Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.

—David Augsburger

When I first got into social media—before it was called “social media,” somewhere between Friendster and Myspace—I had an epiphany about the impact digital might eventually have on our world. In 2007, I made the move from comScore to Sears Holdings, and I was tasked with building a loyalty community for Sears at a time when they had just started doing e-commerce right. They were in full turnaround mode and were running fast to catch up in ecommerce.

By all accounts, Sears could have been—should have been—as successful as Amazon, perhaps even more so. In 2000, Amazon's total revenue was about $2.8 billion.¹ That same year, Sears's revenue was $40.9 billion.² What ultimately turned the tide in Amazon's favor was that Sears's leadership at the time was justifiably concerned that pushing the company into online sales would hurt its 3,000 bricks-and-mortar stores scattered across the United States. So, while Sears had an online presence (Sears.com), it was not a top priority for the company. The top priority was defending the status quo. Thus, they missed boat in e-commerce as Amazon continued to grow—and grow.

Soon after I arrived at Sears, I started thinking about what we could do to improve our digital initiatives. My first order of business was to build a little community of some of our most valuable customers and then find out more about them. Did they still like Sears? Did they still value what it stood for? Did they even know what it stood for? My initiative would be a challenge—I was by myself at first, I didn't have any budget for what I wanted to do, and I wasn't even sure what that should be.

Perched on some packing boxes in a small vestibule, the company literally built an office around me. I remember the construction workers asking me how many ceiling tiles were allocated to me. I had no idea what that meant or how many had been allocated, but apparently that was important for people to know. The number of tiles indicated the amount of real estate you could occupy, and accordingly your status. At the time, it seemed to me that I had been granted way too many given my bootstrapping approach.

At first, I coded a simple community platform myself—there wasn't a lot available off the shelf at the time. We weren't even using Twitter or Facebook yet. I even incorporated Survey Monkey into the platform so we could communicate with people (and because I had no budget for formal research). It wasn't pretty, but it got the job done. Every few days, I would create a little survey in Survey Monkey and send it out to all the people who were on a list of our most valuable customers—supplied to me by Research—and then I'd wait for responses. I usually sent them out on a Thursday night, and I would start getting responses the next day. People were always really good about returning those surveys.

I went through several cycles of this, and I routinely received about 1,200 responses each time. People were definitely engaged. I was about to go home late one Friday, and one of the people I had sent the survey to responded on the public forum side of our platform. We didn't have a character limit and you could write anything you wanted. This guy wrote what I would equate to the introduction to War and Peace (I hadn't thought about a 140-character cap). It had bullets and exclamation points and lots and lots of words. At the very end, however, he said something that caught my attention: “Here's the story. Thank you for spending time talking to us ‘loyal customers,’ but as a former ‘loyal customer,’ I am never going to buy anything from you again.”

And he just left it at that.

It was late, I was tired, and I wanted to go home. In addition, I had been having a bad week in my half-built office and was questioning whether this job was the right path for me. But I thought to myself, “If I believe what I believe, I should probably respond to this guy and see what's going on.”

I wrote back, “Sorry to hear that. What went wrong?”

The man quickly responded: “Here's the thing. I have been a loyal customer of Sears, particularly the Craftsman side of Sears, for many years.” Our Craftsman tool customers were ultra-committed to the company. The tools were and are high quality, and the brand promise was a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee—if something went wrong with any Craftsman product, we would replace it no questions asked with no time limit.

The former customer continued, “Every year I bought thousands of dollars' worth of Craftsman tools—you should be able to see that. One time I bought a little vise-grip at Sears that was not a Craftsman tool and only had a one-year warranty. But, wouldn't you know it, a year to the date after I bought the vise-grip it snapped in half. I didn't think that you were going to replace it per se. But I'm a 15-year loyalist, I buy thousands of dollars' worth of merchandise from Sears each year, surely there was something you could do to help me.”

Apparently, when he went back to the store, the salesperson told him he could just buy a new one for $40. He didn't like that answer so he talked to the manager. The manager said, “Sorry, I can't do anything—it's only warrantied for a year and your broken tool is outside that.” He escalated his problem up the chain. He wrote letters to corporate. No one responded.

