We, as marketers, all understand how important it is to get to know our customers. But what discipline are we bringing to that process? Do we understand the many levels of empathy we need to have for them, and how to translate those insights into the customer experience and product or service?
Today, Emily Vernon, shares so much wisdom about how to look at our customers’ experience. We talk about the cumulative experience and how brands can shift from being reactive to cultural moments to being more proactive. Emily shares the three altitudes of empathy – the layers at which we need to understand our customers in order to create an engaging experience. We discuss how brand experience is shifting from user-centricity to human centricity, and requires leaders to address more complex, emotional needs (yes, even in B2B!). We chat about how empathy should be viewed as a skill, not a trait. She also shares 5 empathy exercise types so you avoid seeing customer insight gathering as one-dimensional and discover which ones your brand is doing well, versus what you may be missing to get a fuller picture. Today’s episode may change the way you gather customer insights from now on!
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
- You have to understand your customers as people, not as a broad, generic demographic. In order to connect with the right people, some people won’t like you.
- B2B has evolved over the last 20 years, but it is important to remember that you’re selling to humans, who justify emotions with logic, but are still buying with emotion.
- There is more than one way to look at empathy exercises. It is important to look at empathy from all angles, gather and analyze that information, and then implement with your team and see what sticks.
“We bring meaning in terms of how we live, we bring meaning in terms of how we do our job. There’s much more of a movement in B2B to start to look at things emotionally.” — Emily Vernon
About Emily Vernon, Customer Experience Consultant an, B2B Experience Lead
Emily consults Reckitt around the end-to-end experience for B2B hygiene solutions. For more than ten years, both agency- and client-side, she has enabled brands to better engage their audiences through experience, ranging from products to service rituals, physical environments to digital platforms.
She’s been honored to have worked with some of the top brands within work, travel, luxury and wellbeing including Lego, IHG, Clinique, Shimano and Converse. Collaborations with these brands and others have been featured in Highsnobiety, Hypebeast, Wallpaper*, Transform and Frame Magazine.
Emily’s experiences with stand-up comedy, offshore sailing and living abroad have cultivated her belief that we should always question the default.
Resources Mentioned:
Decisive: how to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip and Dan Heath
The Empathy Edge podcast with Michelle Wucker: How Risk Empathy Impacts Team Performance
Connect with Emily Vernon:
Website: https://emilyvernon.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilygvernon/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emilygv/
Don’t forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy
Connect with Maria:
Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com
Learn more about Maria’s brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.com
Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take my LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Twitter: @redslice
Facebook: Red Slice
FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
We as marketers all understand how important it is to get to know our customers. But what discipline are we bringing to that process? Do we understand the many levels of empathy we need to have for them, and how to translate those insights into the customer experience and our product or service. Today, customer experience consultant and b2b experience lead for Wreckit, Emily Vernon share so much wisdom about how to look at our customers’ experience. For more than 10 years both agency and client side. She’s enabled brands to better engage their audiences through experience, ranging from products to service rituals, physical environments to digital platforms. She’s been honored to work with some of the top brands within work travel luxury and wellbeing, including Lego IHG, Clinique, Shimano and converse. Today we talk about the cumulative experience and how brands can shift from being reactive. In cultural moments to being more proactive. Emily shares the three altitudes of empathy, the layers at which we need to understand our customers in order to create an engaging experience. We discuss how brand experience is shifting from user Centricity to human centricity, and requires leaders to address more complex emotional needs. Yes, even in b2b, we chat about how empathy should be viewed as a skill, not a trait. And Emily shares five empathy exercise types, so you avoid seeing customer insight gathering is one dimensional, and discover which ones your brand is doing really well, versus what you may be missing out on to get a fuller picture. That last point was really eye opening for me. Today’s episode may change the way you gather customer insights from now on.
Maria Ross 03:28
Welcome, Emily Verdun to the empathy edge podcast. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation with you all about customer experience and the role of empathy in it. So welcome to the show.
Emily Vernon 03:39
Thank you, Maria. I’m so excited to talk about empathy with you today.
