Empathy is about standing in someone else's shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes.

Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.

—Daniel Pink

Creating a truly people-focused organization is ultimately all about empathizing with our customers and employees—walking a mile in their shoes as the old saying goes. It's taking the time and expending the effort—solo and with your team and larger organization—to actually think about and experience what it's like to be your customer.

To gather information about your complete range of products and services, to buy them, to put them to use in your daily life, and to discover what happens when things go right, and when they go wrong. It's also about power sharing—trust cannot be built unless all parties feel they are participants in the process. And guess what? This is not an HR function; it is something that needs to devolve to every individual. Seventy-six percent of executives in an Accenture survey said that organizations need to dramatically reengineer the experiences that matter.¹ They can do this by putting people first.

All the feedback we generate as we experience for ourselves what it's like to be our customers should be baked into the experiences we create or that we ask our technologies to deliver. Unfortunately, it is really, really hard. Most organizations that I encounter say they want to be more customer or employee centric; they want to be more agile, entrepreneurial, and innovative. They know these are qualities critical to ensuring they don't miss the next big growth wave sparked by access to technology and data. However, for all the intent, it is still pretty clear that most institutions remain locked in to processes and thinking from the last century instead of the twenty-first.

We think in terms of marketing and commerce, we think in terms of sales, we think in terms of customer care, and we think in terms of all the processes required to make these functions work. We decide who is responsible for each and how we bring those elements together as though they need to be assembled and negotiated.

But what we really need to do is erase those rigid distinctions and realign our organizations to the concept that, in this day and age, when many if not most people within an institution touch the customer in some way, we can ill afford to color within our traditional lines.

So what can we do to solve this problem—to give authentic, empathetic human experiences a more prominent role in our businesses today while building trust and driving measurable growth?

I propose the creation of a new operational framework—the blur—with the CEO taking core responsibility for orchestrating and driving a people-centric approach to the business and the experiences required to drive real trust and loyalty which in turn will drive real strategic impact.

This new breed of CEO must be able to motivate, innovate, and ask the tough questions—not only, “What is the impact to our bottom-line?” but “Are we thinking of people first in all of this?” That is, how might a decision impact a customer, employee, vendor, and owner? This, I believe, is the starting point for changing the way all the different operational organizational elements work—sales, marketing, IT, and so forth.

We keep talking about humanizing this and transforming that, and everyone gets excited about these ideas and nod their heads in support. But then we go right back to the way we have always worked, putting customer experience onto the back burner. We have to get that report done and on the boss's desk by the end of the day; we have to figure out why a customer's order didn't arrive on time. It's tyranny of the urgent, not the important.

But if you had a top-down commitment to understanding your customer, that would be transformative in most organizations today. Not from a typical, “who is your customer?” standpoint, but instead, “what is the context of those customer needs?” and “what's important in terms of building better interactions to drive better relationships?” Then having someone who can see how that customer lives, breathes, and engages gets ground down across all the processes—all the organizational touchpoints. That, I believe, is where it gets interesting.

Experiencing What a Customer Feels

I have done a lot of customer research during my career—hundreds of segmentations and conjoint analyses and targeting exercises—but I oddly found that the more data I had at my fingertips, the more I grew to feel that I didn't really understand the customer as well as I should. A colleague of mine once told me the best way to understand if a client really knows their customers is to ask them to take out a piece of paper and write down three things they know about their most valuable customers that their competitors don't already know. It is rare that anyone (marketer, salesperson, or C-suite executive) can truly answer that question. There is always something missing because, more often than not, we haven't walked in the shoes of an ordinary customer.

Increasingly, I've personally gotten in the habit of becoming a customer of many of my clients. For example, in early 2020—pre-COVID—we renovated a couple of our bathrooms. I decided to select my client's products and go through the same virtual design experience that any other customer would go through to see what it was like. This wasn't anything that I was paid or asked to do, and the client had no idea I had signed on to be their customer.

The company has physical design centers where you can view the company's products and meet with professional interior designers who at no charge will work from your ideas to create a finished design. For a relatively modest fee, however, you can instead choose the company's virtual bathroom design service, which includes several online meetings with a designer along with custom 3D renderings, a curated box of swatches and samples delivered to your home or office, and referrals to remodeling companies in your area.

