Empathy In Action: How to Deliver Great Customer Experiences at Scale

By Tony Bates and Natalie Petouhoff

A bold new look at how technology can become a force multiplier to deliver more empathy and integrate deeper, more personalized human connections into everyday business interactions at scale.

While the world has never needed more empathy than today, too often technology is used by businesses as a substitute and a barrier to real human connection. We’ve all experienced dumb chatbots, automated scripts and poor employee interactions that dehumanizes customer interactions.

Empathy is a powerful construct for a better world and a better business. It’s not a synonym for nice. Empathy is about respect and treating people in the context of their unique situation in a highly personalized way. They predict empathy is the next frontier in technology. This book is aimed at sparking an industry-wide conversation about how exponential technologies like, AI and cloud can enable a more empathetic world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646870882

Tony Bates

Dr Tony Bates is a Clinical Psychologist and was Head of Psychology for 30 years at St James’s Hospital, Dublin. He trained as a mindfulness teacher in 2001 and founded Jigsaw in 2006. Tony now lives on a cliff outside North Sligo. He is married to Ursula, father of three and grandfather of five.

Book preview

Empathy In Action: How to Deliver Great Customer Experiences at Scale

Advance Praise

My number one principle in business is customer obsession. Truly understanding and anticipating your customers’ needs (empathy) is not only at the heart of delivering exceptional customer experiences but is also how leaders can stay a step ahead of the blind spots that can derail even the best of companies. Tony has been at the helm of one industry transition after another, from the internet to videotelephony to video gaming apps and now, Contact Center as a Service. He has the credibility and experience to start a broader business conversation about delivering better customer experiences through empathy.

—JOHN CHAMBERS, Chairman Emeritus, Cisco and CEO, JC2 Ventures

"Empathy in Action touches on the new paradigm shift where consumers have certain expectations from the brands that they interact with. Loyalty is not a given—each interaction a consumer has with a company can ‘reset’ loyalty as competition is so fierce. This book explores how it all starts with employee satisfaction, which directly correlates with customer satisfaction. If companies want to stay relevant in this new world, these dynamics must be explored and implemented."

—ANDREA CHIN, Executive Director Global Consumer Care - IT at The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.

Regardless of industry, the fundamental foundation for all successful businesses is exceptional customer service. This book examines why customer experience has fallen short in the past and sparks your imagination about a new world of superior, empathetic customer experiences.

—JOHN DONAHOE, President and CEO, Nike

‘Experience’ happens when leaders guide their organization to behaviors and habits that earn admiration and sustainable growth. Use this book as a practical guidebook to achieve these outcomes.

—JEANNE BLISS, Best-selling author of Chief Customer Officer 2.0

"As we permanently shift to a digitally connected world that shapes every aspect of how we live, learn, worship, play, and work, this book provides tremendous insight into the opportunity for leaders to blend empathy and experiences in a way that leads to better business outcomes. My friend Tony has always been passionate about the consumer experience. Empathy in Action invites us to challenge the status quo and drive breakthrough innovation and success through a customer- and employee-centered approach."

—PAT GELSINGER, CEO, Intel

In this fast-changing digital economy, winning enterprises are putting a laser focus on providing a world-class, end-to-end customer experience. I gained new perspectives on the power of empathy in anticipating and delivering on customer expectations. I recommend this book for anyone looking to innovate customer experience.

—SHANTANU NARAYEN, Chairman, President, and CEO, Adobe Inc.

"If you want to truly be customer-centric, then put yourself into the hands of these two CX masters, Bates and Petouhoff. From accounting for experiences on your balance sheet to spelling out how you must lead differently, Empathy in Action delivers a systematic, intentional approach to transform your organization. Keep this book close by because you’ll be referencing it frequently!"

—CHARLENE LI, New York Times best-selling author of The Disruption Mindset and Founder, Altimeter

"If you care about your customer and employees, I recommend Empathy in Action for your whole organization. It’s a guide for reexamining our approaches to customer and employee experience that has the potential for those daring enough to shift paradigms to transform business as we know it."

—SANDY CARTER, VP, AWS WWPS Partners and Programs

"For a decade or more, we have been talking about customer centrism and customer experience. Last year, during the pandemic, we began to hear about the importance of business empathy in realizing a great customer experience. But very little had been done about what that actually means when it’s put into action. But now industry dynamo Natalie Petouhoff and Genesys CEO Tony Bates take empathy and give it substance. Not only do they help define how to see and feel the shoes the customer is in, but also what it takes to walk in those shoes. If you want to truly understand what empathy means in business, how to apply it, and how to measure how successful you have been, then this is a must-have book. So, if you feel anything for your customers, order this book and start reading it, even if you are still in your own shoes when you do. Because, trust me, by the time you are done, you will be living the book’s title—Empathy in Action."

