throttling your bandwidth back to some pitifully slow speed.”

“What?” I thought to myself. “Why aren't you asking me? Give me the option to either say, ‘Sure, fine,’ or ‘No, I'll pay for more bandwidth.’” In that situation—with the clock quickly ticking down on my deadline—of course I'll pay for more.

As I was waiting for the file to upload, I could tell it was going nowhere fast. So, I was faced with a decision: should I cancel the upload and risk the client not getting it? Instead, I went to the app on my phone. I searched for the place to change my data plan, but the search was going extremely slow too. “I can't even change my data plan!”

I abandoned the app and called my provider. Before I was put on hold, I got the happy recording, “Did you know you could do most things in our app?” Not if you throttle my bandwidth, I can't! I finally get through to somebody, and they said, “Hi, this is so and so, how can I help you?”

“How do you not know how you can help me?” I asked, incredulous. “You just throttled my bandwidth 10 minutes ago—you should know that. And then I went to the app to try to change my data plan—you should know that. Why are you asking me?”

I'm sure the person on the other end of the phone was thinking that I was an insane person. They were probably thinking, “I've never talked to you in my life, how would I know that?” My expectation was that provider as an entity should have recognized these interactions that I had with the company. And right or wrong, the human expectation is that I would've been heard, and you would remember our prior interactions. It's a very human expectation.

Actually, our expectation as humans is that corporations are people—they're entities. Our relationship with a company, from the company's point of view, might be the sum total of our transactions. But that's not how we as humans measure a relationship.

Unfortunately, organizations don't always think about how marketing flows directly into service or sales or commerce and back again. And the moments that matter across each could be so much better if brands took some time to think about the transitions, where information flows—how information should flow—based on the behaviors, but more important, based on the contextual knowledge you have of the customer.

Again, that's a new frontier that few organizations have had tremendous success with to date. And even the ones that have some pretty powerful algorithms that could say, “If you bought this, customers like you buy that.” You only have to remove one piece of data, such as who's on the account at the moment, for that whole system to fall apart. Plus, you're talking about proxies—just because I bought this right now doesn't mean I'll buy something else tomorrow. I was in the context of something, and now I'm not. And so, why would I?

Years ago, traditional marketers using segmentation would say the same thing. These segments are somewhat immobile. You do a ton of work, and you find the three out of five segments that are going to be the most receptive to your marketing campaigns, or your new product or service launch, or whatever it may be, because they have these characteristics. So, all we need to do is go and find people in our various databases—internal and external—with the same characteristics and use the technology that we've got to do that.

Again, what happens is that people assume these things are immutable, that they are fixed. And in truth, I believe that segments are not fixed. They're as fluid as context will allow.

Just because I'm painting my house today doesn't mean that I need a roomful of new home decor tomorrow. It may be just this isolated event, and you just needed to understand where I was in that. But, next time, maybe you can anticipate where I'm going. And that's the thing—most marketing is still, even today, very rearview mirror. We're looking at and analyzing the past, not seeing into the future. The technology's there, but it's not getting selected and applied wisely, and it's not being used in the most effective way.

The idea of minimum viable product (MVP) is common in software product development. According to Eric Ries, author of Lean Startup, this is the version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least amount of effort. Instead of creating some massive system or process that does every possible thing in the world, and maybe a bit more, just create something that does the one thing you need done in service to the customer.

I have an ongoing debate about this with Grad Conn,¹ former CMO of Sprinklr. My position was that when it comes to making investments in technology, companies need to be a lot nimbler and more agile. Grad's standpoint was different because I think he's at a point now where a lot of his clients are saying, “We need to figure out how this all scales. If we can't figure that out, if we can't go big, then go home.” That's a different side of the coin I often hear, which is, “I've made these major investments in technologies, but I don't feel like I'm getting the value I need out of them.”

Again, it's a visceral or gut feeling. And the reason is that the transparency isn't there in terms of assessing what it is that success looks like and what return you're expecting up-front. A lot of these things occur because we're comparing different platforms with one another based on their features and functions versus their desired business impact. But then the folks who make those decisions don't necessarily always go down the path of saying, “By the way, if I'm spending $10 million on this platform, I need to make a $100 million back over the next 18 to 24 months.” And that's the challenge.

