Perhaps it’s curiosity that fuels my excitement when discussions about disruption surface. Add empathy into the mix, and you’ve got my attention. This year’s Spredfast Summit intertwined the themes of disruption and empathy across 1.5 days, and I’ve provided a few action-oriented nuggets below just for you.

  • A brand’s age is just a number — not a detriment to disruption. GM is disrupting its 100-year-old brand with Maven, a ride-sharing startup within the company. Disruption starts with understanding what a brand represents. Get the conversation started. Use customer empathy to surface customer needs that you aren’t addressing. Don’t be afraid to innovate, iterate, and eventually disrupt yourself to respond as customer behaviors evolve. (Reference Julia Steyn, Maven, GM: Keynote — 2020 Your Tomorrow)
  • “Make business personal again.” KLM looked for ways to increase customer interactions and worked with a third party to create a bot on Facebook Messenger. In addition to answering 60,000 different questions, it retrieves boarding passes and supports other aspects of the overall customer experience. KLM has seen a 40% increase in customer interactions and a 5-point increase on average for Net Promoter Scores with bots, better than KLM’s initial goal.[i] (Rita Brogley, Facebook: Session — Agents, Bots, and Where They Meet: The Next Iteration of Social Customer Care)
  • Success with bots requires a purpose and strategy. Don’t release your bot into the wild without a purpose — the “what’s in it for me” for the customer and your brand — and a sound strategy. Stitch Fix’s four-month-old “Style Shuffle bot” is 100% automated, providing users with a fun style quiz. The results feed into Stitch Fix’s proprietary system, adding information to a customer’s profile, further informing stylist recommendations, and ultimately removing friction from the clothing purchase process. (Rachel Daily, Stitch Fix: Thought Leadership — Agents, Bots, and Where They Meet: The Next Iteration of Social Customer Care)
  • Customer-centric content places customer desires first. The Venetian uses video content emphasizing the food, shopping, and fun customers can have in Las Vegas, instead of reiterating the hotel’s offerings. Video enables messaging in a convenient, enjoyable, and ready-to-share social format, extending the brand’s reach while keeping customers happy. (Alison Zarrella, Executive Dir Social Media Content at the Venetian and Palazzo: Thought-Leadership — Follow Me Back: How to Drive Lasting Customer Loyalty Through Social)
  • Expand the benefits of social data and create an internal “listening as a service” product. Help other parts of your company understand issues or challenges about specific products, services, or customer interactions. Develop a process to support the consistent distribution of real-time social data. This enables teams to develop insights and customer empathy while better understanding the value of social data. (Rebecca Harris, GM: Thought Leadership —Follow Me Back: How to Drive Lasting Customer Loyalty Through Social)

If you’d like to chat about any of these topics, please reach out.

[i] Net Promoter and NPS are registered service marks, and Net Promoter Score is a service mark, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.