—PAUL GREENBERG, Best-selling author of CRM at the Speed of Light (4 Editions)

"In an age where almost every interaction we have is through a lens of technology, too many nameless, faceless corporations have set aside the human connection for the bottom-line efficiency of technology. The secret to loyal customers isn’t in technology or efficiency; it is in creating that empathetic connection at scale. In this amazing book Empathy in Action, Tony and Natalie have laid out a road map for leaders to lead from the front and reestablish that critical, empathetic human touch. A must-have for any leader’s library."

—ALAN WEBBER, Program VP, Customer Experience Strategies, IDC.com

Whether you are a start-up or an intrapreneur inside a company, this book is your key to become obsessed with your customers and your employees. The authors’ four empathy pillars—listen, understand + predict, act, and learn—are the key to what drives innovation and disruption. I can’t wait for my students and clients to dive into this book.

—JAN RYAN, Professor & Executive Director of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at University of Texas and Partner at Capital Factory, Inc

"Empathy as a leverage tool toward employees’ and customers’ loyalty and company growth. Empathy in Action closes the gap between theory and what occurs to your customer and employee experience when you add empathy to the formula. Unlike many other books expressing the author’s ‘opinion,’ you have a book based on facts, outstanding research, exceptional proofed results, and great ideas that will help your company evolve. We are still far from closing all experience blind spots, but this book will certainly bring you many steps closer. I highly recommend this book if you want to insert empathy in your organization effectively! A practical reading that will assist your organization to gain real market differentiation and advantage."

—RICARDO SALTZ GULKO, Cofounder of European Customer Experience Organization

"Few people are as qualified to dissect and discuss the importance of empathy in business and culture as Dr. Natalie Petouhoff. Her deep expertise in understanding the wants, needs, and psychology of both customers and employees gives her unique insights into how better understanding leads to better business results. Empathy in Action will no doubt be a must-read for business leaders, the C-Suite, and even the E-suite—those seeking to obtain deeper levels of empathy—to better serve customers, employees, and citizens."

—DAVID ARMANO, Founder, Armano Design Group, Forbes contributor, and former Edelman executive

Companies are missing the massive opportunity to transform their transactional relationships with customers into bonds that are formed and informed by their experiences. In all my research and writing, it is clear that businesses with a traditional approach to customer service have only a matter of time before they’re replaced by a vendor that truly understands and wants to help their customer. This book offers readers the rationale behind adopting a customer-centric business model and the unexpected blind spots to avoid.

—ADRIAN SWINSCOE, Advisor, best-selling author, and Forbes contributor

EMPATHY IN ACTION

EMPATHY IN ACTION

HOW TO DELIVER GREAT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES AT SCALE

TONY BATES AND DR. NATALIE PETOUHOFF

Copyright ©2022 Genesys®. Patents Pending. All rights reserved. Genesys, the Genesys logo, Empathy in Action, Experience as a Service, Empathy Pillars, Systems of Empathy, Empathy in Action Flywheel, Employee Experience Orchestration, Customer Experience Orchestration, The Experience Index, Systems of Empathy Experience Orchestration, Customer-Centric Empathy Pods, Seven Empathy Leadership Proven Practices, Empathy Assessment, Fast-Forward Empathy Transformation Questions, and The Experience Orchestration Engine are trademarks or registered trademarks of Genesys. All other product and company names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Usage does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by the holder.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Proudly printed in the United States of America.

Ideapress Publishing | www.ideapresspublishing.com

Cover Design: Jeff Miller, Faceout

Interior Design: Jessica Angerstein

Illustrations: Shreya Jain

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-1-64687-043-1

Special Sales

Ideapress Books are available at a special discount for bulk purchases for sales promotions and premiums, or for use in corporate training programs. Special editions, including personalized covers, a custom foreword, corporate imprints, and bonus content, are also available.

