I recently watched a very compelling TedTalk by Chris Milk, "How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine." Milk recounts his filmmaking journey and how he pushes for a more immersive, personalized experience. Traditional filmmaking has always been about the same rectangular view; the audience is outside the frame looking in. Using virtual reality, Milk's films bring viewers inside the frame to create a shared experience between the audience and the subject.

For those who have always thought of virtual reality as something only used by gamers, I encourage you to watch this talk. Milk's films have a deep humanitarian calling. In his latest work, he had UN Delegates don VR goggles. They were able to "sit" in a refugee camp, in the makeshift home of a 12 year old girl as she shared her story, making her remote experience real to those who have the power to effect change. He reminds us that personal experience is the ultimate empathy driver and in this context, technology can be used to make us more human.

At this point you may be asking yourself, what does this have to do with enterprise CRM and increasing end user experience and engagement? Too often, a client’s decision making structure over how CRM is used in the enterprise is too far removed from the actual users and system processes (your employees and customers). 

Try this experiment the next time you think about an improvement for your customers. Close your eyes, put on some VR goggles (you can use your sunglasses) and imagine yourself out on a sales call with one of your account executives, or sitting next to a service agent in your contact center taking a call from a customer. What is your customer saying? With what systems is your employee interfacing, and are they allowing them to drive meaningful value in that moment? How can you make this situation better? Now open your eyes. Even though it's a bit abstract, you have at least started the empathetic process.

Fortunately, you don't have to put on VR goggles to understand your employees' and customers' experiences. Get out there! Getting an inside view of a customer’s business exposes the unique details and touchpoints that go unvoiced in conference rooms. The solutions you envision and prioritize as a result of this exercise will be better. They will hit the mark for your employees and your customers, because you not only identified their pain points, but experienced them first-hand. 

Data, both qualitative and quantitative, is essential to making informed decisions. But Milk is on to another compelling ingredient in making effective decisions: empathy for the people those decisions impact. In this way, enterprise executives would be wise to get out of the office and insert themselves into the customer facing operations of their business — I guarantee they’ll be surprised and inspired by what they learn.

At Bluewolf, part of our unique process involves consultants embedding themselves inside our clients’ organizations and working directly alongside customer facing employees to understand how business processes and technologies can be improved and optimized. Interested in learning more about we help clients build effective technology strategies? Connect with our team of experts.