Customers are talking: the empathetic company

The New York Times today features an interview with Dev Patnaik, a consultant specializing in helping companies to develop growth strategies and the author of a new book, "Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy," which claims that a missing ingredient in recipes for corporate success is the human train of empathy:

[Patnaik] argues in the book that it is not the lack of innovation that hampers companies, but the “empathy gap” — the chasm between employees in organizations and the people that they serve. Companies, he said, “do a good job of stamping empathy out of employees, then are surprised when employees make poor decisions or try to sell things that people don’t need.”

In a way this reflects the "bringing the outside in" concept from Kotter's "A Sense of Urgency." Patnaik gives the example of the auto managers who never experienced the car business from a customer's point of view--buying a car, financing it, servicing it, etc.--and thereby lost touch with the consumer and the marketplace.

Part of this "empathy gap" is the distancing of management from the customer and the customer experience--where dashboards and status reports have crowded out anecdotal information and real human experience. This is what the "customers are talking" initiative is attempting to do--to connect managers and leaders with the ground-level experience of their customers and by so doing to equip them to make better decisions about their products and services.

Here's an interesting observation from Patnaik about one of the big problems with marketing:

The companies are trying to get the customers to identify with their product rather than getting their own employees to identify with their customers.

In other words, companies are trying to make up for their lack of customer insight with messaging. These marketers believe that if they create a powerful, resonant message, it will draw people to their products. But if the product is not created with a deep sense of the customer in mind, the message won't work.

I'll have to pick up a copy of "Wired to Care" and see what else the book has to say about this important subject.

Related posts:
A Competitive Advantage: Employees who spend most of their time talking to customers
Time to start listening to front-line employees