Empathy as a Superpower: 4 Steps to Getting It Right
By Gavin James, Director of Creative Services & CX Strategist at Beyond the Arc.
The pandemic transformed the age of the customer into the age of empathy. For many businesses, infusing that level of emotional connection into their communications was new territory but it is fast becoming a business imperative as a way of engaging customers who expect personalised attention while grappling with a volatile economy.
Communicating with empathy has always been key to deeper engagement with customers, but now it’s table stakes. Empathy can be a superpower for strengthening customer relationships – but how do you know if you’re doing it right?
Here’s a practical 4-step approach to spark new perspectives on communicating with empathy for the greatest impact.
1. Understand how empathy works
There’s an interesting pitfall in how we often think of empathy. We say, “put yourself in the customer’s shoes” to try to understand them better but empathy isn’t about imagining how you would feel if you were them (that’s about you and may be influenced by your biases). It’s about trying to understand what it feels like to be them, and what their concerns and needs might be, so you can better support them. An effective way to build that understanding is by creating customer personas and journey maps.
Personas help you articulate the attitudes and behaviours of different segments of customers. Journey maps help you identify where, when, and how those people may be most impacted. Together, those insights can inform your communication strategies.
From there, you’ll want to better understand the different kinds of empathy because they can have different effects:
To communicate effectively, you need a good balance of these three types of empathy. Your company needs to convey not only that you understand and relate to customers’ feelings, but that you care about helping in ways that are directly relevant.
2. Use empathy the right way, at the right time
After a couple of years of economic meltdowns, health concerns, and uncertainty, millions of consumers and business owners are emotionally stretched to the limit. Their patience and tolerance are tapped out. That doesn’t mean you want to relate on a downer level, but you need to be sensitive to it.
Here are some key communication strategies:
Lead with empathy. Yes, people want to hear there’s hope on the horizon and feel reassured. But first, they often need to hear empathy that recognises their current vulnerability, so they feel seen and understood.
“You can’t meet emotion with reasoned facts or data; you can only meet emotion with emotion, and move people with you”, says Helio Fred Garcia, a Professor of Crisis Management at New York University. “The most helpful statement begins with an acknowledgement of peoples’ anxieties and uncertainty. Then outline the big picture and action items.”2
As an example, in the earliest days of the pandemic, comparing various airline emails from a CX perspective revealed some stark disparities. The most engaging communications lead with compassionate understanding about unsettling changes, before outlining their new strategies. By comparison, the airlines that launched right into how they’re addressing issues seemed almost off-putting in their lack of emotion. That difference can influence people’s impression of the brand.
Keep it simple. People today are overloaded with information. Processing everything can be challenging, so people may get confused more easily or pay even less attention to details.3 Keep your messaging simple with concise key takeaways that clearly stand out.
Reach out in waves. People less impacted by changes are sometimes more resistant to taking recommended actions. It’s a typical response that people resist change if it doesn’t seem relevant to them. But your company may be sharing important updates that have all your customers’ best interests in mind. You may need to engage different customers at different times (and in different ways), based on where they are in the overall cycle of the crisis experience.
Again, you could use personas to identify customer segments and prioritise by the level of impact. That can help you define a communications plan in terms of how many waves you’ll need, the most relevant timing, and the most engaging way to reach out based on different personas and customer relationships.
3. Earn trust by being believable
The Covid era sparked numerous emails from big brand CEOs who wanted to “personally reach out.” But when customers need to solve problems, are companies really walking the walk of empathy? And are they sustaining a personal touch now that we’ve moved on to a “new normal”?
Go with what you know. People often hear conflicting information, which can heighten a sense of uncertainty and erode trust. Be clear and accurate about what you know and what you don’t, and realistic about what you can do, and what you can’t – at any given time. Your goal isn’t to make people feel overly confident; it’s to help them feel more in control.
Walk the walk. Consider your customer journey map, then look at the various touch points from an empathy perspective. What are their feelings and motivations at certain stages? And more importantly, why?
Those insights can help you take practical actions that demonstrate a compassionate understanding and improve customer experiences.
4. Put empathy to work for you
When you focus first on empathy, every touch point is shaped by understanding your customers on a personal, emotional level. And when your communications resonate more, it can create a trusting anchor for a lasting relationship.
Empathy is your superpower for increasing engagement with customers, now and for the long term. When you apply empathy in the right ways to build trust and add emotional value, you may be doing the most empowering and profitable thing for your customers and your business.
Sources:
In Crisis Communication, Start with Empathy, Security Management, March 31, 2020
Psychology of a Crisis, CDC 2019 Update
How leaders can bridge the empathy gap in a crisis, Strategy+Business, Oct 2, 2019
The New Science of Customer Emotions, Harvard Business Review, Nov 2015
Coronavirus Forcing Financial Institutions to Revamp Contact Centers, March 17, 2020