The promise sounds pretty good, right?

It did to my wife and me, and we were excited to use the service.

When we had completed the design process, I gathered my notes and offered some candid feedback to my client. I even created a PowerPoint to illustrate visually all my experiences (good and bad) as a customer. I also shared some of my experiences with other companies and start-ups that also do online, virtual design for comparison.

The first realization was that to me (and most customers, I would submit) starting with design is key. People need reassurance, especially when making a complex and expensive purchase such as a kitchen or bath. Just having an option to connect with someone virtually or in person is important, and this particular experience was very hard to find.

I proceeded to explain that the design service was easier to find via a Google search than on the client's own website, and once we eventually found the service, the value proposition wasn't all that clear. It seemed like they were hiding it. Other newer virtual design offerings like Decorist, Havenly, or Modsy (all start-ups) were very clear up front about why I should use them and what to expect, so had any customer used those services, they no doubt would be expecting something similar.

And in truth, once we signed up and went through the process and received a design, the quality of the outcome was very high. It was the journey to get there that seemed disconnected from the context of our needs.

Where the start-ups got users engaged quickly and provided areas to collaborate at each step, my client was much more traditional in its approach. Instead of instantly learning about our needs and preferences and engaging in a collaborative dialogue, after we got well into the virtual design process, my wife and I had to schedule a formal design interview. Instead of developing several concepts quickly, we had to wait several weeks to receive just one, and only the designer could edit it. Instead of providing an interactive design area where we could make edits or look at different options on our own, our experience was static.

This disconnect continued through to the store as well. When we arrived, I told the salesperson who greeted us that we had started the virtual design process and asked if she could look us up in her system to at least see if some of the products were available to view.

She unfortunately couldn't find our virtual design as the systems were not connected and there was no web access in the store. But she was a trouper, and after many valiant attempts to access different systems—and about 35 or 40 minutes of waiting—the salesperson was finally able to find our virtual design order and pull up our design and list of materials. My guess is that had I had been an ordinary customer, I might not have waited those 35 or 40 minutes. But I did wait because I was curious about how this interaction with my client was going to play out.

Once we were able to pull up our order, I quickly realized it was only a flat file—she couldn't click on an item, say a faucet, and order it directly from the company. She would need to manually enter that item in another system and create an order form. When I asked if we could do that, the very sweet, very nice woman replied, “Oh, no, you don't want to do that.”

“Why not?” I asked, knowing full well that we had been hired by the client to enable and encourage direct commerce.

Now here is what was wonderful and very human: clearly wanting to look out for my best interests, the woman said, “Because you'll pay more if you buy the products directly from us online—I can't apply any discounts. You want to go through a contractor or a dealer who can.”

So here's the moral of my story: As a customer willing to spend a considerable amount of money, I wanted someone who could help with a design and, more important, had the flexibility to collaborate and edit in real time; I wanted the process to challenge our thinking and provide solid options. But above all, when we were ready to buy, I wanted the process to be easy and transparent. Whether buying online, in the store, or via chat or phone, there should be one record of our design order, access to notes, and a smooth ordering process no matter who was dealing with us.

The last thing I shared with my client was something these agile start-ups included in their value proposition: if we changed our mind or thought of something else we wanted, or discovered the items we bought on discount later, they would advocate for us. That last one we didn't even need to worry about as each of the start-ups had a virtual concierge that would look for 90 days after our purchase and advocate for a refund from any of their partners without us even asking.

While my client's salesperson was very empathetic to my plight, she was essentially sabotaged by the company's existing technology, data, and processes. The power to advocate for the customer and ensure a good experience was somewhere else.

The good news is that after I relayed my story to my client, the company took action to improve its customer experience based on it. The epiphany was that the key perspective in its digital transformation was missing—the customer story was not represented up until that point.

Why is that important? We're all customers, and we have good experiences, bad experiences, and some in between. Putting yourself in the shoes of your customer is the best way to discover whether your systems are serving them well and where there are shortfalls that need to be fixed. There's really no better way to find out if your systems are designed for empathetic response than to experience them for yourself.

The Power of Empathetic Design and The Moving Truck from Hell

I have rented moving trucks many times in the past, and it's never been a big deal. More recently, the company I typically use seems to have put a lot of effort into technology to make the experience easier and more efficient for the customer, creating smartphone apps and providing better automated communication.