He told me, “Basically, the message you gave me is that nobody knew who I was. Nobody knew how much I had bought. Nobody knew how loyal I was. And, nobody thought that it was worth spending much time helping with this problem. So, I decided to stop buying from Sears. I took my Sears credit card out of my wallet, I put it somewhere in my desk, and I forgot about it. I just wanted you to know that.”

So, in for a penny, in for a pound. I responded, “I don't know if I can help, but let me see what I can do.” This was a commitment I had no way of knowing for sure if I could keep.

In desperation I reached out to a colleague of mine who was in the Special Care Division that had just been spun up. “I don't know if you can do anything about this,” I said, “but this doesn't seem right.”

I should have checked back that weekend because, by the time I got back to the office on Monday, there was a sequel to War and Peace waiting for me. I thought, “Oh my God, I made this even worse.”

There again were three big paragraphs with numbers on them. The guy said, “I just wanted to get back to you and let you know what happened. First, I didn't really expect you to get back to me. I was literally just blowing off steam.” He went on for a while before getting to his second point.

“Second,” he continued, “I don't know what you thought you could do, but in my mind there was nothing you could do because I had already given up on the relationship. I was never going to buy anything from you again. It was nice that you thought you could try, but at the end of the day, you weren't going to move my opinion about this. You guys just didn't care and that was the message that came across.”

I felt a wave of relief. It looked like I hadn't made this person's situation better, but at least I hadn't made it worse.

He went on to his third point: “I don't know what you actually did, but your colleague reached out to me on Saturday, and she was the nicest person I ever met. She gave me the nicest apology I've ever had. My wife doesn't even apologize to me like that after arguments. She gave me a gift card for $40, but most important, that apology meant the world to me.”

And then he wrote at the bottom of his message, “So I just want to let you know that today I found that Sears card I threw in the bottom of my desk drawer. I put it back in my wallet.”

“Okay, what does this all mean?” I wondered.

An Epiphany

Maybe I was lucky with this Sears loyalist, or maybe I just proved that it's worth talking to your customers. But I decided what it boiled down to was that, as human beings, what we're really striving for in all our interactions—whether they're digital or face-to-face, whether they're personal or public—is to feel that we matter. And if brands, companies, nonprofits, governments, and so on can understand that, focus again on the people side of the equation, and make customers and employees feel like they matter in all their interactions, they'll win.

Ask yourself the fundamental empathy-led question: How would I feel if I were in their shoes?

This is the thing that will make the difference between organizations that succeed in the twenty-first century and those that don't. Digital is important because it helps you scale, but it's not the technology on its own that makes the difference. It's how you humanize digital, and it's also how you humanize human.

Accenture has done lots of research into what we call the World of Experience. Here are some of the key findings:

• 64 percent of people think that customer experience is more important than price—price is no longer the reliable game changer it used to be.
• 89 percent of customers stop doing business with a brand following a poor customer experience—humanizing digital for better interactions can lower the risk of attrition.
• 65 percent of companies say improving their data analysis is important for customer experience, but currently, recommendations and predictions often do not provide enough context to deliver an understanding of customer needs, motivations, and frustrations.
• 5 percent of brands claim to have a seamless customer experience, indicating that too many marketers are hyperfocused on efficiency and market reach.
• 54 percent of brands currently deliver experiences that result in cart abandonment.
• 73 percent of marketers have less than half of their channels connected, leading to silos and limited learning.

The World of Experience has fundamentally changed.³ To stay relevant today and into the future, companies must evolve—keeping a step ahead of change that is all around us. They must quickly adapt to differentiate in a world where brands are being experienced in new ways. The year of COVID—2020—was a year like no other, a year in which change washed over us even faster than before, shifting the digital world. Instead of just products, services, or brands, consumers want experiences. As a result, companies must provide experiences that are responsive to the individual human needs of customers.

Digital, using the tremendous power of data analytics, is core to these efforts.

But to be most effective, it must be a combination of digital and human. The complexity of products requires humans to be a key part of sales and marketing. Digital must embrace and augment the human players involved throughout the process, and it must do this empathetically—focusing on customer needs first and foremost.

