Melissa Metcalf - Developing Customer Empathy and Establishing an Emotional Connection

Editor's Notes

• #3: Hello, My name is Melissa Metcalf and I’m a Brand Marketing Manager at MailChimp. Today, I’d like to talk to you about the importance of CONNECTING WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS on an emotional level and BUILDING EMPATHY TO ACHIEVE A DEEPER LEVEL of understanding.
• #4: For those of you who are not familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk, he is an entrepreneur, a bestselling author, AND a MailChimp customer. He’s best-known for being a pioneer of social media for business. In one of his books, The Thank you Economy, he says “We have entered a new era in which developing strong consumer relationships is pivotal to a brand’s success.” Gary V believes that we are living through a dramatic cultural shift that is bringing us back full circle to a world that is surprisingly similar to one our great grandparents knew. The idea is that the digital age has opened our lines of communication so much so that we now have to think like small town shop owners. Gary V calls this the “Thank You Economy,” because “only the companies that can figure out how to mind their manners in a very old-fashioned way” are going to be able to compete. Basically, you have to cater to and court your customers like in the old days.
• #5: So we know there is a transactional side to customers. Everyone loves a deal, i know I do. But there’s also an emotional side, which is even more important. Think about it. When given the choice, people will always spend time around people they like...they’d also rather do business with and buy stuff from people they like.” P.4 So your end game is not to make a quick sale, it’s basically to make your customers like you by marketing to them in a personal, caring way. That’s what leads to repeat customers and brand loyalty.
• #6: When we talk about loyalty, we’re not talking about loyalty programs. We’re talking about the rich emotional connection that we as humans feel toward our friends, our family members. We also feel this toward the brands we love.
• #7: That kind of brand loyalty goes all the way back to an emotional connection. The primary goal of every business owner is to meet customers’ wants and needs. But how can you do that if you don’t truly understand them? An emotional connection is what elicits the information you require to meet their wants and needs. And that relationship, rooted in emotion, is what leads to lasting brand loyalty. So how do you get there?
• #8: By developing empathy. Empathy is your target emotion. Empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” Empathy is the singular emotion which ultimately can have enormously positive impact on your business.
• #9: There are many different ways to develop empathy. A few of the best practices are…
• #10: Let’s talk a little bit about customer insights.
• #11: The fact is, we have tons of data at our fingertips: social media customer service emails product reviews. surveys There are a wealth of insights to share here. When you compile this data, you can share them with your company to find out how to improve the customer experience.
• #12: And I want to single out social media because it’s really more than media. It’s real-time consumer insights readily available to you. Nowhere else are people just showering you with feedback without you soliciting it. You can hear first-hand what your customers think, what they want, what they like, and what they don’t. So obviously social media is nothing new, but what is still new is businesses knowing how to apply these insights and connect with customers via social media. ****Remember, social media is a source of insight.
• #13: This is founder Eryn Erickson. Eryn LOVES people. Her whole business is about marrying community and commerce. She’s super in tune with social media and told me that she listens to her customers and that their feedback leads to real change. She told me how much she depends on customer insights, but she had to learn this the hard way. Eryn told me a story about a time when she decided to do a charity tee collaboration. She assumed it would be well received, because her brand is very mission based. So she went ahead and partnered with a local charity and printed a co-branded t-shirt. To her surprise, the shirts sat on the shelves. They didn’t sell. After the fact, she asked her customers and found out that they really just wanted to see SWL’s logo on the clothes they bought. Even though it was a worthy cause, they weren’t ready to buy into wearing this nonprofit’s logo on their clothes.
• #14: After that, she started doing customer surveys. She polls her customers via social media and sends them email surveys to find out what it is they want and need from her. Eryn learned this because she’s a listener. This is not accidental. This is insight based on listening. So not only can insights help you connect with your customers, but they can also help mitigate loss.
• #15: And so the team read Amazon reviews and randomly called people up, some of whom had spent more than $1,000 on the product, and they realized something: While they were branding Everly for the active weekend adventurer, their real customer was an adult woman taking control of her health and kicking soda, added sugar, and artificial ingredients out of her life, Kyle says.
