In the eighth episode of our Career Inspiration podcast, I interviewed Brian Gilbert - Director of Talent Acquisition at iRobot, which is famous for their robotic vacuum cleaner called the Roomba.

Brian has led talent acquisition at high growth startups and publicly traded companies at scale.

​In this episode we discuss:

• Gilbert's background
• How he built out their talent acquisition function which was originally run by a recruitment outsourcing firm.
• Why employment branding has been something the company has focused on significantly and the results.
• iRobot's massive contributions to STEM education
• ...and lots more!

You can listen to the podcast in the player below. To make sure you receive future episodes, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play, or Soundcloud. If you enjoyed our show, please consider writing a 5-star review - it will definitely help us get the word out there!

Keith Cline is the Founder of VentureFizz.  Follow him on Twitter: @kcline6.

The startup food and beverage sectors are hot. With, according to CB Insights, 1,300 deals - valued at nearly $6B - involving F&B companies since 2012. As consumers look for greater convenience and healthier options, and brands, retailers, and producers look to boost margins and reach new markets, a range of companies have stepped up to change the rules and drive innovation.

Many of these disruptors are based in and around Boston and run the gamut from new takes on snack food and natural beverages to packaging, delivery, and restaurant concepts, apps for merchandising and retail sales, and even new approaches to high-tech agriculture.

Like any successful startup hub, the Boston F&B scene has a growing and diverse community of talent, mentors, well-connected startups, supporting software and services firms, and peer communities; plus a few anchor companies like Boston Beer Company, Dunkin’ Brands, and Ocean Spray.

Here’s a quick guide to some of the key players I’ve been tracking and gotten to know as I navigate the local food and beverage cluster forming around downtown Boston. Know others that should be on my radar? Feel free to shoot me a note!

Buzzy brands

Walk through a local Whole Foods Market or CVS and you’re likely to spot a number of products created right here in Boston. From natural food brands like Biena Foods and their chickpea snacks (gotta love their BBQ flavor) to hometown heroes Grillo’s Pickles, and Tom Brady’s favorite indulgence from Unreal Brands, there are a growing number of locally born treats available in your local supermarket.

Of course, those of us who are fans of craft beer know that there’s no shortage of awesome local breweries as well (BeerAdvocate has a handy, up-to-date beer guide I recommend). But fewer folks know that some of the fastest-growing beverage companies are also in the neighborhood, including Spindrift and Downeast Cider House, both of which made Repsly’s recent Top 100 Buzziest Brands list.

The delivery guys

So how do you get these healthy snacks to your workplace or kid’s school or a late night meal (or adult beverage) to your apartment? A number of Boston firms are hard at work making it possible, even as some early food delivery app firms based in town (like Chef Nightly and Foodler, now GrubHub) have exited the game.

Of course, one of the most prominent is online booze marketplace and mobile app Drizly, which continues to rake in both fans and funding (about $35M so far). On the corporate side, Leanbox is reinventing the vending machine with its smart food and beverage kiosks for workplaces, while Bevi is doing the same for water coolers.

Meanwhile, Smart Lunches is tackling the age-old question parents dread: “What’s in my lunch?”, with a clever online ordering app and delivery network to get your kiddos their healthy or allergy-smart meal at school or camp.

The app providers

As brand ambassadors, merchants and their consumers embrace mobile devices, the number of apps available to help manage field teams, merchandise products, and create better in-store experiences has taken off as well. Beyond being a hub for food delivery app development, Boston is also home to a number of SaaS shops, agencies, and investors focused on solutions for food and beverage brands, retailers, and restaurants.

Repsly moved to Boston three years ago to tap into this very ecosystem, and today offers a mobile CRM for field sales and merchandising teams in 70 countries. Other SaaS providers in town include BevSpot, which offers a variety of online tools for managing bar inventory, ordering and sales, Drync, which provides a slick white label app for liquor retailers, and LevelUp (the old SCVNGR), a mobile payments app and customer engagement platform that has raised over $100M so far.

At the same time, several local firms are helping establishments operate and deliver unique, memorable experiences to guests. These include Toast, which offers a mobile POS system for restaurants, bars, and clubs and has raked in nearly $134M in funding to-date, Providence-based Upserve, an end-to-end “Restaurant Management Platform,” and the Moseley Group in Franklin which has been an innovator in applying design thinking and experiential branding to the food biz for over 25 years.