Marketers and their brands have come to a crossroads in how they do business. Before 2020, companies focused on leveraging the tremendous power of data and analytics. Unfortunately, this was often at the expense of the human dimension.

Today, it's clear that people are yearning to be able to trust, and they want it more than ever. They expect personalized experiences, built on real-time contextualization of their preferences. But they want each interaction to connect with them on a human level so they can come away from those experiences feeling they have been heard, their needs have been addressed, and above all, they matter.

The ability to meet this expectation will be a key determinant in the growth and sustainability of every organization.

Of your organization.

What Makes Humans Human?

One of my favorite authors is Desmond Morris. He earned his doctorate in animal behavior at Oxford and served for a time as curator of mammals at the London Zoo. He wrote a slew of amazing books, but the one that got people really talking was The Naked Ape, published in 1967. The book looks at people—their behavior and morphology—in the context of other primates. I love Morris's work because, as a historian, as a sociologist, if you don't study these things, you'll miss them.

Why are things the way they are? Why do we humans behave the way we do? Why do we come together? Why are we even able to come together? What are the traits that make us uniquely human? Through behavioral observation of other animals, Morris was able to apply everything he learned to humans. He could see these interactions between humans—shared with and evolved from our animal ancestors—every day, doing whatever they were doing. And he explains them in a very convincing way.

We humans are who we are because of evolution and natural selection. Behaviors that helped someone reproduce and perpetuate their DNA were selected for. Behaviors that worked against someone's being able to reproduce and perpetuate their DNA were eventually extinguished. Morris said that one of the main reasons we can coexist as a species is that, when we came together, it made natural sense. But very quickly we learned that we needed to have some rules. Otherwise, people would take advantage of one another, which would destroy trust and be a disincentive to working together for the overall good of the species.

The Vikings have long been painted as a fearsome clan of Norse invaders who destroyed everyone and everything in their path. The historian J.M. Wallace-Hadrill—who always had an interesting turn of phrase at the ready—explained that most people considered Vikings to basically be the Dark Age equivalent of “groups of long-haired tourists who occasionally roughed up the natives.”⁴ But as Wallace-Hadrill pointed out, the Viking culture was just as sophisticated, if not more sophisticated, than the “advanced” cultures they conquered. They just had bad PR.

That's the same sort of lens we should put on business.I think we take things for granted because there are those for whom it's in their interest to paint them in that light. And the result is you don't do anything—you miss the opportunity. You're always asking those perennial questions, such as, “How do we get more innovative?” “How do we beat Amazon?” “How can we be like Uber?” It's kind of like the millionaire question: How do you make a million dollars? Well, first you go get a million dollars. It's the same with data. “Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report!” Groucho Marx once remarked. “Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can't make head nor tail out of it.”

The answers to the perennial questions, such as those just mentioned are almost that obvious. You've got to make a commitment to be an innovative organization. And it must be top-down, bottom-up. And you've got to completely divorce yourself from the thought that, because you do things differently, because things don't go well, and because there are failures, you would abandon that tack. Holding onto doing things differently is the whole point. That's why, for every Amazon, there were probably a thousand other start-ups that didn't survive.

And luck has a lot to do with it—human luck. That concept has a lot to do with how we've progressed. It's being willing to take risks when we can't even see the return. We just feel it. That is a unique thing, and you can't get that into a computer program easily.

We want to be able to play it safe and dissect everything and then figure out what went right with Amazon. And then, if we do those things that Amazon did right—we put all those things together and stir the pot—we think we can be just as successful as they are. The reality is, of course, no, because Amazon is the result of many decisions that were made over a long period of time—some right, some wrong. Jeff Bezos had an almost religious-like intent, which was “I believe I'm right. I'm going to go all-in right or wrong.”

And Bezos could have been very wrong. In fact, for years, everybody said he was wrong. Amazon was growing but there was no profit. And according to the conventional wisdom at the time, if your company didn't generate profits, it was surely on the road to bankruptcy. No profit no business. But Bezos proved them wrong. Building market share and revenue came first, then the profits eventually followed. And if he had listened to all those people who said he was wrong, there might not be an Amazon today.

There were two important lessons I believe enhanced Amazon's luck beyond technology and a solid supply chain. The realization that people needed a lot of help finding things to reduce wasted time, and they also wanted recommendations from other trustworthy people before they bought something—two very human needs.

