Mattering isn’t a soft skill. It’s a growth strategy.

Here’s the case for mattering: customers pay more; employees stay longer and people forgive mistakes when they believe they matter to you.

So why are brands still getting this so wrong?

I don’t think it’s because they don’t care. I think most people inside these companies care quite a bit. What gets lost is the distance between the boardroom and customer support – an oxymoron. Good intentions get filtered through quarterly targets, scripts, and systems built for scale.

Look at the LA wildfires. Roughly 80% of policyholders who filed claims after the fires described serious problems, including delays, lowball offers, adjusters rotated mid-claim, conflicting instructions. Three-quarters of people who lost their homes turned out to be underinsured. These are people who lost everything, reaching out for help at the worst moment of their lives, and getting a case number instead of a human being. Meanwhile, 70% of insurers believe they deliver personalized service. Only 43% of their customers agree.

That 27-point gap isn’t a failure of caring. It’s a failure of translation, caring that never made it out of the mission statement and into the moment someone needed it most. Mattering is expensive right when you need it and invisible until then, so it’s the first thing systems quietly optimize away. Not out of malice. Out of drift.

And the people on the other end can feel that drift every time.

Here’s the gentle truth nobody likes to say out loud: most “customer care” and “employee engagement” programs are theater. Sending a birthday email. Saying “I hear you” while reading from a script. These are table stakes, dressed up as generosity, and people can tell within seconds. Mattering isn’t a tactic you bolt onto a broken system. It’s what’s left after you strip the performance away and simply treat someone like they’re a whole person, especially when it costs you something to do it.

Some brands get it right. Costco pays its floor employees well above retail average and has a fraction of the turnover to prove people notice when they’re valued. In-N-Out promotes from within and trains managers to actually know every crew member’s name and story, not just their shift schedule. Sweetgreen and Trader Joe’s build loyalty by letting frontline employees make decisions on the spot, without asking permission first. The common thread isn’t generosity as a policy. It’s trust. It’s believing people are capable of caring about each other if you just get out of their way.

7 ways to practice mattering — none is expensive or time consuming:

1. Let frontline employees fix problems on the spot, without a manager’s sign-off.
2. Respond to complaints with a specific fix, not a scripted apology.
3. Replace “valued customer” language with something a human actually wrote.
4. Publicly credit the employee who solved a customer’s problem, not the department.
5. Shorten the distance between a complaint and a human who can act on it.
6. Ask “why” before you ask “how much”; diagnose the actual problem before pitching a fix.
7. Follow up with a customer after the transaction is closed, when there’s nothing left to sell.

Remember that the person in front of you isn’t a ticket to close. They’re someone who woke up this morning hoping today would go a little better than yesterday. That’s not a low bar. It’s the whole point.

We spend so much energy trying to be seen ourselves. Maybe the fastest way to build something people love is to start by truly seeing them first.