The Empathy Gap

Let me start with a confession about a tone of voice.

There's a particular voice I hear myself use and I'm a little embarrassed by it.

It's the voice I use when I'm typing the word agent or representative or just human please into a chat window for the third time.

You know the one, it starts polite and by the third try, it's not polite.

And here's what I want you to notice about that moment.

Somewhere in that loop, the bot greeting me by name, answering a question I didn't ask, offering me a help article when I asked for a person, something shifts.

I stop feeling like a customer.

I start feeling like a ticket.

And by the time a human finally shows up, if one does, I'm not really asking to be helped anymore.

I'm asking to be heard.

I spent a lot of years thinking about that exact moment.

And I've come to believe the distance between being processed and being heard is the single most expensive gap in business today.

I call it the empathy gap.

And I want to convince you of a few things.

That it's real.

and it's measurable in dollars, and then it might be the last advantage your brand has.

Here's the strategic problem hiding underneath my bad chatbot manners.

Every competitor you have is buying the same artificial intelligence you are.

The same models, the same vendors, the same promise that this is the quarter, service finally gets faster, cheaper, and frictionless.

So if everybody has the same AI, what's left to compete on? I've spent nearly four decades inside companies that built their whole reputations on how people feel when they do business with them.

Starbucks, the Ritz-Carlton, Mercedes-Benz, Airbnb, Zappos, and most recently, one medical for Amazon.

And not one of them earned that reputation by being the fastest.

They earned it because people felt understood.

AI can win the race on speed.

It'll beat every human you've got.