We dedicate this book to Tony’s mum, Val,

and Natalie’s mom, Donna.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Starting an Industry Conversation: How Technology Enables a More Empathetic World

CHAPTER ONE

Technology: Evolution, Experiences, and Empathy

CHAPTER TWO

The Fifth Industrial Revolution: Personalization

CHAPTER THREE

History Foreshadows CX Problems

CHAPTER FOUR

The Business Case for CX/EX

CHAPTER FIVE

The Tech We Use Matters: From Linear to Exponential Technologies

CHAPTER SIX

Experiences Drive Good and Bad Profits

CHAPTER SEVEN

Improving Employee Experiences

CHAPTER EIGHT

Experiences as a Service: The Great Differentiator

CHAPTER NINE

Experiences as a Service for Customers and Employees

CHAPTER TEN

Reimagining the Future of Work

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Leading Change: It’s Not Business As Usual

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Empathy Transformation

CLOSING REMARKS

Igniting a Customer and Employee Respect Movement

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ENDNOTES

INDEX

"  Daring leaders who live into their values are never silent about hard things.

—Brené Brown

Introduction

STARTING AN INDUSTRY CONVERSATION: HOW TECHNOLOGY ENABLES A MORE EMPATHETIC WORLD

Tony’s Journey

The most important mentors in my life are my mother and my wife.

Val’s (my mum) superpower is unconditional love, and the most valuable life lesson she taught me was to never judge anyone unless you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Cori’s (my wife) superpower is her never-ending ability to reach out and help others. She’s a consummate giver. Like all givers, she’s highly empathetic, routinely putting others’ needs above her own.

The deep wisdom and open-hearted approach to life that these women exemplify guides much of my own approach to being a CEO. When I stop and look at the bigger picture, I see a world that desperately needs more empathy. Empathy is powerful, and it holds the power to fuel better businesses, better lives, and a better society. It’s not a synonym for nice. Empathy goes much deeper than that—ultimately, I’ve learned that it’s really about respect.

Empathy is a conscious act. It’s a commitment you make to understand a person in the context of their own life and experiences and then to treat them accordingly. After an empathetic interaction, the recipient feels heard, understood, and respected. But it’s been missing in the business world.

Over the course of my life and career, I’ve become focused on the idea of technology as a tool for promoting empathy in our daily lives. Many ideas have arisen from this one simple concept, with one question leading to another. After several decades of experience as a leader and intrepreneur, I’ve finally arrived at the core question that inspired this book: What if empathy became as important a design factor in new products and services as functionality, efficiency, or profit?

I believe empathy is the next frontier in technology. With this book, my coauthor, Natalie, and I hope to spark a broad, industry-spanning conversation about how technology can create and enable a more empathetic world. It all begins with business owners’ and industry leaders’ policies and priorities, but—most importantly, as you’ll see—the needs of customers and employees they serve.

I’ve witnessed firsthand the astounding technological evolution of the past 30-plus years. Our current era is one that’s been forged by boundless imagination. As Albert Einstein said, Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions. That’s been my experience with technology. It is, simply put, the way our collective imagination takes form.

My career began in the mid-1980s when a group of interconnected computers run by the US Department of Defense formed as the precursor to the internet of today. This network was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

ARPANET proliferated by connecting computers at dozens of universities across the United States, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT. In my first job as a network operator at the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC), we imagined the impossible: What if those ARPANET gateways could connect these colleges to European universities all the way across the Atlantic Ocean? We did just that, running the ARPANET gateway pioneered out of the work of Peter Kirstein at University College London.

Later, we connected NASA and the NSF net over a tiny 512K connection from the United Kingdom to the United States. Ironically, we called it the fat-pipe project. Finally, we were able to transition the United Kingdom from its own proprietary networking standards to a common standard enabling computers to communicate on a network using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or the internet as we know it today.

By the time I moved to Northern Virginia in 1994 to work at MCI, I was helping build the largest internet network in the world. At the time, the World Wide Web and browser had been recently invented, showing new ways to access information and communicate.

These early career experiences were not inconsequential; they were foundational to the ubiquitous global internet we use today—and they also provided a blueprint for my career, which has been shaped by a passion for technology and the extraordinary mentors who were able to transcend current thinking and teach me to envision incredible new realities.

My early mentors were John Seymour at the University of London Computer Centre, and the late Peter Kirstein at the University College London. And, later, Graeme Fraser taught me to think big; Mike Volpi taught me about the power of communication; John Chambers taught me about vision; John Donahoe taught me about mission and purpose; Randy Pond taught me about humility; Steve Ballmer taught me about scale and the power of data; and Pierre Lamond taught me that experience matters and you must be ensconced in the fundamentals of your product and business.