The rocket scientists

While the locally sourced consumer brands and services above are hard to miss, a few other Boston-area firms are working behind the scenes to create next-gen food tech and devices that are changing the way we eat, drink, and produce food. Several are looking to harness the power of AI and machine learning to solve some BIG problems, such as ag-tech heavyweights Cibo Technologies with its custom seeds designed using machine learning, and local unicorn Indigo, which is using machine learning and plant microbes to boost crop yields and farmer productivity.

Of course one of the first ag-tech pioneers was Boston-based Freight Farms, with its wired up containers for go-anywhere farming. Up the road in Manchester NH, Dean Kamen’s DEKA Research & Development may be better known for its futuristic medical devices, but was also the brains behind Coke’s Freestyle soda machine. Meanwhile, if you are looking to create your own new food product, the folks at Chew can help you get started in their food innovation lab right in downtown Boston.

The connectors

Scaling the sparks of innovation requires a supportive community of mentors, incubators, and funding sources. Boston has this in super-sized portions with a number of local food and beverage focused investment firms, law practices, shared workspaces, and media companies like Watertown-based BevNET.

For funding and deal-making, Boston founders are lucky to have a number of options, such as  Cambridge’s Fresh Source Capital, which is focused on sustainable food and agriculture, and Sherbrooke Capital, a VC firm investing in health and wellness from its office in Wellesley. Plus Nutter’s Food & Beverage Practice hosts an excellent Founder Roundtable each fall.

For emerging brands, Branchfood provides networking programs and office space, while the Food Loft also provides coworking space and investment for food and food tech startups.

So whether you are new to the game and looking to test market a new product idea, an established growth brand looking to reach new markets by scaling your field team, or a techie looking to break into the F&B business, there’s likely just what you need right here in Boston.

Allen Bonde is vice president of marketing at mobile CRM provider Repsly. You can follow him at @abonde.

'Tis the season... and there was no shortage of holiday festivities across the Boston tech scene over the month of December.

You'll see some elaborate holiday parties, fun in-office celebrations, and lots of giving back to families in need.

It's also a good time to own an ugly sweater company, as there is no shortage of creative options there.

Enjoy the slideshow below!

Over the years, the application of Lean principles has been successfully incorporated into many areas of organizations - clearly, manufacturing and development have been enormously successful at both understanding the concept and applying it in the real world to achieve objectives. But, other areas of the organization can just as easily incorporate the same types of philosophies (and methodologies) within their own departments.

At its core, the Lean philosophy revolves around customer value as a focus and end goal, encouraging the application of these 7 main principles:

Eliminate waste: Thoroughly and critically examine existing processes and identify steps that are deemed wasteful to reach optimization.

Build quality in: By integrating quality at each step, rather than completing and revisiting, inherently eliminates waste and achieves a better ‘product’. 

Deliver fast: The concept of delivering fast allows the team the ability to elicit feedback and make adjustments as needed.

Create knowledge: It is imperative to capture knowledge that is created. This knowledge has a direct relationship to future performance around time to market and improved quality.

Defer commitment: The team should leverage the defer commitment concept to ensure they have the needed ‘functionality’ of what the customer is requesting.

Respect people: The team as a whole ultimately impacts the customer.

Optimize the whole: Individual teams should look at themselves as part of the bigger picture, not in a vacuum.

There is a misconception that Lean always equates to a reduction in workforce. This is fundamentally not true. When executed properly, it actually makes your workforce more productive, driving higher value per employee.

Getting Started

An interesting approach to beginning to look at Lean is to chart processes with something simple, like post-it notes. Often it becomes readily apparent that not all team members adhere to a common process, and this lays the groundwork to decide, as a team, where improvements can be made.  

• Are you over-producing? Try to identify over delivering vs. over-producing, keeping in mind what is most valuable to the customer.

• Are people on the team waiting? This is a key indicator of waste – obviously. Analyze and brainstorm how to overcome this stumbling block.

• Is there excessive handling on the way to delivery? Look at how you can streamline approval cycles, requests, and information.

• Is the process in play too complicated? Discuss and brainstorm as a team whether there is a simplified method that achieves the same outcome desired.