Of course, I personally think that's great. I can book a vehicle online or through an app, then walk into the truck pickup location, and I don't have to spend a whole bunch of time doing paperwork or taking care of other administrative trivia. But recently, when I went in to pick up a truck I had reserved online the night before, it was unfortunately not ready to go. And that was just the beginning of my experience with the moving truck from hell.

It is difficult to ensure consistency in an industry that is franchised, and in this case, something obviously went wrong at the office. One, the vehicle wasn't ready for pickup; two, equipment was missing; and three, someone else's furniture was still in the back. We were moving from our old house to our new house and our schedule was pretty tight that day.

Staff members were very apologetic, and our customer service guy sent someone out right away to pull out the furniture and get the things I ordered into the truck. Fifteen minutes later I was on my way.

But that was a foreshadowing of our ill-fated misadventure.

I drove the truck to our old house no problem and loaded it up. When I was ready to take everything over to the new house, I turned the key in the ignition and … nothing. The battery had died. Not only that, but the check engine light came on, so the truck clearly had a few issues. Luckily, I was able to use the app to let service know what was happening and I also called them on the phone to schedule roadside assistance. Unfortunately, I was stuck in the phone queue for more than an hour waiting for a customer service rep. Customers should never have to wait that long just to talk to a customer service rep, especially when their vehicle or product has broken down, but alas, as we all know, this is not all that unusual.

Fortunately, I was parked in front of my old house, and the truck was in a safe location. I didn't have to worry about someone running into it. But I could imagine if someone were driving their vehicle on a dark, busy, or rainy freeway and it broke down there. Waiting an hour or more to get put through to a customer service rep could quite literally turn what was just an inconvenience into tragedy.

When I finally got put through to a service rep, I explained the situation and was told that roadside assistance was on the way—they should arrive in about half an hour. The rep also explained that I could track their arrival using the app on my phone. Again, I thought, “Great! What a handy thing to have.”

Score one for digital.

I checked the app every five minutes or so and received regular text alerts as the arrival time counted down. When the clock was down to about a minute to go, I was feeling relieved. I'd get my jump start and be back on the road soon.

The timer hit zero, and then it went negative. What?!? Minutes passed.

I thought, “This is even worse.” I called the customer service number again, and this time it took me 35 minutes to get through to a rep. I had sent some texts too in response to the alerts. In my desperation, I was throwing everything I could think of at the wall, hoping something would stick. The rep then confirmed that something had gotten messed up with the roadside assistance, but that help would be on the way as soon as possible. They would send a new roadside assistance mechanic ASAP. I obviously wasn't a happy camper.

In the meantime, I decided I had had enough of waiting, so I looked for another way to remedy the situation. I remembered that the garage around the block where we normally park had a portable battery charger. I went there and asked the guy—we're friends—if I could borrow the machine to jump-start the truck. He offered to help, and he wheeled the battery charger over to our house. He gave the dead battery a quick charge and the truck started right up. By that time, I had lost at least two more hours of my time trying to get back on the road. I drove the truck to our new house, and I later found out that roadside assistance had finally arrived 10 minutes after I left.

I completed the move and needed to drop off the truck at the rental lot. It was after hours and dark by then—I was running several hours later than I planned—but they left the yard open for drop-offs. The lot was located on the western side of Chicago in an industrial area that is fairly desolate at night. The lot itself was below grade, making it a little intimidating at night, and no one was there but me. At least I hoped that was the case.

I had to use the app again to return the truck. The app instructed me to use a QR code plastered on the side of the building to initiate the return. Just one problem: the QR code didn't work because it was too dark—there was no lighting on the building. I even tried my phone flash but that didn't work either.

Take away that earlier point I gave to digital.

There I was, all by myself in the dark, and I couldn't for the life of me get the app to automatically initiate the drop-off process. I finally went into the app and found a work around to manually start the drop-off process. I had to take and upload photos of the inside and outside of the truck, where it was parked, the odometer and fuel gauge readings, and more. Not a one-and-done kind of thing by any means.

