UNDERSTANDING EACH OTHER ON A GLOBAL SCALE
April 14, 2021
Global businesses these days thrive on innovation and continuous improvement. But how to innovate? Any innovation and improvement needs to be relevant, it needs to bring value for clients and customers so that it can create value for your business. The better you are able to understand your customers, the better you will be able to serve your customers and stakeholders.
Digital Empathy enables you to meet customers where they are by turning the Golden Rule on its head. Instead of: “Treat customers the way you want to be treated yourself”; it applies: “Treat customers they way they want to be treated themselves.” That philosophy is a significant shift and very important for doing business. While too often, segmentation approaches today are being designed inside-out, in some good cases also based on demographic criteria such as age, geography, or buying power and in some very good cases on past behavior. Their emotional state is too often neglected. Digital Empathy takes the emotional state into account to build the right offerings and to manage the relationship in a humane way accordingly.
Hard Facts not “Tree-Hugging”
Neuroscience has shown that emotions are the fundamental driver for taking decisions1. Understanding this will provide you with hard facts. It also allows you to design new approaches on how to manage a customer relationship. You will be better able to meet customers, where they are. Digital Empathy practically applied allows you to gain customer insights in a way that was not possible before. Digital Empathy also allows you to provide a Customer Experience that is superior as it is more specific to each customer: More personalized and more humanized. These are all factors that contribute to a fast Return-On-Investment. A faster identification of an account at risk and a competent recovery of the customer relationship can immediately translate into hard money.
Making businesses more humane
Many companies have had a strong focus on digitalization over the past years. The COVID-situation has sped up the thrive to customer interactions that are less personal. And many companies have outsourced important customer interactions, losing human touch completely. Still, while everything has been digitizing fast; it is human elements that continue to make the difference. Whether in a Business-to-Business or in a Business-to-Consumer relationship; we are all humans. We have specific needs and wants; and also very specific emotions depending on the situation we are in right now. Understanding this and treating this with acceptance and respect we can build a better more sustaining business that is creating value for its customers, employees, and stakeholders in general.
Anthrolytics is about Digital Empathy. We provide solutions that help you create better, more sustainable value by understanding your customers better and enter a more fruitful collaboration. Our experience is in Global Marketing Management, Data Science, Behavioral Science and Leadership.
Björn Kälin is a Co-Founder and the Chief Customer Officer of Anthrolytics. In earlier roles he has been heading Customer Experience and Insights Teams at leading global companies in the B2B and B2C area.