The point is, how do you get back to taking advantage of the things that make us most human? And that's how you humanize relationships with customers. That's how you humanize the innovation process. That's how you humanize the use of data. It's empathetic, it's emotional, and sometimes it's just intuited. It's not always about math and purity of the algorithm. Math and algorithms can help for sure, but creativity and the connections it can create is something that makes us uniquely human, and it is very hard for a machine to be creative—at least so far in our history.

Tomorrow's right around the corner, and I suspect it will be a very different place.

A Frustrating Example

I have two young children, both girls, and when our oldest was going to turn five, we wanted to get her something special to celebrate. The only thing we could think of was a bicycle. When I was a kid, my dad would have gone to the Marshall Field's department store and there would have been an entire bicycle section in the toy department. The salesperson would explain the pros and cons of the different bicycles and my dad could try them out right there. Once he decided on the one he wanted, my dad would pay for it, stick it in the trunk of our car, and drive it home. The entire process was sometimes fraught with absence of choice, or high-pressure salesmanship, but it was simple and relatively straightforward.

Today, you feel like you're more on your own, and in many ways you are on your own—spoiled for choice but no better able to trust. When we decided to buy our daughter that bike for her fifth birthday, I had to first do some research. I did a Google search for reviews and lists of the best bikes for kids. I became conversant with different features—things like knobby versus street tires, braking systems, and internally geared hubs. I learned a great deal about the advantages and disadvantages of lighter and heavier bikes and different frame sizes. This was a good part of the process.

The process was a lot different from the one my dad went through when he walked into the Marshall Field's department store in downtown Chicago and was advised by a salesperson who was good at his job, knew a lot about bikes, and who saw my dad as a person—a friend and a father who wanted to show his love for a son and revisit a bit of the feeling he himself had when got his first bike.

After doing my due diligence, I narrowed down the choices to a few different bikes, and I logged on to Amazon to check pricing and availability and read the reviews. Eventually, I found a bike that checked all the boxes for me—it looked really nice, it was the right price, and it had great reviews. The final box to be checked was delivery—our daughter's birthday was about five weeks out, but I needed time to assemble the bike and hide it at her grandparents' house. According to Amazon, the bike would be delivered in just a couple days, so that sealed the deal.

Plenty of time I thought, so I bought it.

Unfortunately, the bike purchase didn't take long to go off the rails.

The promised delivery date of a couple days turned into a week, and then the week turned into two. I received an email from Amazon notifying me that, even though the bike was in stock, it was running behind. Two weeks stretched to three and a half. The problem was that it was now just a little more than a week to go before my daughter's birthday, and I needed the bike. It still hadn't arrived, and there was no certainty when it would. It was time to get hold of someone at Amazon and find out when the bike was really going to arrive. But that turned out to be easier said than done.

I'm pretty digitally savvy—I know where look and what rocks to turn over when it comes to finding customer service people. But in the case of Amazon, it was ultrahard to find a real person I could escalate to and ask, “What's going on here—what can you do to get me the bike in time for my daughter's birthday?” I was getting increasingly frustrated with my dilemma. I discovered that Amazon's digital experience is great, at least until something goes wrong with your order.

Another day went by, and I was down to four days before my daughter's birthday. At that point, I was convinced the bike was not going to show up—it probably wasn't in the warehouse, and it might not exist at all. We did a little back and forth and the Amazon customer service rep told me via email, “We'll contact the seller and figure out what's going on. It should be with you.”

I was getting ultrafrustrated by this point—my emails weren't doing the trick, so it was time to get on the phone with someone and find out if the bike was on the way or if I needed to scour Chicago to find one.

Persistence paid off though. After four or five attempts I got through to a live person. I was trying to keep myself calm but it wasn't easy. Knowing how difficult a service rep's life can be, I reined in my emotions and started with, “I know it's not your fault, but I'm having a really tough time here. I feel like I'm getting the runaround and I just need a straight answer. If the answer is that the bike is not available and I need to go and do something else, that's fine—I'll just cancel the whole thing. And if the answer is ‘We found it and we can get it to you in time,’ fantastic. I need to know one way or the other, right now.”