The bulk of my career, more than 14 years, was spent at Cisco during the internet boom. Cisco’s vision was changing the way we work, live, play and learn—and that’s exactly what we delivered to the world.1 When I joined Cisco in 1996, 20 million American adults had access to the internet—a population about the size of New York.2 By the time I left Cisco in 2010, there were two billion internet users worldwide3 and 255 million websites.4

Today, just a short time later, almost 4.66 billion people are active internet users—almost 60 percent of the world’s population.5 Change is accelerating beyond anything we could have imagined.

During this period, I was also working on integrating Scientific Atlanta. This 50-year-old company provided digital set-top boxes for the home and was one of the most significant acquisitions in Cisco’s history. I gained an appreciation for the enormous complexity required in integrating and harmonizing systems to support live video streaming. I also learned that if you want to imagine the future, you must look beyond the comfortable reality of today. In this case, the market capturing my attention, video-over-the-internet, was also disrupting the market that had served me so well: building and selling internet routers to telecom service providers.

Around this time, my interests shifted from hardware routing for service providers and enterprises to bringing video-over-the-internet into consumers’ homes. I was on the YouTube board and could see that the lines between business and consumer, which had been separate worlds, were blurring. I saw video-as-a-platform as a means of human expression and had my first inklings of imagining personalized experiences and moments connected via technology.

Eventually, my passion for video and the customers’ experience led me to accept a leadership role at Skype in 2010. My vision for Skype was to create a virtual town square, a virtual piazza, a gathering place. I loved the product and was enamored with the consumer brand; great customer experience stories are so much more compelling than a company name. Skype ushered in a new reality of online video conferencing for personal and professional use.

Often, unforeseen global market conditions can change business in the blink of an eye. During the global COVID-19 pandemic, where would we have been without tools like Skype, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams for our work, our families, and our communities as a whole? These have become our new normal.

I didn’t learn from success alone, however. In spite of Skype’s success during the early 2000s, we had made one glaring mistake: we were late to mobile. In 2010, the number of cell phones sold worldwide was about 300 million.6 By 2012, that number had more than doubled to 680 million.7

Later, while I was president of GoPro, the now-famous maker of action cameras, mobile apps, and video-editing software, I witnessed another missed opportunity. While the success of the moment was exhilarating—we were growing like gangbusters from $1.34 billion in 2014 to $1.6 billion one year later—we didn’t seize the bigger picture: evolving from a product company to a platform company.8 This cost GoPro in the long run.

These mistakes represent important lessons and they highlight a topic we discuss at length in this book: the danger of blind spots.

Currently, I am chairman and CEO of Genesys®. When I joined in May 2019, Genesys checked every box for me. It’s a global company with a great customer base. The size, at about $1.5 billion in revenue with 5,000 employees, was perfect. Small enough that you can introduce a vision, create change, and be impactful—perhaps even double the business—but large enough that you can implement the corporate leadership required to scale. It was also ripe for transformation as a market leader offering on-premise contact center solutions in a world quickly moving to the cloud. Genesys also provided a once-in-a-lifetime chance to apply all I’ve learned about transcending current thinking and innovating ahead of my competitors.

The key to both was a concept I’d seen modeled throughout my life: the innovation we and so many others needed was empathy.

This was the true lightbulb moment that propelled me toward a radical new future, and it is the reason this book was written.

A recent global study of 5,000 adults found that customer service, while seen as more efficient than in the past, is widely experienced as impersonal by those who engage with it.9 While a majority (71 percent) believe that customer service has become more personalized, nearly half (48 percent) still note a distinct lack of compassion in the way they experience it.10

What would a better, more empathetic reality look like? How would our industries improve if people truly felt they were being treated with compassion and empathy throughout their customer service interactions?

As I started my new Genesys journey and my burgeoning focus on empathy as strategy, I was introduced to Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, a thought leader, a brilliant researcher, and a published author in the customer experience space. The timing was perfect. She was intrigued by the same questions running through my own mind.

I think you know where those questions led us—after all, you’re reading the answer right now. By the end of our journey together, I hope you’ll be ready to answer a whole new set of questions for yourself and your businesses.

Natalie’s Journey

Like Tony, I had a mother who formed the heart and center of our family. She made everything special—and she made sure we all knew just how much and how deeply she loved us.

I learned a great deal from witnessing her passion as a teacher. She fought hard to educate others and, by doing so, guided them toward a better standard of living. Thanks to her unconditional love and guidance, I grew up truly believing I could make a difference in people’s lives and that anything was possible.