As I was working my way through the app, I was painfully aware of the fact that I wasn't situationally aware of what was going on around me. I was too busy concentrating on trying to get the app to work to notice if someone had wandered into the lot. The app wasn't functioning the way it needed to function and I was getting increasingly frustrated (the entire day had been an exercise in frustration). Every time I thought I was done with the drop-off process, the app would tell me to take a photo of something else or fill in some additional information. It just went on and on and on.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

This was a case where the moving truck rental company clearly intended to make people's lives easier through a better digital experience—customers can pick up and drop off their truck without all the usual paperwork or waiting in line, and the company doesn't need to have employees manning their lots 24/7.

But the reality was nowhere near the intention.

Instead of making customers' lives easier, the company was actually making their lives harder. The company's systems—both human and virtual—should have been more flexible meeting both real human needs and business goals.

The company's intent was good, but its execution was not. And it wasn't just customers' lives that were made harder, employees had to suffer too. After waiting on the side of the road for more than an hour to connect with a customer service rep, I'm sure many customers let the reps know in no uncertain terms just how frustrated they were.

The People Quotient

From what I've seen, the more technology companies put into trying to make people's lives better, many of them are not thinking empathetically about what the repercussions are of either getting it wrong or not fully thinking it through. That's why I suggest the idea of building into these processes and customer touchpoints mini release valves that can expedite, clarify, and more.

Accomplishing this requires better technology and data, but it also requires a commitment to humanizing the organization—injecting the people quotient into the equation and redistributing the relative power of the C-suite with frontline managers and employees to improve the customer experience. I would go so far as to recasting the CEO as the chief community officer because the company is only as healthy as the community it represents—customers, employees, vendors, shareholders, and other stakeholders.

Let me go one step further: Every key executive from the top down needs to have their role recast to some degree to reflect the importance of the people quotient so they can honestly say, “I have personally gone through this myself, and here's what it feels like to be our customer—it's not great. Let's figure out a way to make it better.”

But they need to be empowered to do so, and all need to recognize that technology and data can be used as tools for this purpose but are not a unilateral solution for it. Do this and I believe it would be far more powerful than doing more focus group surveys. It's the difference between telling a story as a movie or looking at a snapshot in time.

The organizational construct for this idea is very different from today's distinct operational groupings. It's the blur I talked about earlier in this chapter, which requires breaking down the walls between groups and thinking about every customer touchpoint as an opportunity to strengthen the brand, influence loyalty, and drive faster innovation. A fluid, agile team of people is needed who span across all those different touchpoints and operational elements. They see themselves as marketers, salespeople, technologists, data scientists, and service advocates.

This blur enables the organization to share insights and take action faster. Individuals have a travel passport for the organization and they can say, “Wait a minute. We're bombarding these people with marketing messages that say, ‘we stand for this.’ And in truth, there's no evidence that we do. We're not following through.” Or they can say, “We sent people these offers, but they found them to be irrelevant and irritating, so they tuned them out. How are we going to fix that?” Or they might say, “We sold our customer a product, and if they have a problem with it after they bought it, they're mostly on their own—we're not stepping in to help. That doesn't make sense.”

I know that it's complicated. You may have 15 different types of technology that all have to be knitted together, and you may have seven different groups that deal with these things because that's just the way the organization grew up. But honestly, it shouldn't be that way. We should be able to go to the chief executive officer and say, “We've got to change this today—right now.” Maybe we've got to streamline it. Maybe it isn't always putting more people on it—instead, it might be that we need to provide customers with better access to the information they most typically search for.

Whatever it takes, it should be the full-time job of the chief community officer and their team to seek out points of customer dissatisfaction and frustration and get them fixed. Only then can you truly begin to humanize digital.

Get It Fixed

One time, when I was working with a large retail organization, I looked at their social accounts to see what customers were posting about their experiences with the company. Based on the posted comments, the feedback this organization was getting from customers was loud and clear: there was something wrong with the commerce experience.

I brought this to the attention of leadership and others in the organization. “I'm seeing lots of bad customer experiences on the social channels,” I said. “Something's wrong.”

The uniform response was, “We know about these things, and we've already fixed them.”

Based on what I was continuing to see on the company's social, reviews, and feedback forums, this was not the case at all, so I decided to dig a little deeper.

I was working with a partner who was scaling machine learning and they wanted to do something with us to prove it out. I asked the partner if I could give them all the unstructured feedback we were getting just from the company's website—not social, but the website itself—and if they could come back with a ranking of the most common problems. They said, sure, they would run through all the data and give us the top-three issues out of a thousand.