Maria Ross 03:44
Yeah, and you have such a great breadth of experience across some of our most beloved brands, Lego, Clinique, Shimano Converse. And I know right now you’re working with Wreckit, as the b2b experience lead, which is wonderful. But tell us a little bit about your story. Just briefly, before we kick off this great conversation about customer experience and empathy. What led you to this work?
Emily Vernon 04:10
I have always been enthralled with customer experience, even before it was a thing I started off in footwear. And when you do footwear, it’s so important to understand, say culture and daily life. And it made me want to go beyond footwear. And that’s when I started doing a lot more work in terms of experience strategy, looking at how your customers and audiences interact with you at different points. And it’s been really expanding, expanding from there. And one of the places I’m so passionate about is looking at brands that really help us to create our ideal lifestyles, and that’s why the brands that you mentioned, they’re generally within say like work, hospitality and travel luxury and well While being, because these days, we have so many options to customize things to what we need, how we need to live. And it’s also a passion of mine, because throughout my life, I have tried many types of lifestyles, whether it’s living abroad, or trying to live out have to carry on bags for the last couple of months. And it just shows me different ways of living, and different sides of my own personality. And I always admire brands that help us to live those types of lifestyles.
Maria Ross 05:33
I love that because I think we as authentic marketers, not marketers that try to swindle people, but authentic marketers, we spend a lot of time trying to understand our, our ideal clients and customers and not just from the perspective of how they use the product or the service, but what is their life like, and what are they trying to achieve. And yes, in the end, it is about selling products, but we’re trying to enhance their lives. That’s why we do it. We’re not trying to persuade someone to buy something they don’t need, but figure out what their needs are and what experience they want to have and figure out how we can help augment that. So, I love the way you put that about being interested in customer experience before it was a thing. So, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about what you call the cumulative experience. Brands and companies are increasingly required to react to larger cultural movements. We talk about that a lot on the show about your brand can no longer not take a stand. And they have to be able to be speaking out about things that are impacting the lives of their customers and their employees. Because we can’t separate our personal and our work life anymore. It’s impossible. So, you talk about the fact that that these are currently reactive that companies are reacting to these things right now. And that they impact the customer and users cumulative experience. What do you mean by that?
Emily Vernon 07:01
Exactly, as you said, when we look at a brand or a company, we’re not siloing them in our minds, like I am now doing a purchase journey, I will not think about what you are when you’re in the news, or when I see something about you on LinkedIn. The community’s Experience is everything about that brand, and even its company and its greater actions. And it has an effect in terms of our perception. Because overall with customer experience, what we always say, is about total perception. And there’s just so much more awareness around what’s going on what that means to me. And actually, what that means to other people, I think we’re seeing couple of tall tales, where this is becoming quite important. The first one is there’s so much more emphasis on our different experiences, and how that is affecting our well-being. We’re not putting people into small boxes. And the more we’re seeing, say, our employee workforce as a lot of different individuals. The third one is, as you mentioned, it seems that there are a lot of cultural moments that brands are talking to, but it’s a bit reactive, which right now, fine, but how do we improve that going forward in the future, to make that more consistent, and even to give companies a bit more confidence into what they say, and then how they say it. And the third one is, as you mentioned, a lot of creatives are individuals and brands and customer experience roles went into those roles, because they wanted to do good wanted to do better. And those are certain muscles that they want to use, as well as help other people in their organizations to do the same.
Maria Ross 08:48
I love that. And I love that idea of moving from the reactive to the proactive because they think that that’s really where purpose and values and mission and vision, play a role. Because if you do the work of articulating and thinking through and putting a stake in the ground about what your brand and your company stands for, ahead of cultural moments ahead of political firestorm ahead of whatever’s going, you will know how to respond and people will expect you your your your best customers who are attracted to you because of your purpose and mission will expect you to respond in a certain way. It’s not going to be a guessing game of oh, this thing is happening. How do we think we should respond to it in the market? You will know because you have a playbook you have a guide. And I love that idea of starting to think about this. This is where all these different threads of things that people put off for so long are starting to come together with leaders have put off for so long in terms of that, you know, we don’t need a mission statement. We don’t need values we you know, we can just have a pretty poster on the wall. Now they’re understanding the important role that those things play in crisis in moments of cultural move. Minutes and in how they need to respond. And what’s been interesting to me. And I’m wondering if it’s interesting to you is to see the companies and the brands that have chosen not to say anything thinking in a very outdated way that by by not saying anything by not standing for anything, we’re staying neutral. And we’ll be able to appeal to the broadest possible market of people. Are you seeing a backlash in terms of that in terms of the customer perception of those companies?