So when Grad says, “Actually, I think we need to be able to figure out how to scale sooner,” he is right. We need to move beyond small bite-sized entrepreneurial gestures. We need to push ourselves to figure out now how to make money from these investments from the start—be bold or go home. How do we justify the expense that we've made? That's one way of looking at it.

But that still doesn't necessarily negate the need to get something done. Maybe again, the word context is important here, which is, depending on the context and where you are in the business cycle and what you're trying to do determines whether you push for scale from the start or iterate toward the end goal. Doing something is far better than doing nothing and waiting for the perfect storm of things to occur together so that you could scale something. But we should absolutely have a path to scaling baked in when we're thinking of doing this kind of digital transformation.

Which takes us back to the moments that matter.

You've got to put a price tag on the moments that matter. Let's say you got to a sticking point with a customer because they couldn't find the parts they needed. They found the SKU eventually, but it was hard for them on the commerce side. So they took that SKU, they put it in Google, and they found the item faster or for less cost someplace else. That is a moment that matters. That is an inflection point. They would have gone with you, but you made it hard for them to complete the transaction, so they went with someone else.

The thought was you take that and then you say, “Let's build a business case around it. We'll build a business case around the moment that matters in an experience that's important.” And that's the thing we put a price tag on. It might, for example, be worth $500 million in additional incremental parts sales. Well, what greater motivation could you have to make an investment than to know that if you do it right, you're going to make 5 times or 10 times more on it? And that's the lens we must use when we consider technology.

Measure Value Drivers

The number one question I get asked by clients is this: How can I understand the real value I should be getting from these data and technology investments? Measuring value drivers is a key part of empathetic design. Without this piece, even the most people-centric system falls apart. Without this piece, the walking-a-mile in your customers' shoes stuff is all touchy-feely and it doesn't have much obvious measurable impact. Without this piece, you can suck up all the data you want, but you're not going to use it for anything, a lot of it's just going to fall on the floor. It's like the classic I Love Lucy episode I mentioned in Chapter 3, where Lucy and her best friend Ethel dropped more and more chocolates on the shop floor (and stuffed into their mouths and clothing) as the boss kept increasing the speed of the conveyor belt.

Without this piece, you might make tech investments that on paper look like good choices at the time, but I guarantee you two or three years from now—if you're even around and running the program—someone's going to tap you on the shoulder and ask, “You know, we spent $10 million on this. Did we make $100 million on it? $200 million? $500 million? Did we make anything from that investment?”

Most people will scratch their heads and answer with a blank stare because they've moved on long ago. That's the thing. This value piece must be in place now, not later. If we're a data-driven, experience-based company, then the value drivers include the data, the technology, the human, emotional, and visceral empathetic stuff, and the lens. The lens is the financial return on our investment—is it going to give us a return? If so, how quickly? If not, should we be doing something different?

Which leads us to the next question: How should we measure the lens—the financial return on our investment?

Generally, you would do this in the same way you would if you were starting a business or any other venture. You would ask questions along the lines of: Who's my market? What's the nature of demand? What's it going to take to deliver on that demand? What's the market share I can expect to get? What additional considerations do I need to make in terms of having to get out there and market the things we're selling? And then, what's left over?

That's your return on investment—you put this money in, and you get that money out.

In many ways, I don't think that's mutable. It doesn't change—it's what you do. But few organizations go this far; they don't take it to the level of thinking about the moments that matter and putting a business case around that. It's a microbusiness case, and that's the thing that's often missing.

I think about Capital One as the ultimate analytic company. The thing that's amazing about them—and it's still as true today as it was 10 or 15 years ago when I knew them—is that they made a real commitment that everyone in the company is going to be extremely analytically oriented. They can take a blank piece of paper, without having done a ton of work just yet, and do a quick back of the envelope to tell you whether a new card product is going to have any value for the company whatsoever. And then they'll go and do the heavy lifting later. Anyone in Capital One has the ability to measure the value drivers, and they do.