• #16: Based on this huge revelation from customer insights, they changed their whole business. Updated packaging Brought production and formulation in-house Switched sales focus to e-commerce “She was using Everly 3-5 times a day, so bulk packaging and pricing made more sense, but she didn’t want to give up on the portability,” Kyle says. “So we put Everly in spouted pouches—a first for drink mixes. She can carry it with her in her bag but still save lots of money.”
• #17: Customer research is another great way to build empathy with your customers. We have a great research team at MC that travels near and far to conduct one on one interviews with customers. They visit their homes and workplaces and engage with them in their own environments, where they’re more comfortable, and hence more likely to give candid honest feedback.
• #18: I recently came across a study by Special K which is a great current and relevant example. The best-selling cereal brand recently published findings from a research survey examining what inner strength means to women and how it impacts their lives. The research surveyed over 6,000 women across different countries and continents to gather data. The New Face of strength aims to understand strength and what it means to women. According to their Methodology: “The following paper looks more closely at what inner strength means to women and the ways in which it can impact their lives.
• #19: So what Special K is doing here is building empathy by learning more about their customers to connect with them emotionally. And they do this by implicitly equating their product and brand with inner strength. Eating Special K is part of a healthy diet. A healthy diet leads to inner strength. Research shows that inner strength leads to happiness. Special K leads to happiness. ****-Special K: They make deliberate connections
• #20: And you can see the results of this study showing up in their marketing materials. I found this on the homepage a few weeks ago. The copy says “Special K wants to be your “cheerleader.” Which translates to “we’re going to be there for you emotionally and in return you will be loyal to us.”
• #21: And for those businesses who aren’t a Kellogg’s and aren’t large enough to interview 6,000 women across the world, you can still do this type of research on a smaller scale. IGIGI is a MailChimp customer who is a plus-sized fashion retailer. They interview customers twice a week on the phone to learn about them, what they want, who they are, what their experience is with buying clothes. The notes from the interview goes into a GoogleDoc and is shared with everyone in the company. The interviews influence how they design the site, the clothes, and how they communicate/market. One way their research comes takes shape is in the form of their Shape Stylist feature of their website. Here they compile tips on what to wear, how to style your clothing and what works best for every shape. And a large part of this comes from those customer interviews.
• #22: Sometimes the best way to understand the customer is to actually become the customer. We recently employed this tactic at MailChimp.
• #23: One of our big strategic initiatives at MailChimp has been to grow beyond email. That means that instead of just being an e-mail marketing platform for our customers, we’re growing into a multi-channel e-commerce marketing platform. So we’re doing tons of marketing to these e-commerce customers, but we realized “Wait a second, we don’t actually have an e-commerce store.” How can we truly understand these e-commerce customers unless we know what they deal with on a daily basis? And then our CMO came up with a great idea: Let’s launch an e-commerce store. What better way to put ourselves in their shoes?
• #24: And that’s how we decided to open an e-commerce store called Freddie and Co. Of course there were some things to take into consideration: What on earth should we sell? Well we’re not a retailer, but we have all of these amazing e-commerce customers who we’re always looking to empower. Let’s partner with them to create custom product and then we can help promote their businesses. Who gets all the money? Profit was never the goal. It’s all about connecting with customers, so we don’t need or even want the revenue. Solution: let’s donate it all to charity. Perfect. done. But wait, Who’s going to run this thing? In the spirit of authenticity, we wanted to go with someone who had no previous e-commerce experience, someone who had never owned a business or run a website.
• #25: ENTER MEG. Meg is a Marketing Associate on the MailChimp Marketing team. She helps with all sorts of fun marketing responsibilities, but she has certainly never run an e-commerce store. I don’t even think she’s ever worked in retail. All things that made her a perfect fit for this project. She will literally have to learn as she goes, like so many of our customers. We knew she would make mistakes, but that was the point. Because the real objective, was not just to run the store, but to share her experiences as she went along. And putting a face and name to those experiences was key in establishing an emotional connection with customers. We knew that these learnings couldn’t just come from some ambiguous source, but rather a REAL MailChimp employee with a face, a voice and a name.