Emily Vernon 10:31
Overall, I see that customers want to engage with brands that reflect their lifestyles and values and have those associations, there might be some brands where you don’t expect it. But there are others that have a lot more presence in your life, and more presence, in general, in terms of companies, where you expect them to say something. I’ve also seen companies where they’re actually speaking a lot more internally about issues, but aren’t reflecting that externally to show, hey, we’re thinking about this. But we’re going to concentrate our efforts in terms of what’s going on with our own people. It actually came up during a, I was in a meeting for a diversity inclusion committee, and it came up well, we actually don’t know who, where they’re talking or who they’re talking to. And it doesn’t always come up as a thought, with the approach to communication. Also, the important thing is not every single customer or user is going to perceive what you’re doing in a positive way, depending on where their their feelings are on a certain topic. There’s a really interesting study, because there’s a debate between, you know, when it comes to corporate social responsibility isn’t just a high percentage in terms of what people would do, what they say versus what they actually do. There was a study done in 2013, by the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and they were working with a chain, a grocery store chain in the northeast, to see if they talked about their corporate responsibility, what would happen in terms of loyalty, they talked about four different things, kind of environmental friendliness, community support, selling local products, and then treating their employees fairly. They found in general, this was positive people perceived this grocery store chain more, and they bought more products, except for one audience in terms of environmental friendliness, because their perception, their feelings toward that had the associate, environmental friendliness was something that was a little higher in price, perhaps a little bit more affluent in terms of its products and services, or wouldn’t be able to serve them, as we’re talking about, like on their day to day basis and their day to day feelings and needs. Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk about it, it means you have to find what is the right way to talk about it to understand those different feelings your audiences have toward what you’re doing and what it means to them in terms of their overall experience.
Maria Ross 13:21
That’s so important, I think to and it’s, I think that’s why really understanding your customers, as people and not as this like, broad demographic, this generic what I always call the generic vanilla blob of people that doesn’t exist, you know, in real life, it’s really getting to know them as people and understanding that, you know, you’re not going to please everybody, and that’s okay, your brand needs to stand for something. And in order to be connected with more people, it needs to understand that potentially people won’t like you. I always used to use example, early in my career about Starbucks. And when I was living in Seattle, you know, there’s a lot of independent coffee shops in Seattle, they take their coffee very seriously there. And Starbucks knows who they’re talking to. And they’re not trying to convince every independent coffee expert, that they should be a customer of Starbucks, they know their lane, you know what I mean? And they know they know what their people come to them for, and what their lives are like. And that’s how they’ve been able to sustain the brand and introduce new products and new experiences that speak directly to those people. They’re okay with the fact that there’s going to be a group of people that still go to their independent coffee shop and absolutely hate Starbucks and they’re okay with it.
Emily Vernon 14:42
Yeah, and it makes me think there’s just so much so many brands telling, trying to tell us so many things that it’s just as important to, to know when you should speak up, and then when you should perhaps give someone else the mic. We we probably learned a little bit from The Webb telescope that there are a lot of galaxies out there. And it doesn’t mean that each one needs to shine as brightly all the time. I was really, I was really surprised to hear that there was like an estimate in terms of how many ads we saw a day, it was somewhere between like, six and 10,000 ads. And I’m sure we’re all like looking around and trying to see like, where are they, but we just don’t notice them anymore.
Maria Ross 15:25
They’re everywhere. It’s pervasive. Yeah.
Emily Vernon 15:28
It’s, it’s crazy, I’m sure, I’m sure I have a couple around that I don’t even pay attention to. And that’s where being consistent repetitive and talking about things over time. And again, or not talking about certain things really helps to connect to your right audience, who really wants to engage in that conversation, versus trying to force people in certain conversations.
