Closing the Empathy Gap
There is nothing uniquely human about empathy. Every species of fauna has it, displays it, and benefits from it. If anything is unique about the human variant of empathy, it is the degree to which we have become comfortable forsaking it for simplicity and convenience.
In the summer of 2018, while a Partner at Prophet, I met Zig Serafin, the President of Qualtrics. Zig had come to the company a few years prior after a successful 17 years at Microsoft, and I wanted to know what compelled him to join. So I asked him. His eight-word answer – “we’re building the feedback loop for the world” was spoken with excitement, conviction, and a faint dose of incredulity. Where else, Zig posited, could one be doing such important work, given the gap between how people want to experience the world and they way that they do experience it?
As my team worked with Qualtrics to define and articulate the company’s brand, one thing repeatedly boiled to the surface. At the intersection of what the company was founded to do (make it easier to gather and understand opinion), what its technology had become (a customer analytics platform), and what customers wanted (better products and experiences) was the insight that empathy – by definition infinitely abundant in our species – was not being recognized as the renewable resource that it is. Many companies had stopped caring what you think, unless you carried a Black Card or held Global Services status. The growth of smart mobility, ubiquitous Wi-Fi, and cheap data had been met on the martech side by browser cookies, re-targeting, and personalization. And, thus, behavioral data (whatI can know by seeing) took pole position relative to sentiment data (what I can’t know unless I ask). This was not a repudiation of sentiment data per se; rather, it was a refuge from mass-market ad buys with unknown ROIs. An escape into the quantifiable approach made possible by the democratization of data. Why advertise to the masses with fireworks when pointing a beam of light at an N of one will yield outsized results? To win a Clio and be fawned over at Cannes? That’s so 2007.
Speaking of 2007, that’s the year that is often cited as an inflection point in the history of technology. If you prefer a techno-utopian’s view of the world, maybe it’s the most important year on record. The iPhone launched, Airbnb was founded, IBM Watson was released, and Android was taken to market. By some measures, it was the best of times. But was it also the worst of times?
As we would learn a year later, as they stood in days-long lines to buy the iPhone, millions of Americans were being duped by the latest instantiation of Wall Street’s financial chicanery, this time in the form of mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps. Michael Lewis chronicled it to perfection in The Big Short. Leverage was being amassed atop leverage, not without thought to the consequences, but without regard or respect for them. Consumer confidence plunged to an all-time low in October of 2008 on the heels of record unemployment and deteriorating stock prices. Disguising some of this chagrin was the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, who won in a virtual landslide by carrying 365 Electoral College votes.
But something was lost in those years, and it wasn’t just the value of home equities in Sacramento and Scottsdale. It was the focus on what everyday people thought, felt, and believed about the experiences in their lives. We were told the banks were too big to fail, but no one seemed to care if our local branch charged inexplicable fees. We were told that the Big Three needed our tax dollars, but no one asked us if the half-hearted innovation attempts coming out of Detroit were still valued in light of cheaper, higher-quality, cleaner imports. We were told to sign up for Facebook, but no one asked if we wanted our data sold or for our footprints to be tracked across the web. In a seemingly never-ending cycle as the economy began to go digital, we were asked to upgrade our apps, to download the latest version of the OS, to sign up for the newest feature on the platform – and it all came so suddenly and so self-seriously that we regarded it as the new way forward. And when nobody asked what we wanted, after a while, we stopped noticing – and we stopped caring.
That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Starbucks was not successful just because it brewed great coffee; it was successful because it knew, from listening, that millions of us coveted and sought a “Third Place” away from home and work to connect with people. Nike was not successful just because it created ultra-lightweight performance running shoes; it was successful because it knew, from listening, that millions of us wanted to Be Like Mike or Be Like Mia. Spotify was not successful just because it built a commanding music library and podcast exclusives; it was successful because it curated the musical experience we wanted and reflected our community in a global conversation. These became the products we turned to and the brands that we loved. Not because they watched us. Because they listened to us. They closed the empathy gap. They understood us, and with that understanding, they built things and put things in the world that we couldn’t imagine living without.
