COVID, Season 2: it's time for an empathy strategy.

I tried three times to get into Game of Thrones when it first came out...

I kept getting lost: too many houses, characters, beheadings and weird place names. It wasn't until the end of season 1 that I felt like I had any kind of idea what was actually going on.

2021 feels a bit like Season 2 of COVID. We learned a lot of the main players in Season 1 (2020). It was filled with inciting incidents, scary plot lines, and a lot of confusing new language to get our heads round.

Starting this new year, however, doesn't feel all that new does it?

Social distancing, working from home, homeschooling – things we all had to get used to last year are still very much with us.

2021 will be another year of primarily communicating with each other digitally, trying to meet the needs of those at home, and caring for those impacted, displaced and disrupted by COVID.

2021 will also be a year with a key difference. For those of us that usually use this time of the year to plan, we are doing it in a fundamentally different context than before.

We are starting a financial / marketing / strategic planning period from within a crisis, not in response  to it.

That means that we go into this year with a different mindset – one that needs a different strategy.

What's your empathy strategy?

When we are socially distanced from one another we need more than ever to build empathy.

Empathetic connections with one another are what help combat our isolation and feeling of distance.

We need a strategy. When we can't get out to see, meet, and commune with our teams, audiences and customers, how will we gather the emotional intelligence data we need to build empathetic connections with them?

We need to start by looking at the tools and tactics which go beyond the button, the mailer, the like, the click. We need to capture intent. We need to capture the conversation.

Conversation is where the real action is

What makes shows like Game of Thrones, The West Wing and The Simpsons great isn't production values, costumes, or editing. It's the script.

I've been reading Jerry Seinfeld's compendium of stand-up over the holiday break. It's hundreds  of pages of over 40 years’ material from one of comedy's masterminds. What is so striking about it is how simple it is, and how easy it is to get a laugh.

The script of a great standup is built on empathy. Both given and received. And that’s what a good conversation is built on too.

If we want to truly connect with people in these strange times, we need to become experts in anticipating, researching, scripting and programming the conversations we want to have..

This means doing away with some fundamentals of advertising. We need to stop looking at "users" and "audiences" and remember that everyone we engage with via a chatbot, a voice device, a tweet, or an email is being invited into a conversation with us.

For the more "conversational" formats this is even more pertinent, as we begin to see marketing, content and communications channels emulate the style of human-to-human interaction.

Human-to-bot interaction should be no less empathetic.

I often say a great bot or voice experience should be like inviting the perfect dinner guest into our homes – they should be passionate, candid, humble and patient.

They should arrive on time, bring a gift and know when they have outstayed their welcome.

But to achieve this we need to start much higher up the pecking order.

To build empathy, we need to wrestle with intents.

Conversational AI in 2021 will present us with, not only the tools to connect with our customers and audiences in whole new ways, but the most insightful method of understanding them.

Through capturing, monitoring and rebuilding conversational patterns we can get closer than ever before to understanding, not just the behaviours of our customer (such as a click), but the intent of our customers, too - that’s only truly expressed in what they say.

However, in 2021 we begin to go beyond  keywords, questions and utterances. We can start to truly look at sentiment.

There are companies like OTO which are making this happen in real time, by analysing real speech for more than just the words.DeepTone looks at over 100 speech markers to determine how something is said, not just what is being said:

In the early 2010's "sentiment" analysis became the range with platforms like Radian6 and Kred claiming to be able to look at online influence and conversation trends by monitoring Twitter and Facebook posts at scale. It was quickly realised that much of the noise on these platforms is made up of  the opinions of the over-opinionated. Those that shouted loudest provided the loudest false positives.

With speech-to-text analysis and sentiment analysis as it is now ten years on, we can begin to get a much clearer and truer picture of what people are looking for when they speak to us, or when they ask their questions to devices.

2021 is the year to join the conversation.

2020 saw many forward-thinking brands join the conversational space by investing in prototypes, tests and learning projects. Some began to invest into Voice Search and experiment with voice as part of the customer service mix.

2021 is set to be the year that voice gets down to business.

Where we see brands that have experimented before, embed voice in their strategy.

We are seeing search and customer service teams wake up to the power of serving people asynchronously through voice assistants and chatbots, freeing up call centre staff and optimising their web-SEO at the same time.

2021 will be a year like no other. 2020 was just the first season. 2021 will be the year we look deeply at how we put back together the pieces of our world that were fundamentally broken in 2020 – and, arguably, before.

Let's do it with conversation. Let's do it with empathy. Here's to Season 2.