Maria Ross 15:52
I love that well, and that’s the epitome of empathy, right is meeting people where they are. So that’s a great segue into something you call the three altitudes of empathy. And this idea of looking at feelings in a more structured way that helps us make decisions about the products and services and the experiences that we bring to market. So around each customer, or user, or human, there are three altitudes of empathy. Tell us about those.
Emily Vernon 16:19
The first, I would say the first thing with this idea of altitudes of empathy is what you just mentioned, we have to shift from really, customer or user Centricity to human Centricity that we don’t see them only in this functional or interactive way, there’s more to who they are than the customer personas that we might make. These altitudes really came out of the need to dimensionalize, who were looking at, versus trying to make it feel a bit. Like, try to make it feel a little bit like we’re checking off that we need to do a persona, or that we’re doing a almost children’s book, play by play with customer journeys, which is fine. Simplicity is great. But how do we start to look at someone with more depth? And that’s where this idea of altitudes of empathy comes in? When we look at them like this, the lowest altitude would be how you feel about something functionally, how is it working? Does it work for you very close in. Above that is your day to day, your day-to-day feelings? And sometimes when a brand or company is not involved? What are they thinking about? You know, for example, if we look at that study from the Tuck School of Business, what are their concerns and feelings just generally from a day to day, and are we talking to them or ignoring them. And then all the way above is this idea of our feelings to a more societal and cultural level. And that’s really the altitude today that we need to understand a little bit better, because that’s the greater context for everything that’s happening. And that altitude isn’t always included in our journeys. It’s almost the journey on top of a journey, not to sound like Inception, but it still affects everything below. And I believe if we can start to dimensionalize, those feelings will not only understand our audiences a little bit better, but perhaps can guide our internal teams a little bit more in terms of dimensionalizing these while actually now humans, and how they actually would come across the cumulative experience of a brand or a company.
Maria Ross 18:33
I love that. So, really quickly summarize those three for us before we move on, because I really want people to understand those levels.
Emily Vernon 18:40
Of course, the first altitude, the lowest one, very functional, the second one being more day-to-day feelings. And the third one, the feelings toward, say societal or cultural happenings.
Maria Ross 18:57
I love that. And is that something you recommend when you work with clients that they when they build these customer personas, or their profiles, or what have you that they’re looking at those three different altitudes?
Emily Vernon 19:09
I’m seeing it more and more as something that we need to work with. As we’re doing customer journeys. It’s coming into the coming into some of my work, but it’s almost like we can move even further and address those. So, it’s, it’s something that I see coming versus something that’s yet not yet fully established as a as a practice.
Maria Ross 19:33
Absolutely. And I know I do a very MacGyver version of that for my clients. We don’t do extensive, you know, in person interviews or things like that, but when we’re thinking about those personas, it’s not just about the persona in relation to their product or service. It’s how that person operates in the world. And what is that person like? What do they value? What do they fear? What do they worry about and it can often seem very disjointed for Chloe tends to go through that exercise of like, I don’t understand where this is going or what this has to do with our technology. But then you start to pull out the buying drivers from that. And it’s immediately apparent how it impacts what they’re saying about their product or service, and how they’re delivering it. So, as one tiny, minut example, if you go through this exercise, and you realize that you have an audience profile, where someone is constantly stretched for time, and is super busy and overwhelmed, you know, the answer is, you know, don’t create a, you know, six-week course for that, that person, it’s never gonna fly no matter how good it is, right? So that’s just like, one little example. But it’s amazing how, when you when you get a client to actually think about that, all the sudden, it’s like a domino, that they’re able to make these other decisions so much easier. Do you find that as well?
Emily Vernon 20:53
Oh, yeah, it reminds me of a time where I was working with hospitality brands from the US and they did wellness, because we all know traveling, we could be a little bit healthier
Maria Ross 21:04
Can be better. Yeah.