They took the flat file of every comment that was on the website, and then they ran it through their machine-learning processing capability. And sure enough, when they came back with their report, of all the things I had been told were already fixed, not even one of them had been.

The top three customer complaints were things along the lines of, “I buy something and then you tell me, three weeks later, you don't have it in stock. What am I going to do now?” Or, “I put something in my cart and it disappeared.” Or, “My promo code wasn't applied when I got to the cart.” These seem like pretty straightforward stuff from a technical point of view, but very irritating to customers.

I feel that we genuinely believe we have solved these kinds of problems because we humans naturally think very linearly. “I was given a to-do, I did it, and therefore it's fixed.” But we are not empowering people to go back and actually be the customer—to be on their side and ask, “Did we really fix it? Did we really make it better? Did we really do something that's in our customers' interests?” “Was the innovation that we innovated really that earth shattering, or did it just create an added layer of complexity?”

I honestly don't think you're going to get to that point unless you have someone who can play the role of chief whip. Not just from a customer perspective, but from an employee one as well—they both go together.

And I think they have to be able to swoop around and create a little chaos, not unlike the Chaos Monkey Netflix developed to randomly create failures in production systems to ensure no one gets too complacent in the status quo. Only then will stuff really get done and customers and employees get the attention—and the solutions—they deserve.

My UK Summer Adventure (I Think I'm Just Unlucky Renting Vehicles)

Before you think all my personal experiences with brands have been bad ones, I'm going to tell you a story about an experience where some empathy went a very long way for me personally. Yes, the overall experience was a bad one, and digital didn't help, but an empathetic person jumped in to make it much better when we needed her help the most.

When I was in college in the UK, my parents would come over every summer and we'd rent a car and drive around the island. They would usually set up the rental and take care of everything and I would serve as the driver. Because at the time I wasn't particularly savvy with how to drive a manual transmission car on the opposite side of the road (a lot to think about if you don't already have the required muscle memory), my parents' one request was that the car have an automatic transmission. Automatics weren't readily available for rent, however, and they had to be ordered long in advance.

One summer, my parents flew into Heathrow, and after we picked up their bags, I took them to the car rental office. I believe the company had just set up their UK operations and was having teething issues. We're reasonably patient people and we don't get easily flustered, but after waiting for an hour in a queue that wasn't moving an inch, it was clear something was not quite right.

I asked what was going on and found out that their computer systems were down. They had to send the agents out to the car park to grab each car and drive it to the office with the keys after they did the paperwork. We understood that things go wrong, so we weren't too upset about the situation. We eventually made it to the front of the queue and handed over our reservation paperwork for the automatic vehicle.

The rental agent's face suddenly drained, and he said, “Well, we don't actually have this car. We have a manual transmission car if you want to get that.”

No, we didn't want to get that.

I told the agent, not entirely in jest, “If you want the car back with gears, you probably need to find us an automatic.” Trying to be charming.

“Sorry,” replied the agent, “but we don't have one.”

“When do you think you'll have the car that we reserved—the one with an automatic transmission?” I asked.

“We'll have to wait for them to come in,” the agent said, with an air of indifference. “Maybe in an hour, maybe in four, I have no idea.”

By this point, the rental agency manager had walked up behind the agent. I asked the manager, and I was very calm about it, “Do you have any automatic transmission cars right now?”

“Yes,” said the manager, “we do have one. But it's a luxury vehicle.”

“Okay,” I suggested, “why don't you give us that one?”

My usual experience with car rental companies in the United States is that if they have a car that meets your needs, and they have dropped the ball in some way, they will give you an immediate upgrade to get you on our way. Okay, I know that doesn't always fly everywhere; we can be a little spoiled in the United States. But while it's not a perfect situation for the company—they'll probably lose money on the deal—they're going to have a happy customer who's going to be on their way and maybe even post a nice review, come back the next time, and recommend the brand to friends through the stories they tell.

But the manager stuck to the letter of the law as she understood it. In the meantime, other people in the queue were getting into shouting matches with the agency staff about their vehicles. It was a really bad scene. I wouldn't stand down, though. I wasn't getting angry and I didn't lose it with them, but I wasn't going to just wait in the corner.