I don't know if Amazon has changed its ordering system, but at the time they weren't geared toward making complex alterations after the fact. The rep had to come up with a creative workaround that I'm certain most of his colleagues wouldn't have known how to do.

“I'm going to create this sort of duplicate website over here,” he told me. “You're going to first cancel your order, then you're going to go to the link that I will send you. You're going to select the same thing. I will give you a credit on everything, including the delivery charge. And you will select this because I found the bike in stock, and I confirmed that we'll get it to you within two days. Then you have to go ahead and make that purchase. I'm going to give you a credit for the cost of delivery because you've been a great customer and this is really bad service.”

And it worked. But it took an empowered and highly knowledgeable human to help me. Amazon's ordering system couldn't do it, as amazing as it might be. The experience actually made me feel better about Amazon because of this living, breathing service rep who was willing to be a little creative. The fact that he took the time to listen (and most important, emphasize like that salesperson back in Marshall Field's) to me was a big deal.

One more thing from the consumer perspective: let me know that you've at least gone the extra mile. If the bike turned out not to be available, the rep could have said, “I can't find it. I'm sorry, but I'm going to give you a credit. By the way, I was able to just quickly look online and there are some bikes just like this in stock at the Walmart down the road from you.” That makes a difference—it leaves an impression. We remember and long for the Miracle on 34th Street every holiday season and then seemingly go back to internecine warfare for the rest of the year, with every battle being a zero-sum game. It doesn't need to be that way.

I thought, what if you could productize that? How can we make things better—more human for people generally—not just, how do we sell them more shoes or bikes or whatever? How do we make people feel like they did a good thing and they weren't exhausted at the end of it? That would make a very real difference in their experience with digital. That would be more empathetic, more human.

A Bridge Too Far?

But, as we all know, the online world is not all good. Increasingly, digital is a double-edged sword and sometimes technology gets it terribly wrong. For example, it can be much more invasive and frustrating than it should be.

In a New York Times article, author Charles Duhigg told the story about how retailing giant Target decided to analyze shopper cue-routine-reward loops—neurological loops at the core of every habit—and then use the insights gained to market the company's products more effectively. According to Duhigg, some questions came up as part of a marketing discussion: Would it be possible to use data to anticipate a customer need, before other retailers? And if so, would it be possible to tell if a customer is pregnant?⁵

It's not hard to imagine why any retailer would want to be able to figure this out. Think of all the things new parents—and prospective new parents—buy during the course of a pregnancy and the birth of a child. There are cribs and crib mattresses; sheets and blankets; bibs and burp cloths; breast pumps, bottles, and formula; changing pads and diapers (lots of diapers); onesies and undershirts and pants and socks and booties; diaper wipes and other cleaning supplies; maternity clothing and prenatal vitamins; books and toys—the list goes on and on. Being able to identify such customers would enable an organization to better target shoppers with highly focused product offers.

Allegedly, a team went to work on the problem, and after combing through and analyzing a treasure trove of marketing data, they were able to develop a prediction score based on 25 specific products that, when purchased, indicated a customer was likely to be pregnant. What's more, they were able to fairly accurately predict a customer's actual due date based on their buying habits, and to allow changes to marketing offers depending on the stage of the pregnancy or the birth of a child. Seemingly, this would be a win-win for the customer and the business.

One can imagine that in this day and age, any and all organizations understand the value of customer data and passionately pursue the Holy Grail of marketing—anticipating a customer's needs before they even realize those needs themselves. However, the real question shouldn't just be, “Can we do something?” The first question should be “Should we do something?” We should base that on the exploration of a fundamental question: “As customers, how would this make us feel?” This is something the most empathetic of we humans would process in a nanosecond, and overlooking that question can lead to unintended consequences for sure.

According to Duhigg, approximately one year after this model was implemented, an angry man stomped into a local Minneapolis-area Target store, asking for the manager. “My daughter got this in the mail!” the man heatedly explained to the manager. “She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”⁶

The manager looked at the coupons the man held in his hand, and they included offers for maternity clothing and nursery furniture. The envelope the coupons were mailed in was indeed addressed to the young daughter of this angry man. All the manager could do was apologize for this obvious mistake, which he did profusely.