Emily Vernon 21:07
And they, they were looking to go into the Chinese market, which if you start to think about those upper echelons of feelings, from a cultural and society perspective, there’s so many aspects of wellness that are quite quite different, you know, when you think about food and health, physical exercise, and then mental well-being, and even the balance of environments, and the movement of energy, there’s a lot of, or at least pre pandemic, there’s still a lot of influence over say, traditional medicine or even functional way. And we spent so much time understanding what it meant in terms of the US what it meant in terms of the Chinese market, still a bit broad. And by establishing those, it was so much easier to make other decisions about the experience, because we were able to align on those upper echelons of feelings of how people felt about wellness. So, indeed, it’s almost like we do this within their projects already. It’s trying to identify and write them down. So that, as you mentioned, we feel that we are being productive when we’re doing something that might not feel related, but actually is just the whole umbrella in terms of the project.
Maria Ross 22:25
Yeah. And I find it’s a challenge to and possibly you do as well. I think, I think the realization is happening more and more, but with b2b companies, that you know, them saying, well, we don’t we need to understand the whole person because it’s the person’s buying this for their company. But so many of the decisions that we make, even in the work context, are a reflection of our own goals and values and fears and worries, and what that decision that we make for our company, even if we’re not writing the check from our own checkbook, what that says about us, and I feel like there’s there’s starting to be a movement among b2b companies where they’re finally getting that, are you finding that in your work?
Emily Vernon 23:08
I am, I’m smiling, because it’s always a conversation, when we start to look at products or services is something quite functional, where in the end, b2b customers are still b2b, or b2c individuals. And they have that expectation in terms of how a brand would talk to and also what is the meaning of your work. Going back to lifestyles we have, we bring meaning in terms of how we live, we bring meaning in terms of how we do our job. And indeed, there’s much more of a movement in b2b to start to look at things emotionally and to and to also acknowledge, indeed, there’s a functional aspect, but there still is the greater emotional aspect, it’s not going away, it’s that we’re, we’re giving a little bit more human to B to B, because in the end, people are running a business, they’re dealing with people, they’re dealing with clients. b2b is almost even more human than than b2b because of everyone involved. So, I have been seeing it. And I’ve been noticing an improvement, but still a repetition that we need to emphasize that in, in the b2b as in the b2b that we think about 20 years ago, it’s it’s definitely evolving.
Maria Ross 24:26
Absolutely. And and at the end of the day, we’re still selling to human beings and human beings are complex, emotional creatures. And I have found that even in the most technologically driven sales, there’s always been the old adage in tech, that when you’re selling to it buyers, they’re very skeptical of marketing, they’re very skeptical of gimmicks, they’re, you know, they just want the information they want the data. But we as human beings, this is undeniable. We tend to justify our emotions with logic. So, the emotion, the resonance comes first, even if someone doesn’t realize that it does. And they might be trying to find the data to just backup their existing point of view, versus that they’re very data driven. And if you show them the data they will come.
Emily Vernon 25:15
Indeed I was I, we were talking earlier about trying to find a new book. And one of the samples that I was reading was decisive. And they were saying that people.
Maria Ross 25:24
I love that book. And Dan Heath, we will put it in the, we’ll put it in the show notes. It’s one of my I love all their books, because of their their bent on us looking at the way humans work and operate.
Emily Vernon 25:39
Indeed, and it, it’s exactly what you mentioned that we do, in terms of confirmation bias, we are looking for those data points. But also, when you’re running a business, you’re not just dealing with facts, you’re looking at people’s livelihoods being judged for your decisions. I think that’s actually one of the hugest thing is, what will someone perceive this to be? And they had an interesting example of someone having to change their mindset to say, if my successor came in, what decision would they make, you know, getting in all those different data points in terms of what’s actually happening, how your stakeholders are feeling. And it’s, it’s always going to be emotional to some extent, and how you manage your emotions, and sometimes learn how to deal with risks as you’re running a business. So, decision making is huge. And empathy is a big thing for us to use as a point of making decisions. But we need to understand it a little bit better, so that we can also talk about it better with other people.
