Editorial
The Gist
- Empathy essential. Prioritize empathy with customers for lasting loyalty.
- Understanding matters. Deep customer knowledge elevates experience.
- Feedback key. Insights from feedback refine empathetic strategies.
Providing industry-leading customer experience is often dependent on your ability to provide efficient, timely and personalized service to customers during every interaction with you.
Many companies claim to be customer-centric, but few truly live up to this ideal — most because they don’t understand what it means to be truly customer-centric. For many companies, being customer-centric means simply delivering good customer service. However, being truly customer-centric goes beyond providing good service. It means putting the customer at the center of everything you do, from product design to marketing to customer support.
Understanding your customer — and their needs — is simply good business. Harvard Business Review suggests that the top 10 most empathetic companies increased value more than twice as much as the bottom 10 companies — and generated 50% more earnings.
The ability to display empathy with customers has become vital to your customer experience. From understanding why empathy with customers matters to adding empathy to your leadership toolkit, let’s take a look at how you can bridge the empathy gap.
What Is Empathy, Anyway?
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. There are generally three types of empathy that an individual can experience:
- Cognitive empathy refers to when a person can understand what another person might be thinking or feeling, based on the situation. This is the type of empathy that leads an employee to put themselves in a customer’s shoes to better feel the pain they feel, and it can be very useful for customer journey mapping, persona building and testing.
- Emotional empathy is when someone can share another person’s feelings. In a CX situation, it can be demonstrated by an employee verbalizing that they understand a customer’s frustration, for example, “I understand you’re not a fan of subscription pricing because you don’t want to pay monthly. I can see why you’re upset.” Emotional empathy with customers is a vitally important skill for your customer service and support personnel.
- Compassionate empathy will lead someone to act in consideration of another person’s feelings. Picture a customer support agent escalating a customer issue, and instead of transferring the call and hanging up, staying on the line to make sure the issue is fully understood before passing the customer on to a colleague.
We all know companies where it feels like employees just run through a script to focus on getting you off the phone as quickly as possible. The responses are rote and don’t answer your needs. (“YES,” you are probably saying, just like you shout at the credit card 800 number while you are trying to reach a human who can actually help you.)
When it comes to customers, all types of empathy are important. Because if you don’t have empathy, you probably aren’t really focusing on the customer — you’re probably just following a script and hoping for the best.
Related Article: How Compassion Can Benefit Customer Experience
Why You Might Have a Customer-Centricity Problem
According to research from digital experience platform Episerver, 71% of surveyed B2B leaders said they had a customer-centricity gap, and 54% said that their customer relationships were strained — or even non-existent.
It’s easy to lose focus on the customer, spending more time worrying about hitting sales targets or meeting quarterly earnings goals than delivering exceptional customer experiences. Without a deep understanding of the customer's needs, preferences and pain points, it is difficult to create products, services and experiences that truly meet their needs.
If you’re looking to get back to basics and focus on the customers, try the following:
- Center business processes around the customer. This may mean investing in digital transformation to tie together disparate systems and data so you’re able to see the whole picture of your customer relationships — and make their experience more seamless.
- Empower your employees. Empower your employees to lead with empathy. Provide them with the training and resources they need to understand the customer's perspective and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
- Design products and services to solve customers’ immediate problems. It’s easy to worry about your customer in the future rather than what is in front of you right now. If you’re adjusting your market or ideal customer profile, don’t forget about solving your current customers’ problems today while you focus on shifting toward the future.
Focusing on short-term results like quarterly sales results and earning goals can lead to decisions that prioritize the company's needs over the needs of the customer. Be sure you’re focusing on what matters: your customers.
Related Article: 4 Tips to Empower Your Contact Center Agents With Empathy
Why Empathy With Customers Is Important
According to Gartner, 64% of people rate customer experience as more important than purchase price when making a buying decision. Statements like “If I’m understanding correctly,” “I appreciate your patience” and “I can understand how that would be frustrating” can go a long way toward calming an aggravated customer or colleague.
When customers feel understood and valued, they are more likely to develop a sense of loyalty — and this loyalty can translate into increased sales and advocacy, as customers are more likely to recommend working with you to colleagues.
To help build empathy into your customer experience, try these tips:
- Use active listening. Solicit feedback through surveys, focus groups and social media. Take the time to understand customers' needs, preferences and pain points.
- Personalize interactions. In its research report “The Connected Customer Experience,” Genesys found that 37% of respondents said having a business remember or know them — and anticipate why they’ve contacted the service department — is a sign of a phenomenal experience.
- Collect feedback. Use customer insights to inform your business decisions. Whether you are developing a new product, designing a marketing campaign or improving customer support, make sure you are prioritizing the customer's needs.
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We’re all worrying about the future of generative AI, but AI lacks one thing humans can offer: empathy. Empathy starts with listening, understanding and anticipating the needs of others — and that doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about external customers or colleagues. So as we all begin looking toward 2024, let’s not forget about building empathy back into our customer experience strategy.
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