in 2000, Tod founded a dot-com company called MindfulEye, which developed artificial intelligence to understand the meaning behind online chatter. With this software, companies could gauge the subjective mood of public opinion on the Internet. With a few clicks, you could see a chart of people’s opinion of a given company. Tod’s company went public in eighteen months, and this category would later be known as sentiment analysis.
Several venture capital firms were vying to be the company’s second-round funder. Tod and his partners met with three such firms and evaluated them based on their past performance, skills of executives, and the proposed valuation and terms. But at one of these meetings, Tod’s group got a bad vibe from one of the vying firm’s leaders. They couldn’t put their finger on it, but something struck them as odd — perhaps a sense of distraction, perhaps of looking for a quicker stock turnaround than they wanted. Still, that group’s proposal on paper seemed strongest, and they discounted their gut feelings and went with that group.
While MindfulEye did well, they later found their instincts had been right — that firm probably wasn’t the best partner for long-term growth. MindfulEye grew to about twenty people before being caught up in the dot-com bomb and was unable to secure additional funding rounds. Trusting their gut would have placed the company on a more fruitful path.
Stories
Another component of building humanity into your organization’s mix is using anecdotes and storytelling as part of the corporate ethos. Leaders certainly need to communicate important information to their troops, but each time you do, you should look for a human story to articulate the impact on your actual customers, employees, shareholders, and partners.
This will be easier for some departments than others. Many marketing groups already develop character portraits to represent the people in their markets. (“Jill is a thirty-year-old junior executive who loves to travel and is trying to be better at fitness.”) But this kind of anecdotal information can and should extend to all parts of your organization.
Your legal team should try to understand someone’s motivation for using your brand imagery without your permission. (Perhaps they’re a superfan and are trying to connect with your firm or share their enthusiasm to attract others to the products and services you offer.)
Your human resources team should define custom benefits packages based on the real-world needs of your employees, not just accept what’s offered by a benefits administration firm.
Your customer service team should rely less on scripts and instead try to picture the way people are interacting with your product or service, to better empathize with frustrations.
The ability to relate to people and communicate that quality in stories isn’t restricted to the Type-A personality leaders like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. It’s a skill anyone can learn, one that gets better with practice. One simple way to start is to identify what specific problem people had prior to using your organization’s services and then paint a picture of how your service has improved their lives.
Start now.
How You Relate
Likewise, you should strive to understand how your market understands you.
When automotive vertical site Edmunds.com was trying to better understand the people who use their service, the team reviewed millions of comments online to figure out how people were talking about specific cars. Toyota Corolla kept coming up associated with “college”; the Nissan Sentra was associated with “mom” and “daughter.”
Formerly the realm of heavy data processing tools, this kind of evaluation is a lot easier these days with social media monitoring tools like Sysomos. Even starting with a simple tag cloud — where the words that are most commonly associated with your company appear in a larger and heavier font the more frequently people use them — can help you understand how your market views you, the quality of your products and how they are using them.
Language
Starting today, you should strive to eliminate “corporate-speak” from as much of your organization as you can. True, there are some places where this simply won’t be possible because of regulatory requirements — financial and material disclosures, for example — but in most places, your words can probably be made more human.
This can even be something as simple as the use of contractions and real human emotions — “Whoa, that’s no good. I’ll check into that. Thanks for letting me know.”
Remember that your stakeholders rely on the people behind the brand to help them when needed.
Empathy
Perhaps the most important factor of building humanity into business is developing empathy. As Jayson Boyers, VP at Champlain College notes, “Though the concept of empathy might contradict the modern concept of a traditional workplace — competitive, cutthroat, and with employees climbing over each other to reach the top — the reality is that for business leaders to experience success, they need to not just see or hear the activity around them, but also relate to the people they serve.”
Early in his career, Boyers was responsible for overseeing his company’s largest division, which was suffering from poor employee morale and lack of trust in its leadership. “Rather than force my will and clean house,” he says, “I sat down with each employee to gauge their feelings about the company and talk about how to improve results. Through empathetic employee engagement, we could create a pathway to success.”
Don’t fall into the trap of false empathy, though. Many organizations undertake occasional employee or customer surveys to briefly gauge the level of happiness in those groups. Then, they do nothing with the results. Don’t use these surveys as a way of trying to fake empathy. True organizational empathy is based on action you take from what you learn. It’s worse to ask and then do nothing than to not ask at all.
Chapter 3
TOUCH Assessment
To start, it’s helpful to get a sense of your organization’s overall humanity — this quick assessment tool will give you your TOUCH score.
Technology
Do you invest in technology that makes things easier for your customers or easier for your staff?
Too many organizations use tools that help achieve internal goals (such as aiming for shorter time on client-support calls) rather than helping your clients and stakeholders with their goals. Think of the difference between Microsoft’s software (designed primarily by computer programmers and loaded with features that most people don’t use) and Apple’s software (designed primarily by human interface specialists, sacrificing some functionality for ease of use).
Our tools primarily benefit us. (0 points)
We don’t use much technology. We are customer-centric. (1 point)
Our tools benefit us and our clients. (2 points)
How many layers of technology do your customers have to go through to reach a human being with front-line decision-making ability?
Web forms, phone trees, and automated marketing certainly make the process of doing business easier, but these technologies often have the “benefit” of keeping your customers and stakeholders further away from real people who can solve