• Is there an unacceptable amount of defects? It’s common knowledge that the cost of quality increases and your value diminishes when something must be fixed after the fact.

These are just a few of the questions you can ask yourself and your team to see how Lean might apply in the work you perform every day.

Real World Illustration: Lean in a Professional Services Group

In a recent example of Lean, NeuEon recently worked with a large Edtech firm’s professional services group. The group was charged with upgrading numerous existing clients to their cloud product. The team performed a series of planning steps for using Lean/Kanban principles in their work. After some discussion, the team realized that there were many tasks that could either be eliminated or automated to increase efficiencies. The team also implemented Atlassian’s Jira to track the standard tasks for each upgrade. In using Jira and Lean/Kanban principles together, they identified and quantified that the work in the queue would never be finished within the prescribed times. This realization of the amount of actual work vs. available resources empowered the team to discuss expectations internally and with clients.

Other key data points that revealed themselves in this new Lean/Kanban process included severe bottlenecks in the process. The team could identify tasks and dependencies that were built into the overall process and acknowledge that these dependencies, in some instances, were “band-aids” that were integrated into and became part of the process. The team was then able to assess their process and highlight these areas for improvement critically. The result not only helped the team deliver better quality for the client but also prepared the team to tackle new initiatives with knowledge of how to apply Lean to every situation moving forward.

Conclusion

The application of Lean can be adopted by multiple functional areas across organizations and shouldn’t be looked at as something done only by specific departments. Lean can be used in any industry, and its principles allow for a company to make teams more accountable and own the process they use each day to create a product or service, regardless of whether the customers are internal or external.

Jim Hannon is a Lead Consultant at NeuEon, specializing in the implementation of Agile Transformations and business process improvement.

We’re coming to the end of another jam-packed year, and like most of us, I’m taking a pause to reflect on all that’s been accomplished (and some of what hasn’t!). For me, it was a year of serious reflection, some big decisions that affected my personal and professional life, both creating and diving into some new opportunities and enjoying a few good wins along the way.  And yet, when I think about what made it truly notable, it wasn’t about what I did as an individual that I find celebratory —  it’s the wins our team had that make me the proudest.

I count myself fortunate to be part of three great teams at work: our executive team, our People Strategy team, and the Rapid7 community. Though the work often overlaps, I typically engage and experience the roller coaster ride with each team slightly differently. With all three, however, I find an abundance of learning opportunities, challenges to tackle together, and an outsized amount of laughter along the way. And as December comes to a close, I’m going to take a moment to thank them for what they have given me… and hopefully, encourage you to do the same with your own teams.

Dear Rapid7 Team,

Thank you. There are far too many of you to name, but if we’ve interacted in any capacity more than a passing hello, I’m addressing you.

Thank you for the disciplined risks you were all willing to take along with me. Those who know me well appreciate I’m more than a little left of center when it comes to taking on a big change or risk. Complacency and fear of stagnation are almost as terrifying to me as is my fear of clowns. This company provides an exceptional support system, allowing me to pursue my crazy ideas. It’s one thing to ponder the ideas that pop into my head in the middle of the night, but it’s quite another to see what happens when I partner with others to bring those ideas to life — especially when I get to work with such an amazing team and drive positive impact. It’s also pretty special to see so many of you gaining confidence to drive innovation and impact in the company because you feel inspired and supported to do so.

Thank you for providing me a boundless set of opportunities to foster my own continuous learning. Whether it was partnering with our leadership team during various offsites, discussing how we will take over the world, or learning from a leader in an overseas office about how their needs differ from ours in the U.S., it was a year full of personal development for me. I end this year with new perspectives, new ideas, and new passions for topics I hadn’t considered at the start of 2017. I learned long ago if you walk into a room assuming you don’t have all the answers, it’s incredible how much you can learn from others. This adage served me unimaginably well this year. You didn’t fail me.

Thank you for your individual excellence. One of the benefits of being part of a growth company is that the opportunities for improvement never stop. It’s like playing whack-a-mole: once you feel like you’ve tackled one big thing, another one pops up needing attention. Some people get exhausted and disengaged by this constant marathon, and yet the folks I work with always come ready to dive in. It’s one of the things that makes this company truly unique; status quo is taboo. Our dedication to constant improvement is a true key to our continued success.