A few days later, says Duhigg, it was the father's turn to apologize. He called the manager and said, “I had a talk with my daughter. It turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August. I owe you an apology.”⁷

While there remain questions about the details of this story, it is nonetheless a good parable that should make us stop and think. It's one thing for a marketer to be able to anticipate something a customer might do, but it's another thing altogether to overreach and miss the context. When my boss, Glen Hartman, and I talk about the importance of contextual experience in situations like this, the hardest thing is discerning the moment that matters most to a customer and directing them to the right thing—changing their experience as a result.

The Digital Dilemma—Meeting Needs Versus Surprise and Delight

Despite the bad experiences we all have had with onlinepurchases and other transactions, where digital gets it right is the promise of being able to do things that we couldn't even imagine a few years ago. In just one example, today we can find things to buy online that we've never been able to find before. I started using Etsy for the very first time a couple years ago and I was blown away by the experience.

Etsy has really thought through the typical ups and downs customers often have when they're dealing with solo vendors or small business owners. And Etsy also gives customers access to unique items that people from every corner of the earth have personally made. When I placed an order and the package arrived from Bratislava, I would never have imagined that's where the item came from. Being able to use technology in this way, with just a few clicks, is amazing and it's having a remarkably positive impact on humanity. It gives individuals tremendous reach and real power.

But context is everything.

As Glen Hartman, Global Commerce Lead of Accenture Song, illustrates in this example:

Let's say you have a big family, and you do grocery shopping for your family every Saturday. Your grocery store happens to be doing everything they possibly can do in the advanced world of technology and data and experience, and they're doing a great job—they've got it all nailed. Most grocery stores don't, but yours does.

You love this store—you're a member of their loyalty program and you have their app on your phone. You like to load your shopping list into the app, and when you set foot into the store, they know you're there because they're using location data from your phone.

The second you walk into the store, and once you think about it, they're going to work with you on their most important outcomes and metrics. There are three metrics they care most about. One is to get more customer trips into the store. Two, when customers are in the store, they want them to buy certain types of merchandise—usually things the CPG [consumer packaged goods] companies are pushing for inventory reasons. They usually display this merchandise on endcaps and in other prominent locations. The third metric is the cart—buy more. Now, this could apply to online or offline commerce, it doesn't matter—the concept is the same.

So, you walk into your favorite grocery store on Saturday, and they've got everything right. They see you there, they see your shopping list, they start serving up coupons tailored to your list, and they want to make sure you're going to buy some of the products on the endcaps. They know what you like—you've been to some of the cooking classes they run, and they know you love to cook.

They look at the shopping list on your phone, and instead of looking at it just as a shopping list, they look at it as a set of ingredients. Suddenly, they send you a message via the app, “If you add these two other products, you can make this great recipe tonight.” They even serve you a video showing how to make the recipe and a coupon to get those two other products at a discount. Now they're cross selling and upselling—they're making the cart bigger.

You're loving it—it speaks to you, it's personalized, it's relevant. It's all good.

Then one day you show up at that same grocery store, but it's not on your usual Saturday. It's 11 o'clock on a Tuesday morning. It turned out that one of your children was sick and you had to go pull her out of school, take her to the doctor, and get a prescription. You've got to get back to work for a presentation at 1 o'clock and you can't be late. You went to the grocery store to get your prescription filled—they have a pharmacy in the back, and the doctor already sent the prescription to the pharmacy electronically—and you need to buy a vaporizer, Vicks VapoRub, and some juice and cough drops. That's it—you need to get in and out as fast as you can.

When you walk into the store, you don't want coupons. You don't want recipes. You don't want any of that. You just want to get the things on your shopping list and go. The company can see what's on your shopping list and it thinks, “Something's up with Pete—it looks like he's in a hurry. Why don't I take the things on his list, and I'll heatmap the store to show him where everything is so he can get in and out quicker?” Or, better than that, you're met at the front of the store by a concierge who says, “I noticed these things are on your list, so I already gathered them for you, including the prescription. Here you go. Since you're in our reward system, we have your payment information, and we'll just charge it to your account—you don't need to check out. Don't worry, go take care of your kid. I hope everything is all right.”