Iterate Often

The human journey is a learning process, and none of us should think that we'll ever be done with it. Despite our best efforts or our deepest fantasies, it's never going to be “Okay, I stood up this platform and now I hand over the keys—I'm done.” That's neither a realistic nor a smart outcome.

As part of the value framework we create, there needs to be an educational learning component that in effect states, “We got 80 percent of the way there, but now we need to be very structured and apply the same process to make sure that we are adapting, and the investments are adapting, in a way that makes them better every week.” Otherwise, it'll just be, “Okay—let's wait until the next code freeze, and then we'll …”

Customers don't care about your code freeze. What the customer does care about is trying to use their credit card to complete a purchase but can't because your form encryption isn't functioning correctly, leaving 10 percent of your customers who can't buy anything using their favorite browser. It happens more often than you might think, and you probably don't even know about it. You might instead think the problem is a result of abandoned carts.

These are living systems that are in a state of constant flux and change. Making improvements on them must be a structured, iterate-often process. And then, whether it's mystery shopping every two weeks, or every month, or whatever, seeing what it feels like combined with the empirical data that you're getting from the behavior of your customers or employees—that's where it gets interesting.

The same goes for content. Organizations create content and they have creators of content, but they don't always think about the curators of content that can market the content. I think, if you have a huge content organization, it needs to be more like a media company than like a content-origination company.

Make no mistake, creating structured, iterate-often processes is a commitment, but it's a necessary one to find the success you seek.

So iterate often. You're always learning, always improving. You're never done.

Build an Empathetic Organization

Your organization is only as strong as its weakest link. And right now, we're still in the mode of keeping our operations somewhat distinct and separate. Someone always has responsibility. There's the CMO for marketing, there are corporate communications, there's the service team, there's the manufacturing team, there's the sales team, and so on. But today, more than ever before, these functions are blurring together.

If you're a CIO, you need to be aware of and think like a marketer or a salesperson, and not just treat these groups as clients. And vice versa, if you are a CMO, you need to be not just empathetic, but familiar and comfortable using, diagnosing, and specifying technology and data.

The correct answer is not, “I'm the CMO, let me go out and get an agency.”

The best organizations have CMOs who are conversant in analytics, technology, digital, and most important, in empathetic design. Imagine if your entire C-suite was able to think that way, and they might not have to be all smooshed together and whatever, but they could navigate those transitions between the various groups better, more effectively.

Ultimately, empathy is key. Explains Sprinklr's Ragy Thomas:

You need to have emotional empathy. You need to be passively intimate. All this will come back to: Do you have the ability to know the customer in real time? Do you have the ability to listen to that customer in real time? Do you have the ability to work across all your faculties to do the best? We have a framework that we call “Listen, Learn, Love,” which is really the foundation of Sprinklr. The ability to listen to your customers, the ability to learn from what your customers tell you. What is it that matters to you? Who are you? What are you trying to say to me? What is the issue? And then, showing love for your customers across all your silos. Can I show you that I care across every digital and non-digital touchpoint? That is the key.

Use the Trust Index to Measure Brand Health

The health of your brand is something you should measure externally and internally on a regular basis. Why? Because there is a direct correlation between your overall brand health and your ability to accomplish the business plan that you put forth. This, to me, is the linchpin.

As people have moved more and more to modern channels versus traditional digital channels such as websites, that creates a whole raft of new expectations. If you are conducting conversational commerce, you'd better be authentic and able to extend the brand promise to that experience at that moment in that context.

One way of doing that or making sure is that you put all those channels and all those motions and operations through a lens of, are we building trust here? Are we building the relationship in some fashion? It doesn't have to be a palsy relationship where you're constantly talking with the customer 24/7. A relationship can be anything. It should just be an affinity for the brand, and it's top of mind when you have a need, but maybe you don't always have that need. It evaporates quickly if you violate the trust equation.

So what is the trust equation?

It's one part figuring out how your company becomes more authentic—its employees, customers, and vendors.

Multiply that with what you know about them. Tell me three things about your most valuable customer your competitors don't know.

Then, divide by how that customer is feeling about you at any given time, because what you know about them and how you project yourself with them goes to what kind of sentiment and affinity that customer is going to have for you.