Thank you for the teamwork. We think of ourselves as “one moose,” to recognize that we are all in this together. We appreciate that we accomplish infinitely more as a team than we ever would individually, and we do the hard work to make relationships work. It fills me with tremendous pride to watch guests enter our lobby, only to be asked by those of us who pass by, “Have you been helped yet?” No one tells us to behave this way. We do it because we work hard to be inclusive and kind. Just as no one tells us to ask a peer “Do you need a hand?” when we know they are working hard to make a deadline. We do it because we understand grabbing a shovel and pitching in is what you do when you are on a healthy team.

Thank you for the meaningful customer partnerships. Given my customers are all of you, (rather than our external paying ones) listening to your ideas and concerns, actively engaging with you in idea generation and those activities that will drive the greatest benefit to us all are key focus areas for me. By continuing to ask me the tough questions I hadn’t yet considered, you have helped me to raise my game.

You’ve ignited a fire in me to take advantage of opportunities, rather than wait until they become problems to be addressed. Some were easy, some were far more complex that will require a programmatic response in the New Year...but as always, if they were important enough for you to ask about, they are worth my energy attempting to solve. I do not own the culture of this company — we all do. When we partner together and hold ourselves accountable to keep it strong, healthy, and scaling along with us, together we keep this company thriving.

And finally, thank you for all for allowing me to do the work I am passionate about doing, every single day. As the year comes to a close, so does my seventh year at Rapid7. Never did I imagine I’d continue to find a challenging, rewarding, and inspired company for such a sustained period of time. I love this company and I love the partnership and collaboration that comes from working with all of you. Thank you for that.

Happy Holidays to all. May you get good rest, and come back on January 2nd ready to engage with all that 2018 will bring!

Christina

Christina Luconi is Chief People Officer for Rapid7. Follow her on Twitter: @peopleinnovator.

"I'll send an SOS to the world

I'll send an SOS to the world

I hope that someone gets my

Message in a bottle."

The Police - “Message in a Bottle”

I think all recruiters have had this experience: we have a new position we need to fill, we’ve spoken with the hiring manager and their team to define the position and the attributes someone should possess to be successful in the role. Then, after hours of scouting social media profiles (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter,  etc.), we have a list of people to whom we want to reach out to. This is a critical moment. Strong outreach should lead to strong ROI on all that time. But if the outreach is bad, we have wasted the time of everyone who has been involved in the process.

Here’s the problem: more often than not recruiting outreach lacks creativity and personalization.

Below are 5 of 7 InMails I received:

Hope you are doing well, I wanted to reach out to you because I came across your profile and need your help.

I just wanted to reach out because your profile looks awesome.

I came across your background and your extensive recruiting background is a terrific match.

I came across your profile and wanted to speak with you about an exciting Technical Recruiter opportunity here

I LOVED reading through your page!

The repetition is almost robotic. It is like recruiters have moved from “post-and-pray” on job boards to, as The Police say, “Hope that someone gets my message in a bottle”.

We need to stop talking to people like they are “profiles” or “pages” and talk to them like they are people. Recruiting technology has evolved a lot in the last five years. The tools are excellent but they can also make us robotic. Outreach like this treats people like commodities. People are now “pages”, “profiles” and  “backgrounds”.

If you are trying to start a new relationship with someone, you cannot make them into a commodity and expect them to respond. Your message should give your reader the “why” in the very beginning.

Here are two lines from an InMail I wrote that had an 80% response rate:

Hypergrowth is NOT easy. At XXXXXXXX we have grown over 50% this year and we want to grow that much again next year and the year after.

To continue our growth XXXXX is looking for an…

Here is an excerpt from an InMail I sent (response rate: 50%):

The right software architecture paves the way for success. The wrong architecture keeps good products from becoming extraordinary.

Our software is at a crossroads. We want to move our software to the Cloud and build in Big Data and AI functionality. To do this we are creating a new architecture group and that group needs a leader.

I try to make the “why” of my outreach very clear. Why does this position exist? Why is it important to the business? The reason we should talk can be inferred, but it comes down to one word - opportunity. More simply put: the business has a need, which in turn creates opportunity. Let’s talk about opportunity This is much more effective than “being impressed” with someone’s “background” or “profile”.