• #26: So each week, Meg wrote about her e-commerce adventures in an email newsletter called What’s in Store. She would tackle a different topic to share problems, solutions, successes and obstacles - all her learnings along the way.
• #27: So on the one hand, we had Freddie and Co. running 24/7 just like any e-commerce store And on the other hand, Meg would provide a behind-the-scenes look at running running a store. MailChimp customers may want to shop Freddie and Co. and that’s great, but what we really wanted to do was to educate and entertain them through What’s in Store and share in Meg’s journey. Because the larger objective was to build empathy and create an emotional connection.
• #28: Overall this strategy of sharing our learnings and giving customers a behind-the-scenes look at our e-commerce journey was extremely effective. Not only did Meg start receiving tons of fan emails, but we saw a notable increase in positive customer sentiment.
• #29: Almost everyone that responded was just excited that someone else out there knew what they were going through. They were thrilled that someone else was sharing in this experience and was talking about the good and the bad.
• #30: Now becoming the customer doesn’t always have to be a big undertaking. Take secret shoppers for example. When I was in college I picked up a part-time gig as a secret shopper for McDonald’s. They would give me $20 to spend each week and I would go to several local McDonalds stores and just go to town. I thought it was the best job of my life…for about a week until I got sick of eating McDonald’s nonstop. It was basically like the documentary Super Size me. Anyway, I would submit the receipts and fill out a questionnaire with feedback on the food, service and overall experience, and the McDonald’s research team would share these customer insights with the company. Lots of companies do this in their own way.
• #31: We have a MailChimp customer named Sock Fancy who is a huge advocate of becoming the customer. These are Sock Fancy founders, Stefan and Futhum. They’re a subscription sock service, and their strategy is that every "decision maker" at Sock Fancy is also personally subscribed to the service. Stefan told me, “We want everyone that could possibly have an influence on any aspect of our business to have experienced the product first-hand. They navigate through each aspect of the experience - from the initial checkout experience and the confirmation emails to the moment they rip open the bag and slip on a fresh pair of Sock Fancy socks.” It can be difficult to get perspective when you’re in the thick of things, so becoming the customer is sometimes the most effective way to understand and share the feelings of your customers.
• #32: Lastly, let’s talk about creating a culture of understanding to build empathy.
• #33: Culture starts at the top. If you want your employees to be good to your customers, then you need to be good to your employees. Business owners have to set the tone for their business and be an example of the kind of interactions that they want employees to extend to their customers. Think about it: When people are happy, they want to make other people happy.
• #34: Returning to our old friend Gary Vaynerchuk, he says “we recently established a new vacation policy: there is none.” Gary V lets his employees at VaynerMedia take as much or as little time as they need, as long as they are still performing at a high level. Now this may seem a little aggressive, and I’m not saying that everyone needs to go out and abolish their vacation policy, but the point is that if you instill a culture of empathy and understanding among your employees, this will trickle down to your customers.
• #35: At MailChimp, we’ve worked hard to facilitate a culture of empathy and understanding. Our founders, Ben and Dan, set an example by actually coming to work every day and embodying our brand values of creativity, humility and independence. They’re approachable and meet with every single new hires for an on boarding session so that MailChimp employees hear what’s important straight from the founder’s mouths.
• #36: We’re also big on customer service. One way we can foster a culture of understanding is by coaching our support team to be empathetic. It’s common for them to use phrases such as “I’m so sorry you’re experiencing that problem” or “I know how frustrating that can be.” - Responses that let customers know we understand them. How may I help you? What can I do for you? I’m so sorry, how can I fix the problem? I’m so happy to hear from you! These are all phrases that let your customers know you understand what they’re going through.
• #37: But of course, the one caveat is that you have to be authentic. Authenticity is crucial to creating a culture of empathy. Customers know when you’re faking. You wouldn’t trust a sales associate that said “I”m so sorry for your problem hold please.” When your intentions are good and true, it shows, and that draws people to your brand. So to recap, customer insights, conducting research, becoming the customer and creating a culture of empathy are all ways you can connect with your customers. These things aren’t hard to do, they don’t have to be expensive. It’s really all about listening.