In that moment, the grocery store broke every single rule they have for a success metric. They didn't get you into the store, you didn't buy products from the endcaps, and you didn't spend more. Those are failures on every level for the way they manage their business. But in the moment, because they've read your intent—you were in a very different situation that Tuesday morning than you are on a typical Saturday—it's a huge win for you the customer, and a wonderful, much more relevant experience of personalization that serves your goals.

That kind of experience would be a game changer—a remarkable application of the power and promise of digital, but we're not there yet. The good news is we're getting closer, it's not all that far away. The technology is there.

Creating Moments That Matter

We were recently doing some brainstorming around creating moments that matter in financial services and retail banking—looking for ways to humanize the process. If you have ever bought a house and applied for a mortgage (particularly post 2008), then you've experienced being asked to lay bare your entire personal financial situation—embarrassing bits and all.

First there's the obligatory credit check to assess how much debt you have, what kind of debt it is, and how reliable you are at paying it off. Have you ever declared bankruptcy or skipped credit card, car loan, or other consumer debt payments? Obviously, that'll show up in your credit report. You'll need to provide your personal income tax filings and W-2 forms, any real estate taxes paid for at least the past couple of years, plus assessments, investment statements for you and your spouse or partner, and, if you own a business, you may have to provide those income tax filings and a detailed profit-and-loss statement too. You'll of course need to provide copies of recent paystubs to corroborate your claimed income along with bank statements that show you actually have the down payment funds available to you to complete the home purchase.

I'll wager your parents never even knew this much about you. Truth be told, you might not have known this much about you either.

When you complete the mortgage loan application and approval process, there's probably no institution on the planet that knows more about you, at least financially, than the organization that originates your loan. Maybe 99.9 percent of the time, that's where it begins and ends. The mortgage lender knows what you own, what you're buying, how much cash and other assets you possess, how many lines of credit you have, what kinds and amounts of debt you carry, and on and on. They have all this information, but in most cases not much is done with it. Of course, there may be regulatory issues that constrain a bank from sharing that financial information with other parts of the organization or outside its own four walls, but this data is tremendously valuable to marketers.

If would be the perfect time, even if you couldn't do a very sophisticated handoff of every piece of data, to do some sort of magic around it and understand exactly what the customer's next move is going to be. For example, they're probably going to need to insure their new home, so maybe it's time for them to think about changing insurance companies or changing products. They're probably going to decorate or renovate their home, especially if they plan to live in it themselves and not rent it out. So, they're going to buy a lot more things for their home in the next few months. If I notice they're running up their credit cards at West Elm or Crate and Barrel, I could offer them a low-cost loan to transfer the high-interest-rate credit card balances.

The possibilities are virtually endless. And that's just the financial side of it. But often what happens is nothing, or at best a slew of product and service offers divorced from any understanding of who you are, what you might really need, or where you are in moment that matters to you most.

Whether we idealize it or not, 30, 40, 50 years ago, our parents likely personally knew their bank manager, or if they lived in a small town with just one bank, the president. They would have had to at least talk with that person before they were approved for a loan. It was like a scene out of It's a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart playing the role of small-town banker George Bailey and all the lives that were touched and made better with his help.

When this kind of banking worked at its best, you had a relationship with someone who knew you and knew your family and knew you were good for it. They were empathetic to your needs. They were human, and they treated you in a human way. At its worst, you might have found yourself with Henry Potter—a caricature of an extremely unforgiving banker (and a not-so-subtle indictment of runaway capitalism). But in truth, which character do you feel you are more likely to encounter? And have institutions done enough to build trust beyond agreeing to keep your money safe?

When I was getting ready to go to college in the UK, I opened a bank account at Citibank. And even though I wasn't making much money for Citibank at the time, the bank was there for me when I needed their help. When I had to find someone who would write a letter of introduction so I could get a visa, the manager of my family's branch wrote one for me—on Citibank letterhead. The letter said something along the lines of, “Robert's parents are great. They've been banking with us X number of years, and I can recommend them highly.” No doubt, the level of personal attention from a big bank—from most banks and financial institutions—has disappeared. Even as our fortunes have increased, that high level of humanity, empathy, and intimacy we used to routinely enjoy seems to be, at least on the surface, a rare if not exotic commodity.