At the end of “Message in a Bottle”, the singer does get a large response, but it takes over a year for those 100 billion bottles to come back. Obviously, there is some hyperbole in the number of responses, but taking a year to get any response would be disastrous for the organization. We have to stop sending out “SOS’s” and “hoping” that someone gets the message. Instead, we should reach out to people as people, give them the “why” upfront, and discuss an opportunity. This will make us successful and ensure that our time was spent wisely.

Greg Scherzo is the Senior Recruiter & Co-Founder of the Ellis Project. You can follow him on Twitter here: @GregScherzo.

Image courtesy of Raw Pixel.

It’s been said that you make your first impression in seven seconds. This is all too true for a candidate going in for a job interview, especially if you are a college graduate going in for your first job interview or gunning for your first internship that will help your career.

One thing interviewers will notice is how someone presents themselves, not just with personality, but how they dress. And, for many college graduates and students, they aren’t too sure how to dress the part especially if it’s their first time. Take, for example, Own The Boardroom Founder and CEO Erica Zahka’s previous role, where she managed entry-level employees at Brainshark.

“I was managing the customer support team, and the dress code was pretty casual,” Zahka said. “However, there were situations where individuals asked ‘What to wear?’ For example, maybe they were invited to visit a customer with the sales rep.”

She also began to realize that many college students are focusing on resumes and not so much on their attire for interviews.

“It’s not something they think about,” adds Zahka. “And not only is it a major influencer in how you're perceived, it also elevates how you feel, and therefore act, walking into the room.”

Zahka’s startup Own The Boardroom (OTB) is providing an answer to this concern for college students and graduates about to go into what could be their first job interviews.

The founder compares the company to Rent the Runway, where women can rent designer clothes for weddings and other related events. OTB is an online store where consumers pick out an outfit and rent it for up to a week. Browsing the OTB page, there are collections of outfits that range in different styles and fit into any business meeting.

“We are working directly with manufacturers to create and sell the outfits,” Zahka said. “When we first started, we featured clothing from a handful of designer brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein.”

While OTB is currently in an online marketplace, Zahka is looking into the idea of creating an OTB app for smartphones.

The website offers consumers much more than just clothing with OTB publishing content that focuses on all aspects of finding a job after college, including resume tips, building your own personal brand, and how to mentally prepare for an interview.

Currently, OTB is described as a “one-woman show” by Zahka, but she maintains a strong network of freelancers, who are also college students, to help out the content and website maintenance.

Zahka has been working with college career development centers in the Boston area. Some of them include Northeastern University and her alma mater Babson College.

“As an entrepreneur, I’ve had the chance to speak at a few of Babson’s entrepreneurial classes, offering my own advice and interview tips for upcoming graduates,” Zahka said. “It’s been a great experience to ‘share the wealth,’ so to speak, on job interviews with our audience directly.”

Aside from working with colleges and getting a chance to speak with students about to enter the workforce, OTB has made appearances at other Boston tech events. The company competed at HUBWeek’s Demo Day, and was part of Mass Innovation Nights #103, where she was part of a group entirely made up of women founders.

Anyone looking for a job should be hyper-focused on their resume and preparing for the interview. Worry about what you are going to wear shouldn’t be stressful and OTB takes the pressure off, allowing job seekers to hopefully nail the interview.

Colin Barry is a contributor to VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter @ColinKrash.

In the seventh episode of our Career Inspiration podcast, I interviewed Carlie Smith - Director of Talent at Circle.

After two years of working at a local recruitment agency, Smith joined OpenView Venture Partners as part of the firm's talent team. She worked as an advisor for their portfolio companies on hiring strategies, team structure, and many other aspects related to the recruitment function. 

Last year, Smith joined Circle, a peer-to-peer payments technology company, to head up talent acquisition. Circle, which was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville, has raised $136M in funding from investors including Jim Breyer, Goldman Sachs, IDG Capital, General Catalyst and Accel Partners.

​In this episode we discuss:

• Smith's background
• What it's like working as part of the talent team at a venture capital firm
• Working with multiple early stage founders on hiring
• Building Circle 's employment brand
• ...and lots more!

You can listen to the podcast in the player below. To make sure you receive future episodes, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play, or Soundcloud. If you enjoyed our show, please consider writing a 5-star review - it will definitely help us get the word out there!