As an ode to that boundless faith in the power of human belief, I carry a famous quote by Eleanor Roosevelt in my wallet. On July 4, 1957, the First Lady wrote: The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

My mother had beautiful dreams, and she taught me to dream the same way.

We lost my mother when I was 14. I was able to carry on her legacy by helping to raise my three siblings, all of whom became amazing adults that continue to make the world a better place through their unique accomplishments.

As the daughter of a dedicated teacher, a strong education was always a priority for me. After completing a course of study at the University of Michigan, I was awarded a fellowship by General Motors. This support allowed me to pursue a PhD at UCLA in material science and engineering. Learning about the complex workings of the world around me transformed my entire worldview.

Pursuing my PhD thesis in high-energy particle physics was one of many endeavors in critical thinking. My education taught me to ask why things are the way they are and to wonder if there was a better way to make them happen. As part of my thesis, I looked at the materials used to make spaceflight possible.

On a deeper level, I was learning more than the lessons of the moment—I was learning to look at root causes and solve problems in new ways.

Despite the drama of launch sequences and the incredible image of astronauts walking among the stars, spaceflight is one of the most dangerous parts of a crew’s return to Earth. For a long time, many of the materials used to withstand the high temperatures encountered on reentry were too brittle. Under such intense pressure, they often cracked and peeled, leaving the exposed vehicle in danger of burning up.

Throughout my research process, I examined how technology could be used to transform these materials and how they might be combined in new ways to deliver on the promise of a safe return home for astronauts and their crews. I had to reimagine the creation of those materials, rearranging the molecules atom by atom. On a physical level, this was accomplished using cutting-edge technology such as high-energy particle accelerators. By transforming materials in novel ways—often through the use of Earth’s most powerful machines—a vehicle’s alloy surface could withstand extreme temperatures and remain flexible, allowing it to withstand reentry forces and bring our passengers home.

My experiences gave me an entirely new lens through which to view the world.

As I embarked on my own flight into the working world, I used similar critical-thinking skills to reimagine the problems I was tasked with solving. These were the largest challenges faced by the biggest organizations, including industry leaders like General Motors and General Electric.

Time and time again, my work was a process of looking at the way things were and asking, Does this make sense? Are there any other, better ways to deliver on these same promises?

As it turns out, asking these questions aloud can be very hard. I often found people doing what they were told without question, let alone answering any of the questions living between the lines. It’s always easier to fly below the radar. I saw that this was true even if the things people were doing made little sense for customers, employees, or companies as a whole.

One of my first forays into the customer experience field came when GM asked me to evaluate whether we should continue the use of two-sided galvanizing to prevent corrosion of car and truck bodies. This is a process that coats the metal in superheated zinc to form a chemical shield that protects it from corrosion. The financial department was looking at cost-cutting strategies. As engineers, we worried that reducing the corrosion protection would damage our brand if our cars had large holes in the sides. After the corrosion testing came back and showed that the car doors would rust more without double galvanizing, I asked what the leadership’s decision was going to be. I assumed that they would come to the same conclusion I had: despite the cost, double galvanizing was necessary to ensure our vehicles’ quality in the long-term.

GM’s team responded that they were choosing to go with one-sided galvanizing instead of the double-sided method I had suggested. For me, the obvious choice has always been to produce a better product and a better customer experience.

I asked them, Aren’t you concerned about the customer’s experience with our products? Their reply? You’re an engineer! Not a marketer. Why are you so concerned with what the customer thinks? Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be the last time I was faced with shifting paradigms in cultures to help others see the situation from the customer’s point of view.

In my work at Hughes Electronics, I straddled working as an engineer on the radar systems used to guide pilots (our customers) on their missions, and leading internal programs for employees. I designed their integrated product development employee teaming initiative where all disciplines from various departments—marketing, sales, engineering, finance—came together for the first time to work as one team. This multidisciplinary approach for Hughes increased their ability to deliver projects on time, within budget and scope, with a customer-centric approach. I also created the employee development program, allowing a synergistic focus of employee’s personal and professional goals. By creating a separate employee development process that focused on What’s in It for Me? (WIIFM), it zeroed in on their passions, desire to learn, and grow, their productivity and quality of their work improved by 30 percent.

As I progressed in my career as a management consultant, I led the transformation of both customer and employee experiences through the implementation of new strategies and the latest technologies. Organizational change management became one of the most important aspects of any technology transformation project—without it, the hearts and minds of the employees aligning on people-centric, large