It's not that you expect a bank to keep that infrastructure the same as it was 50 years ago—it can't and it shouldn't. But that bank could be making a lot of the things it does a lot easier for customers, much more proactive, much more thoughtful—more human. I applied for a mortgage refinance over a year ago, and in the middle of the process—which took many more weeks than anticipated—I was still getting invitations from the marketing department extoling the benefits of refinancing.

Why?

Did they not know I was already a customer, in process to refinance? One can argue at length about whether companies are people, but they are composed of people. And those humans have all been there; they all know what they like and what they dislike.

As one of my colleagues and I started to break it down, we decided that there are two levels. One level represents tactical moments that matter—things that if you just eliminated them or made them easier, that would win you a lot of points with your customers. Like reordering a checkbook (if any of us use those much anymore), or making it easy to initiate a loan application without asking for the same information twice, or simply giving customers more control over the alerts and reminders they receive on their account. However, enough of this exists today that's still bad that it colors relationships between brands and their customers.

The other level includes the more strategic moments that matter. This could include zeroing in on the individual goals that people have and realizing that they're not really interested in wealth management goals, but instead in their life goals. So, what if banks were more like life coaches? Instead of looking at a customer's life as a linear game to retirement, they could take the 50,000-foot view of what they want to accomplish along the way.

They might tell a client, “You want to travel every five years with your family—let's figure out what that looks like.” They might want to take a sabbatical every 10 years, or start a business, or go back to school. The bank could do something different by making the relationship and the products offered to customers specifically relevant to them and what they want to do with their lives. Even if customers' goals change, the bank will change with them. And here is the important point to keep in mind: in order to do that well, institutions need to be able to listen, synthesize, and act. That is what builds trust and loyalty.

I think the old way of selling to financial customers, the “Yes, we have this fantastic team of wealth managers who will take your rollover money and use Monte Carlo simulations to outperform Wall Street,” is in need of a significant overhaul. The framework of community first is key to that.

When I first started to build communities, we thought really hard about how we could engage with customers in ways that made them feel like they mattered (to us, and most important, to one another). One of the first retail communities I built attracted around a million and a half people within about 18 months. But what was more important about it than just the sheer number of people was that a percentage of them were extremely engaged in the community.

We certainly gathered and analyzed data, but when we looked at that data, we found something interesting we hadn't seen before: data that existed in no other database. We discovered that the more we actually engaged, asked questions, answered questions, shared and listened to ideas, the more popular the community became and the more participants were willing to tell us about themselves.

We created a real community of fans hanging out with other likeminded people. We allowed that community to engage with each other and to grow organically. During the second year after we initiated the community, we encouraged people to write reviews. In fact, we expanded the loyalty program to include rewarding people with points for content they wrote good or bad, such as reviews—just because they helped others.

I remember it was just after Thanksgiving that second year when we discovered there was a whole group of mothers who spontaneously got together on our platform the weekend before Black Monday. They had what they dubbed a “Black Monday virtual sleepover,” where they talked about what they were going to buy for their kids, the good deals, the not-so-good deals, places they could find things they wanted, and much more. We didn't interfere with what they were doing—we just watched from the sidelines.

They were being as human as you can be, doing the things that humans enjoy doing. Talking, sharing, providing others with the benefit of their knowledge, having fun, enjoying being part of a community. And they were doing it in a digital environment that facilitated their interaction, and above all, trust.

David Kidder is co-founder and CEO of Bionic, part of Accenture Song. He reminds us of the importance of seeing customers above all else as people and remembering that we're in business to serve them, not them to serve us. Says David:

We have the idea of customers—that is us selling to people for them. We need to move from for to with, we need to move from customers to people, and we need to move our mindset from a total addressable marketplace role—which is zero sum, doing it to win—to total addressable problems and needs of the world.

The question is, are we doing that? Do we see the people? Are we doing it with them? Are we doing this in the needs? Those core ideas are almost the opposite of how most companies think today. And what's underneath this, their reality, is just a subset of their intentional choices. They're disconnected from that why. And what's underneath the why is only really an innate state of one or two things. That's fear versus abundance, which is why they're stuck.

Why are we here? Because we've lost our North Star.