Maria Ross 26:40
I love that you brought in the idea of risk, because I did an interview, that I’ll put a link in the show notes, too, with Michelle Walker, about the risk empathy, and understanding just like any other vector of diversity, when we’re putting together high performing teams, we need to have an appreciation of where people are in their risk profile and their risk footprint. Because that can actually input the impact the productivity, and the performance of the team if there’s not an appreciation of the different risk fingerprints, which she calls risk fingerprints within that team. And so, you can also see how that relates to your larger customer base, that, you know, if you’re if you’re trying to target a customer segment, and you’re trying to push them too fast, and they have a different risk profile, you’re not going to succeed with that product or service. So, I love that you brought in that aspect because it that idea of the risk fingerprint does impact how we make decisions. And we need to factor that in another layer in of when we’re looking at our ideal customers and clients looking at that vector as well. So, I love that you brought that up. Talk about what you’ve seen in terms of people looking at empathy, as a trait versus a skill.
Emily Vernon 27:59
When we look at empathy, and honestly, the the idea of empathy is not that old, it’s about a century and what we thought it was, has changed. So, we have to give each other all a bit of credit in terms of trying to do empathy better, and to understand how to apply it. A lot of times when we look at empathy, we look at it as as a trait, or that certain people are really good at it, or functions are good at it, say designers or people within marketing or branding. But you don’t just go into a workshop and expect to be empathetic. It’s much like if you’re doing public speaking, you don’t just wait to go do public speaking to practice? Well, I hope not. But you wouldn’t usually do that to practice public speaking, even the best public speakers will do exercises to improve how they public speak, maybe play around with different ideas, and even develop further as a public speaker or someone who wants to engage an audience. And that’s where with empathy, we almost need to start thinking of it like a muscle or like a skill that we actually need to exercise it over time. Versus rely on that that one workshop that we all get really enthusiastic about to then use it, because we’ll be good at it. But it won’t be as impactful as if we’re trying to exercise our empathy over time.
Maria Ross 29:30
Yeah, I often talk about and I talked about this in my book, the concept of the empathy gym. And that you know, you don’t go run a marathon without training for it. You start somewhere and it has to be a practice. And when you go to the gym the first time, you’re It feels weird, you’re sore, you don’t do things right, quote unquote, it doesn’t mean that that one time is enough for you to be ready to run a marathon. And so this idea of that, we can just take a pill and automatically become empathetic. If that muscle has atrophied in us because we as humans are wired for empathy, it’s in our DNA, we have to build it back up again. And that takes more than one workshop, I actually was speaking to a possible speaking client the other day, and we were talking about the fact that they want to work on empathy for their management team, their sales management team. And I said, I am happy to come in and do a workshop, I can do that, and you can pay me and that’d be great, it’s not going to solve your problem, you actually need to have some sort of integrated curriculum that is repeated. And then what has to happen within the organization to reward and model and encourage empathy. It can’t just be a two-hour workshop, and everybody’s quote, unquote, cured, right. So, I love that you talk about it in terms of, and I think that makes sense for a lot of people when I when I bring up the gym analogy or your analogy about like, being a good public speaker, you don’t just like, go in cold. And all of a sudden, you’re you’re, you know, Barack Obama up on stage. So, it’s we need to get through this idea that even this quote, unquote, soft skills, which I still hate talking about them as soft skills, because I think they’re so important and so relevant to the bottom line. But those take practice, that takes time. And you have to build that up. And I love the idea of calling it a skill, not a trait. So, thank you for that. You have talked about empathy, exercise types. So, with an empathy report card, you see what type of empathy types your business or team does well, and what needs further exploration in order to better improve the cumulative customer experience. Tell us what you mean by that.
