Want to help patients? Start by walking in their shoes and trying to understand their health journey. Empathy is key to everything. As our world continues to advance technologically and bots take over, one has to question if they really have the potential to show emotion and project empathy. Bots are left-brain processors. They're learning engines that assimilate rational information and do it fairly easily as they process conversations. And the responses to these conversations drive certain calibrated answers. Can chatbots learn to feel someone's pain?

"If you live your life openly with your emotions, that's a more manly stance than burying them," actor Nick Offerman told Men's Health in a recently published article.

Marketing through technology has become key to revenue generation, and there is a multitude of new products promising to drive revenues by using new electronic tools driven by artificial intelligence, data analysis and other means. Quite a few of these products aim to act as non-human "concierges" for hotels and, while helping guests enjoy a better experience, offer a way for hotels to up-sell.

Marketers, like most professionals, are eager to leverage the potential of data. According to DialogTech, more than 82% have expressed the need to use metrics to demonstrate their campaign's return on investment. Unfortunately, more than half believe that metrics do nothing to improve their efforts or drive their business, and these suspicions aren't entirely unfounded. During his September 2017 keynote speech at Advertising Week in New York, Mark Coffey, SVP of strategic operations of GasBuddy, spoke about the proliferation of data and how its mere presence doesn't guarantee impact. A deluge of data, in and of itself, offers brands no …

The travel industry is undergoing a transformation. While frequent-flier miles and tiered loyalty programs were once the key to consumers' hearts, travelers are increasingly craving the cheapest price, deprioritizing points in favor of lower fares. As booking sites like Hopper and Google Flights place a further emphasis on price, and disruptors like Airbnb become a household name, legacy travel brands must consider how to drive excitement among travelers and redefine loyalty at all phases of the consumer journey.

The rise of visual social sharing via platforms such as Instagram has provided brands with a new way to examine their complex relationships with people.

The winners of the digital economy will be the companies who can leverage a detailed understanding of customer experience and use that information to drive transformation from the customer's perspective. By quantifying customer experience, CPG companies would be able to implement exact measures to enhance strengths and improve weaknesses, positioning them to conquer the four challenges facing their industry with customer-centric business solutions.

You're all dressed for work and ready to head out the door when you spill that last sip of coffee on your nice white shirt. Because you're living in the 21st century and you've enabled Tide on Alexa, you say, "Alexa, ask Tide how to get a coffee stain out of my shirt."

Tackling customer experience challenges and fostering innovation in omnichannel strategy have long been crucial priorities for retailers. But more recently, finding the solutions to those challenges, and a laser focus on eliminating customer friction points, have been more urgent agenda items than ever before thanks to Amazon.

That moment when water heating on a stove gets hot enough to transform from still into roiling is called the tipping point. Malcom Gladwell, who wrote The Tipping Point, chooses a unique word to describe the phenomena of widespread change that leads to a tipping point. He calls them "epidemics" because ideas, products and behaviors "spread just like viruses do."