When I was at Prophet, I led an annual study called the Brand Relevance Index. Yearafter year, we saw the likes of Apple, Disney, Amazon, and Toyota at or near the topof the list. (There were some mind-benders like KitchenAid, too, which reinforced forme and our teams the power of creating and owning a category, a topic I would later get a Master Class in from Dave and Al at PlayBigger). The brands we always saw at the bottom of the list? Twitter and Facebook. Why? When we dug deeper, wefound that people see them as modern-day utilities. The piping for the internet. Completely dispensable, totally commoditized. The content on their platforms matter, and often matter more than real life; the platforms themselves are regarded, more or less, as non-entities.
It didn’t have to be that way. Companies like Facebook and Twitter (and many others) could have listened more to its users instead of depriving their analytics of words like opinion, sentiment, and thought. But, to be charitable, Facebook and Twitter had the specific fortune of going truly global in that digital (non-lethal) pandemic of 2007, when the world began to officially “ooh” and “ahh” if something could be divined without the inconvenience of having to ask for it. MAU and CAC became the new Please and Thank You.
This truth was jarring. No one I talked to would put it in precisely these terms, but the more time I spent with marketers, the more the sentiment would echo: Personalization and targeting, based on behavioral data, enable us to approach Platonic offer design! We can serve up exactly the right thing to exactly the right person at exactly the right time in exactly the right channel! Well...that works if preferences don’t change and behaviors are repeatable. But what happens if someone regrets a purchase? What happens if they love the mobile app but forget their password and buy on the web instead? What happens if a fintech provider migrates its digital services to the cloud, and unknowingly creates a friction-filled experience, rendering it one swipe-left away from annihilation as its competitor swoops in?
In a B2B context, the silence around true customer centricity became equally deafening. “Sense-Analyze-Act” had become the mantra for every company. It didn’t matter whether you were an airplane company, a real estate company, or a construction company. All of a sudden, you were a data company. You created data, you sensed it, you analyzed it, and you acted on it. Nothing was incorrect about thisper se. It was just completely uninspired, wildly underinformed, and downright insufficient.
Over 15 years of building brands, it had never once occurred to me that we might be able to divine a good recommendation by watching without listening. Of course, the best brands tap into something about you that you might not even be able to articulate. But when that happens, brands are tapping into universal human truths, not ubiquitous data truths. Every strong brand or experience I had a hand in building – T-Mobile, Atlassian, Amazon Business, and PagerDuty, to name a few – was created based on a set of bedrock beliefs and durable foundations that came from listening to customers and employees about what they expected and needed most from the company. When you have behavioral analytics, you have a great view of the past and some hypotheses about the future. When you can augment those hypotheses with opinion, feeling, and sentiment, you risk-adjust them to such a fantastic degree that you can predict what product, brand, or experience ought to be served up.
I became so convinced of the underutilization and hyper-importance of human feedback and sentiment that, two years after my initial conversation with Zig, I made the decision to join Qualtrics. I decided that I was ready to join the Legions of the Listening. At Qualtrics, we talk not about the inhuman (and inhumane) “Sense-Analyze-Act,” but the holistic and human-centric “Listen-Understand-Act.” Semantics? I’d argue not. Sensing and analyzing are inherently disinterested in the deep cognition, patience, and commitment required to really listen and deeply understand. I am proud of the way we talk about our Experience Management platform as the Ultimate Listening Engine. For what is action without understanding? It is guesswork. A high-stakes wager.
We are social creatures; as Charlie Sutton of Facebook reminds us, technology should be the source of our agency, not the foil to it. That is not to say that behavioral data is to be eschewed. After all, it’s produced by the actions that we take. And, as Steve Jobs famously said, customers don’t know what they want. But that isn’t the point. The point is that we do know how we feel, and what we think. And if our opinions and sentiments can’t combine to form the most fertile soil imaginable in which to plant the seeds of innovation, then perhaps we are growing the wrong plants and eating the wrong fruits.
We’ve entered an era where it’s more important that it has ever been to listen, to understand, and - only with that deep understanding - to act. Every voice matters. Every opinion matters. Let’s go back to building what people want, not what they’ll just be content to use. Let’s go back to creating based on future possibilities, not past certainties. Let’s go beyond watching and take the time to really listen.