Emily Vernon 31:47
When right now, when we look at empathy, it’s it can come off as doing one thing, you’re trying to understand someone’s feelings. But when we look at different ways of applying, say design thinking, we actually do different types of empathy throughout the process. And it can really help different teams and organizations to understand what those are. So, for example, there’s five of them, I would say you have the first one being immerse, and this is when you go into an audience’s environment, and you try to experience it to understand it. The second one is connect with, which is when we talk to our audiences and users, whether it’s like one to one or intergroup. The third one is research. And this is really desk research. To give us more context, we’re reading articles, we’re looking at influencers, we’re looking at thought leaders, the next the fourth one is imagine and this is what we try to actually project ourselves into how the audience or user might react to something. And then the fifth one is assess. And this is when we try to look at did we apply our knowledge correctly. And that was so interesting, because we want to understand the feelings. And generally, when you’re doing customer experience, or even the user experience, you have to make decisions on the go. But then at some point, you need to test them. And that’s really where assess comes in. And I’ve seen depending on the team, organization, or even industry, some people are better or more apt at doing one versus the other. But if we can start to break it down in terms of what what we already do, we can start to see how to counterbalance that type of empathy exercise with a different one to make sure that we don’t have blind spots, as well as to give a little bit more dimension to the information that we already have.
Maria Ross 33:45
So, I’m curious, and I’m gonna put you on the spot here with a curveball question. But can you talk about a time you’ve applied that to a client and what were some of the insights gleaned?
Emily Vernon 33:56
Out what I can? What I can show is that for different organizations that they’ve been good at certain exercises. So, for example, when I was working at Converse and footwear design, and being exposed to say, like Nike, as well as JD sports, we were really good at immerse people were very just apt at understanding the culture and knowing everything in the news and knowing how to respond to that. I saw it Wreckit on the flip side, that as something as a company that’s an FMCG, that we’re really good at still our assess, really starting to look at how do we apply our knowledge correctly? Testing designs and services. So, what I saw within those two organizations, one that’s really good at immerse and the other that’s really good SS is that they would need to know consider other empathy exercises to make sure that they were reacting correctly. So, for example, with something like footwear design and culture, it’s really good to develop that intuition. But you still want to make sure that you have something else. So, you’re, you’re not just filtering something through your own lens. And I’ve seen a lot of organizations and industries improve. And though that they generally need to balance that out, in terms of making like larger group decisions.
Maria Ross 35:32
I love that, that there’s this idea of different brands being good at some of the empathy exercises, but maybe a little weaker and need improvement in the others, because I think we tend to, and this is actually opening my eyes as well, we tend to think of, there’s just one type of empathy exercise when one type of way to gather that information and get to know your customer. And I love this idea of like, getting a fuller picture. By doing all these things, not you know, we don’t have to throw out third party research or like what you call desk research. That’s important, too, and qualitative, and one on one and immersive. And so, I love this idea of making a leader think about a more holistic way of evaluating who their customers are and what they want, what they aspire to be, what their goals and fears are. So, they really can’t understand them. I guess what my question and maybe some of the listeners question follow up on that is, how do you get a company to connect the dots between all of the information they’re getting about their customer, all of the all of the empathy that they are feeling, and seeing for their customer, and get that to translate into implementation?
Emily Vernon 36:57
The biggest part really is starting to structure your information, and categorize it. I know that sounds really cold and boring. But when you start to see what you’re doing well, and what you’re not doing well, or what information you have, that’s when you can act on it. Without that it just seems like a big jumble of information. And that kind of go back to your previous question in terms of how to identify and then improve or use them for empathy types. When I was at Converse, we did a lot of within our we had a local regional team, we did a lot of experiments in terms of creating different tools and aspects to better understand the customer, we would make, say, Instagram feeds to try to show to other people. As we saw that we were really good at immerse, we actually went and connected a lot with our audience. I mean, everywhere, whether we are in like London, or in Manchester, we tried to talk and make sure that we really understood, and we weren’t just doing it through our lens. So, I can say that, if you find yourself going one direction, it’s good to have a team that’s open to doing a little bit of experiments and trying to make new tools, and ones that you feel that might resonate with your team. And that was that was such a big thing for us. And having those in place. If we created say, we had websites and blogs. And also reports, by having a couple different ways of sharing sharing information, we started telling a bigger story. And we can engage different people. So that that’s always the biggest thing for me it was with empathy, try different things, try it, make something up, you know, look at how other people have done it, and see what sticks. There’s no right or wrong way. The biggest and most important thing is repetition, and finding something that works for for your company and your team, because you’ll be probably quite surprised of the creative things that you can come up with. And creativity is a big one in terms of empathy.