Keith Cline is the Founder of VentureFizz.  Follow him on Twitter: @kcline6.

Over the past few decades, I've been part of the incredible shift in the world of branding. What was once viewed as a bunch of fluff and over-spending with no hope of ROI, is now increasingly seen as fundamental to the customer experience and business value with incredible levels of commitment and measurement. Driving this shift is the massive move to digital that we experience every day; We move from our desktop to our phones to our tablets with the expectations that these experiences will be seamless. We expect the apps we use and the brands we interact with to have figured it out. The reality is that some have, most have not.

The other day, I went to pay for something using points from a travel rewards card. I was in the app on my phone trying to pay the balance with points to no avail. I eventually found that in order to pay with points, I had to log through the browser.

*Record scratch* What?

So, I'm in the experience, I want to complete the task and you want me to leave the experience and go someplace else? This frustrating experience is called friction and it will make or break your brand.

Friction is caused by customer pain, like what I experienced with my travel rewards, and because of the frustration it causes, it makes customers question your brand. Pain creates doubt and doubt results in the customer thinking your brand doesn’t care, which is the reality much of the time. I can hear C-suite folks saying, "It's too much time and money to fix or improve that. What’s the customer  going to do, switch?"

Yes.

Last weekend, my Uber account was hacked. Someone had access to my account, including the credit cards and debit card I had stored there, and was riding around San Fran on my tab. Terrific. After searching the app, Googling and reading a bunch of customer reviews, which read more like hate mail, the reality set in that there was no one to call. Instead, I was instructed to instant message their team via Facebook. Seriously? Okay, seriously. Someone, likely a chatbot, responds right away asking for my email and they tell me to go to a page on their app that basically gives 3 reasons for unrecognized charges: #1 Check with your family and friends because they might have used your account, #2 You might have canceled your trip, and #3 An authorization hold was placed for a ride. Nope, nope and nope. Then I see number #4 I don't recognize the charges, which leads to a form – a long form that requires pictures, details and gobs of information for each individual charge. I canceled my credit cards and was left utterly frustrated. The next day, I tried to contact Uber again, this time calling Uber’s driver support number. I was told to follow the process on the app to file for reimbursement. We went around and around and he finally said, "I don't know what else to tell you to do." And I said, "You guys will lose in the end. Have a nice day." I deleted the app from my phone.

The lack of empathy for what happened to me was palpable. Uber didn't care that my credit card numbers are in someone else's hands or that someone hacked into my account. They didn't care to tell us when millions of accounts were compromised until a year later. They didn't care enough to create a service team and a phone number or "human" way for people to get problems resolved that are financially and personally impacting. They didn't care to be empathetic to anything or anyone. Their brand has failed to connect the dots and, instead, they gave their biggest rival, Lyft, a complete layup to slay Goliath.

The lesson in all of this madness is this:

Your brand has a friction tipping point.

Chances are, you don't know what it is, but when it happens, your customer will leave you. It might take months, like it did for me, but it will happen. It is like a leaky bucket. It's a slow drip, which without the right fix, means that, over time, your bucket will be empty. My approach to my work is all about deeply understanding the customer – their pain, their journeys, their goals – and turning those learnings and insights into human stories and experiences that fuel business growth. Because it's what I'm so passionate about, I have little to no tolerance for friction interacting with other businesses. I know too much about how to think differently and approach your brand and what it offers with care and emotion. It is not hard, torturous work. It simply requires a commitment to the customer that the entire company  – top to bottom  – must embrace, live and breathe. The brands that figure this out will win, the others will struggle with a never-ending leaky bucket.

I recently read a great article by Margaret Magnarelli, Senior Director of Marketing at Monster about customer-centered marketing. She inspired me to share my experience and advice for brands looking to make this shift:

Stop segmenting and start customizing

I work with lots of businesses and when we talk about their customers, they all have some sort of segmentation or categorization of customers. The problem with segmentation is that it looks at customers as a group. I'm a good example of segmentation gone bad. I often get lumped in with GenXers, which technically defines me from an age perspective, but I act more like a Millennial in terms of my buying behavior, tech and app usage, social media immersion, and preferences around interactions with brands. I also get lumped in with the "mom" crowd. I'm a mom but it doesn't define my entire life. If a brand really knew me they would know what makes me unique and, rather than sending me general, segmented marketing stuff, they would customize messaging to speak to me. You have data on what your customer buys, what they do in your app or on your website, how they interact with your service team and lots more. How can you use that data to create a personal, customized relationship? I see AI making this level of customization possible in a scalable way and urge all of you marketers and leaders to start asking and exploring different questions to understand your customers as a person, not a segment.