About two minutes later, another woman who worked for the rental agency came over to see if she could help. She had come over from the United States to help set up their new operation.

She whispered to me, “Here are the keys, here's your paperwork, now just go.” We thanked her profusely. She fixed our problem, and we were on our way—in the car with an automatic transmission that the manager wouldn't let us have unless we paid a premium. Her action was empathy personified.

But we're not done with this story quite yet.

After driving all over the UK, and having a terrific time, we brought the car back 10 days later. The woman who had helped us was still there—she was doing all the paperwork. She recognized us and we thanked her again. “Thank you so much for helping us—you made my parents' trip really special. Do we owe you any extra for the upgrade?”

“No, no, no,” the woman replied. “But if you could write a note to our head office, that would be really helpful.”

“We're happy to do that, but why are you asking?” I wondered.

“When you left with the car 10 days ago,” she said, “the manager tried to get me fired for giving you the keys.”

“That's crazy,” I told her. “You did something that was right. You felt empowered to do it. You probably were empowered because you came from the central office. But the manager tried to do you a dirty because you helped a customer.”

And 19-year-old me did write a note—to the company's CEO. And, to my surprise, he wrote a really nice note back. He said, “I looked into this, and you should never have had this experience; none of our customers should. I know the employee in question and she's fantastic, that's why we sent her to the UK. We're thinking of promoting her.” At the bottom of the letter was a coupon for a free rental for five more days.

My point is, we are all people with the same hopes, aspirations, and frustrations, but we don't always feel empowered to help get something done, to make it right. We're afraid to draw outside the lines to make the technologies, systems, and processes work the way they should—in the interests of our customers, employees, and management. It's a major missed opportunity and the result is a lot more angst and problems and costs.

Whatever your position may be—CEO, CMO, CIO, VP of sales, manager, and so on—empower people to do right by your customers. Be empathetic to their plight. Solve their problems then and there. But you must bake this reflex into the DNA of the organization, otherwise no one will feel enabled and there won't be a vehicle for employees to use to take action if they do.

And consider having your CEO take on the role of chief community officer—someone who continuously pulls back the covers on your organization, looking for problems like the one we experienced at Heathrow and ensuring they don't happen again.

Reducing Your Customers to Tears Is Not a Great Experience

My wife and I had our first baby when we were living in New York. Looking back, this was a very exciting time for us. Our lives were on the precipice of momentous change—we didn't know what to expect, we didn't know what we needed. Every day there were new questions for us to get answers to. We figured that getting registered at a store for the stuff we needed to take care of our new arrival would be one of the easiest things for us to do. The company's machine must be well-oiled, right?

We decided to get signed up on the Babies “R” Us gift registry, and we headed over to the Union Square anchor store in Manhattan. After we arrived and tried to get registered, we quickly realized that things weren't going well at all.

The registry computer systems weren't working—one woman was in a full-on meltdown because they might have deleted her account. They had devices you could carry around the store to scan items into your registry, and those things weren't working either. We were beginning to wonder if they were real. It was a bit like Chris O'Dowd in the comedy series The IT Crowd tricking his boss into thinking his computer was set up with voice commands. Chris's boss spent the rest of the episode screaming into his mouse.

In addition, none of the inventory tags were set up correctly. And to add insult to injury, we had to wait a long time just to get set up on the registry.

Here, Babies “R” Us had people streaming in who wanted to be their customers, and yet the company hadn't figured out how to make that experience as pleasant as they possibly could. Having a baby is one of the most joyful things in life, and you don't want to burst anyone's bubble or give them a reason to never return. If you do the right things for the right people at the right time, you can derive a nice income stream from people who will be loyal to you forever because they had a great experience.

Sadly, on that day, in that Babies “R” Us, we were all having a terrible experience.

Afterward, I went home, and instead of writing an irate letter or calling customer service to complain, I jotted down some notes about our experience. For every issue enumerated, I also added in a potential solution. I managed to find the CEO's email address—he was an alumnus from my consulting days. I didn't know him personally, but I was able to track down his email address and send him a note.