Maria Ross 39:04
Absolutely. And so, what I hear you saying there something you said at the top of that, which was this idea of categorization and prioritization of the information that you hear? And in my mind, I’m like, of course, you know, it’s like it’s creating, it’s getting those insights and categorizing like, is this? Is this a product issue? Is this a customer rep issue? Is this a, you know, a buying process issue, and then figuring out how you can improve it in those different areas? And like, what can be solved with technology? Versus what needs to be solved with policy versus what needs to be solved with product design?
Emily Vernon 39:42
Yeah, it reminds me of a conversation we’re having as a team, because we’re looking at this huge topic of, of sustainability. And indeed, We have to start to break these big ideas down to understand where can we act and where we can have an impact And also when you have those categories, you can start to see how you’re improving or not, which is also really motivating. We want to be able to improve an experience. And if we can see, it was x before now, it’s why it only gives us more, more hope to try more things within the organization.
Maria Ross 40:19
So, I’m going to ask you a pretty selfish question. Because I think it’s also the most the million-dollar question is, how do you? How do you get leadership to be patient enough with that process of discovery? Because, you know, I know, especially with my clients, you know, part of part of the value prop, I offer them as a very efficient brand story and brand messaging process. And I often lament the fact that we can’t spend longer on empathy for customers customer insights, I kind of sort of have to hope and pray that they will deal with that on their own right. But how do you? How do you convince leadership of the ROI of the patience of this kind of a process? And maybe you don’t have a magic bullet for us, but so let’s say there’s someone listening, who is a director of customer experience in their organization, and knows they need to be doing more of this testing and experimentation. And, you know, looking at the different empathy exercises, but they’ve got, you know, leadership team that’s like, how is this going to impact us next quarter, right? Is there any are there any words of wisdom you can share?
Emily Vernon 41:29
There are a couple of approaches, and I’ll go through one that I’ve had to learn, which is try to attach it to an existing project. And that can really help to show its value. So even right now, within b2b, we’re working on certain projects, where I was saying, hey, why don’t we, why don’t we start to understand our customer a little bit better, because it could help us to x in this project. And I’ve been waiting for a project to, to add this on to it. So, my advice is, know what you want, and start to look and scope out what projects you can attach that to so it can grow. And also, some of the people that would be allies in the organization that can help see that value. And the other part about that is knowing that it’s going to take some time and repetition, that you’ll talk about it, and someone might go back for revert, that’s okay. It really is something consistent. But the biggest thing for me is is find find that project. And once people see the value of that it can then grow and then be added to other projects as well.
Maria Ross 42:42
Yeah, absolutely. Once once that project knocks it out of the park, and you can say, well, here’s why it did was because we took a step back, we did all this work. And that’s why this project succeeded. That speaks volumes, it’s like you said it’s getting that first one. And I love that idea of not trying to boil the ocean. I think that’s where so many folks that are in the design or customer experience, space, feel feel disheartened, because they want to change everything all at once. And it’s just it’s finding those smaller initiatives, I always talk about, you know, transforming your company in an empathetic organization, you can start small, you can start with these little bright lights that that then become a model. And those are successfully start to get people’s attention. And then they think well, how else can we apply this? Where else can we apply this in our organization? So, such great advice. Thank you, Emily. This has been such a great conversation. I appreciate your time and your insights. We’ll have all of your information in the show notes. But really quickly for people on the go. Can you tell them the best place to find out more about you and your work or where to connect with you?
Emily Vernon 43:46
Yeah, of course, if you want to learn a little bit more about my work and what I do, you can find me at Emilyvernon.com.
Maria Ross 43:55
Wonderful, nice and easy. Thanks again for your time today.
Emily Vernon 44:01
Thank you, Maria.
Maria Ross 44:03
And thank you everyone for listening to another wonderful episode of the empathy edge podcast. As always, if you enjoyed what you heard, please share it with a friend or a colleague. And don’t forget to rate and review we love that. Follow us, subscribe, do all the things and until next time, please always remember that cashflow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind.