Dig deep into the customer journey

Your brand must be human. This sounds obvious, but, as I experienced with Uber, it is not. It's easy to get caught up in the product roadmap or whatever else is on the priority list. One way to shift your brand to become more human is to journey map your customers' experiences and understand what your customers want to do. I do this with every client before we start any customer-facing work. It takes a few people in a room with a giant sticky pad and some markers. Begin by ensuring that everyone at the table knows the customer in a detailed, personal way. Once you’re in the customer headspace, begin listing out the customer pain points or problems. What is the customer trying to solve? Why does your product help them solve it? I worked with one of my clients to do this for a new insurtech brand. We had pages of user flows and an incredible amount of detail about what the customer would expect to do at each part of the flow. It was a complicated journey - both online and offline. The best part of journey mapping is that it helps you anticipate what the customer will want to do next and helps you meet their expectations. Your journey maps become detailed blueprints for all of the customer interactions that need to be designed within and outside of the stream. Some people see journey mapping as just a product or UX exercise, but it is a super-insightful brand exercise. Once you understand the customer's journey, you are on your way to being human. Being human is emotional and building an emotional connection with your customers is the holy grail of any brand. Go on, dig deep.

Listen to the bad and ugly

I mean really listen. When a customer complains about your brand, you have a choice to make about how you handle it and how you absorb the feedback. I write lots of reviews for restaurants, hotels and products. I would say that less than 10% of my reviews are bad, but there are times when I just have to share a crappy experience. I worked with a client that would only read the positive reviews. Who wouldn’t want someone telling you how great you are all day long? But, how does that make you better? Answer: it doesn’t. And, it’s not based in reality. It’s a proven fact that negative reviews carry more weight. In Uber's case, the customer complaints are more of an uprising and Uber has made the conscious decision to do nothing to ease the pain. The bad reviews and negativity can sometimes be noisy and, sure, there are people who just like to complain. But, when you see a trend, you need to pay attention. Imagine the impact of going back to customers to tell them you heard them and you improved something based on their feedback. Imagine if Uber had listened to their customers and created a path to connect with a human to resolve these complicated issues, or imagine if they had just done it before customers started to complain? Maybe I wouldn’t have clicked “delete.”

Turn pain into empathy

Humans have the ability to be empathetic. The people around us that lift us up and give us advice when we need it and help us thru difficult times are the people we always turn to. Why? They are empathetic. The listen and understand us. Empathy creates trust. Trust is the foundation of relationships. Brands have the opportunity to be empathetic, but often don't see themselves in the relationship business. Whether you deliver pizzas, cybersecurity software or consulting services, you are in the business of forming emotional connections with people. When you understand these people - your customers - at a personal level, you can turn their pain into empathy, giving you a powerful a new way to communicate and connect. I think about the Uber situation and how empathy could change the reality for their brand. I know so many people that have switched to Lyft and, after listening to Lyft Co-Founder, John Zimmer, talk about founding the company and how their mission is centered around people and making the world a better place, I'm sold.

The bottom line is this – don't think for one second that you have a customer for life. Loyalty is dead. We continue to watch brands turn to dust because they thought they had all the power. The reality is the power has shifted to your customer. And, with one tap, your app is deleted. With one call, an account is closed. With one click, your customer can tell the world something amazing about your brand or something horrible. And, as Whitney Wolfe, the founder of Bumble says when asked about her competition, “We really aren’t worried about competitors for one reason: I really believe anyone can copy a product or piece of technology, anyone. I could go find a bunch of talented engineers and build any software product right now. However, you cannot just copy someone else’s brand and become them. There has to be authenticity and true purpose, a mission and a story. No one can replicate that.” Find your empathy and be human. It’s an untouchable advantage.

Michelle Heath is Founder & CEO at Growth Street Marketing. Follow Michelle on Twitter: @michelleheath.

Photo by Michal Parzuchowski on Unsplash.