I explained in my note that I wasn't trying to criticize the company (my general rule is fix the problem not the blame), I just wanted to give them some ideas for how to make the experience better. From better management of inventory and scanner systems, to appointment scheduling, to social media and reviews, I gave him my thoughts on how to be a bit more empathetic and why that might actually return real value.

I sent him an email that Saturday, and that evening he got back to me. “This is terrible,” he said. “I talked with my direct reports about this, and it totally makes sense. I see this stuff too. What you're saying is sensible and I would like you to come visit me at headquarters to discuss further.” Man, I didn't expect that kind of response, but looking back, a good CEO would take the time to follow up and should be deeply connected to their customers and employees.

You see these kinds of challenges day in and day out with any organization that you care to mention—even the best of them. And the bigger the organizations are, the more challenging the problems can be to resolve.

What You Can Do (Today)

My point still stands: if someone—or a group of someones—is appointed as a people-centric, empathetic weight in an organization, then the customer and employee experience will naturally improve. It's kind of the new version of what used to be market research. Instead of just thinking about the statistical aspects and abstracts of segments and customers, and doing a bunch of multivariate regressions to get to what motivates people in their demand, I believe the most basic thing is to walk in their shoes for a day and see what you learn. That's what the best shopkeepers were naturally able to do a century ago.

Go to the store, spend some time walking the aisles, visit the website, play with the chatbot, place an order online, run through the phone app, and do all the things your customers do. I'm sure there are people who do that in most organizations, but I don't know that they're empowered in terms of what they are able do when they run into problems. Can they go back and say, “All right, here is what I found, so before we do anything else we're changing this today!”? I don't think so. That has to be the quid pro quo.

Part of the problem is we don't always know where to start. Enterprise initiatives are more often than not episodic, partly because of the way they are organized, partly because of all the stuff that can get in the way. Technology that we hope will automate and make simple our most complex business problem fails to help us achieve our goals. And data that we covet because of insights it can deliver drowns us in the flood.

When you look at data in particular, it's kind of like that classic episode of I Love Lucy about Lucy and Ethel's first day of work at a chocolate factory. Their job was to take chocolates off a moving conveyor belt, package them in a paper wrapper, then put the finished candies back on the conveyor belt. Their supervisor explained that if a single chocolate got past them, they would be fired. Everything was going fine—at least until the conveyor belt started to go faster. In a futile attempt to keep up, Lucy and Ethel started eating the candy, stuffing it into their hats and clothing, and letting it drop onto the floor. They got away with it for a bit, but their supervisor was so impressed with the job they did that she ordered the conveyor belt to be sped up, making the problem even worse.

It's the same in today's business environment. All that data that everybody wants and says is so important becomes a flood that no one can keep up with. It falls on the floor and no one does anything with it because it has a sell-by date, just like those chocolates. So, if you're not feeding that information back into the organization and into your empathy team so that they can go and tap someone on the shoulder and say, “This stops today” or “This improves today,” then I don't think you're taking this seriously.

How, then, do we get this done?

Someone needs to be the tiebreaker—someone who can reset and rebalance the power differential based on real-time insights, and who is always in the customer's and in the employee's corner. That someone is ideally your CEO/chief community officer, assisted by technology for sure. Otherwise, you'll keep repeating the same things, time after time after time, and wondering why you aren't getting different outcomes. As the old saying goes (often misattributed to Einstein), “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

So, why are we waiting? Why aren't we setting ourselves up to be best in class to get there first, to be doing the right things for the customer, for the employee, from day one?

Good question! If you do, then you will build a better company—a company that will be more profitable over the long term because you'll attract the right people to be your customers and the best people to work for you. That's just not happening in many organizations today. I understand that we're moving really fast and everything's at scale, and making the wrong tweak could cost you millions. But that's very short-term thinking. If you treat people badly—or even worse, neglect them—you'll make them feel like they don't matter and you're going to reap what you sow. They will walk.

And remember: research shows that it's somewhere between 5 and 25 times more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to retain one you've already got.² Employee Benefit News (EBN) reports that it costs employers 33 percent of a worker's annual salary to hire a replacement if that worker leaves, excluding productivity losses.³

You could burn through tons of dollars to try to attract someone new, or you could spend a little bit of money and give the customer and employee a kiss on the cheek in a proactive way and just hold onto them. As Walt Disney once said, “Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.”⁴

Shouldn't your organization be known for doing the same?