[{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BlogPosting","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/05\/19\/sapphirenow-2016-empathy-keynote\/#BlogPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/05\/19\/sapphirenow-2016-empathy-keynote\/","headline":"The road to success is paved with\u2026feelings: Thoughts from the floor at SAPPHIRENOW 2016","name":"The road to success is paved with\u2026feelings: Thoughts from the floor at SAPPHIRENOW 2016","description":"Over two million square foot of prime Orlando convention center, packed with thousands of delegates from all around the world.","datePublished":"2016-05-19","dateModified":"2023-03-24","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/contributor\/jack-dyson\/#Person","name":"Jack Dyson","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/contributor\/jack-dyson\/","identifier":152,"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/0d3b4b398e8aea3b7b406b7f646a735eb4ec2827c327fa6570e9ce500329a73a?s=96&d=mm&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/0d3b4b398e8aea3b7b406b7f646a735eb4ec2827c327fa6570e9ce500329a73a?s=96&d=mm&r=g","height":96,"width":96}},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"The Future of Commerce","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/logo-foc-schema-app-1.png","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/logo-foc-schema-app-1.png","width":172,"height":60}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/thumbnail-62284e1c2a68b634fb743ea0a2da6b1e.jpeg","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/thumbnail-62284e1c2a68b634fb743ea0a2da6b1e.jpeg","height":370,"width":1200},"url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/05\/19\/sapphirenow-2016-empathy-keynote\/","video":[{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"VideoObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0KFVLWX7eEY#VideoObject","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0KFVLWX7eEY","name":"Ferris Bueller's Day Off - 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The keynote for SAPPHIRENOW 2016, the largest global business technology event.Over two million square foot of prime Orlando convention center, packed with thousands of delegates from all around the world; hundreds of thousands more watching the live stream; row upon row of people in the auditorium, their faces reflecting the ghostly blue light of myriad laptops, tablets and smart phones. The data streams of ones and zeros flying around are almost palpable, yet when the keynote starts Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, tells us that true success boils down to one thing: empathy.For many people watching, this was a proper bit of disruptive thinking. If you\u2019ve painstakingly built a business on numbers, where do feelings come into it? Give it a moment. Empathy for your peers and colleagues creates efficiency, for your customers it means great service \u2013 and most important of all, it takes you out of a B2B mindset because if you can put yourself in the end-consumer\u2019s shoes, you can give your customer the best tools to service them.For content creators or those more firmly in the B2C world, it might be less surprising. You can\u2019t make meaningful, engaging content or contact without understanding what your audience wants to watch, listen to or read. But then, we all know what an assumption makes, and like Ferris Bueller says: \u201cLife moves pretty fast. If you don\u2019t stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it.\u201d You might think you\u2019ve got a good handle on the best way to engage with your customers and their needs, but how do you know?This content is hosted by a third party ( giphy.com ).To view the content, either update your cookie preferences or view it in a new browser window.Cookie PreferencesNew WindowNavigating these waters is tricky. Like the swamps of the Everglades, there\u2019s a bewildering amount of what-ifs and options \u2013 and for the unprepared, some of them end up in dead ends. If you want to get from A to B, what you really need is the right perspective. Whether that\u2019s a birds-eye view, a map that lets you look ahead, or simply a local guide to help you through each stage, understanding the entire journey is key.For tiny businesses it\u2019s quite straight forward. Let\u2019s say you sell fruit by the roadside. End-to-end customer care is simple and essential. You know the supplier by name and have a personal relationship. It\u2019s probably not too much of a stretch to get a handle on peak times and seasonal demand. Plus you\u2019ll have repeat customers who come to you for what you do best, and you can anticipate that business too.In order to show a customer you care – about them, personally – you need to improve their life in some way right now, not next year, or someone else will get there first. If finding a new way to do this represents disruption, then you can\u2019t afford to be late to market. The problem is, once businesses have scale, knowing the customer becomes much harder. This is where not just harvesting data, but knowing what to do with it, becomes essential. For the fruit seller, it\u2019s instinctive. But in a longer chain it\u2019s much harder.It\u2019s one thing having tools, but it\u2019s quite another to use them. Too many of us are \u201call the gear and no idea,” buying stuff in the hope it will somehow fix a problem. Often the solution is already in our hands, but again the challenge is perspective.I\u2019ve always found motivational quotes something of a guilty pleasure, so I\u2019ll defer to Rumi who sums it up sweetly: \u201cYesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.\u201d This is just as true in business is it is in personal development \u2013 and it\u2019s clearly not limited to the business model alone. Change needs to include process and people. Understanding (or being empathetic to) your other teams. In the grand scheme their challenges, after all, are yours too.The need is to reimagine how you engage with your customers at every point, from awareness to after-sales care. Innovation is key, of course. There are always new possibilities out there for sources of revenue and profits. New ways of improving your brand by offering better value. So to this I\u2019d also add one very important thing: think inside the box.Whether you use it or not, or whether it\u2019s even controlled by your team, all companies have data. One big question to ask is are there any ways you could look at what you already have to improve your understanding of and engagement with customers? How about by combining it with publicly available data? For example, if a retailer has customer location, they might combine this with climate data to send more relevant communications (i.e. don\u2019t stock shops with toboggans in places with no snow).There\u2019s one important caveat though. We need to be wary of the expectations we place on our data \u2013 it\u2019s too easy to make a sweeping request that sounds simple but is actually far too technical to be practical. An interesting perspective on this comes in a fascinating SAPPHIRE session with Dr. Christoph Meinel, Director and CEO of the Hasso Plattner Institute.Social media data, he says, is very unstructured, leaping between channels and user accounts. Not only that, but it also depends on photos and videos which can\u2019t be analyzed in the same way as text in a Google search. It\u2019s with exactly this in mind that the Hasso Plattner Institute developed BlogIntelligence, which does content-related analysis for content filtering, opinion detection and trend analysis.In tracing how information moves through networks, the Institute uses infection trees to see how it \u2018infects\u2019 users and who is linked with whom, visualizing it so that users can get insights from that, too. Best of all, the information can be converted into leads and users can react quickly \u2013 because the speed of the reaction shows the potential customer that someone is taking care of them.It all comes back to looking after people. One of the great things about being at SAPPHIRE this year, is that among all the 1900 various sessions and demonstrations, there are thousands of delegates, all of whom are looking at their data and wondering what else they can do with it to improve people\u2019s lives \u2013 and that future is exciting.  Your competitionwants your customers.Is your brand built to keep them?Unlock strategies to power your enterprise HERE."},{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"2016","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"05","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/\/05\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"19","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/\/05\/\/19\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":4,"name":"The road to success is paved with\u2026feelings: Thoughts from the floor at SAPPHIRENOW 2016","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2016\/05\/19\/sapphirenow-2016-empathy-keynote\/#breadcrumbitem"}]}]