Empathy is Your Customer Service Secret Weapon

Showing your customer you value them is your biggest business asset

Photo by Transly Translation Agency on Unsplash

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Have you had your morning coffee yet? (

Neela 🌶️

and

Jana

I know you have) If not, this should wake you up: US companies lose $75 Billion worth of business every year due to poor customer service. And 91% of customers have ended a business relationship due to a bad customer service experience.

Why do so many businesses struggle to deliver good customer service? The harsh reality is that many businesses struggle to show empathy for their customers.

What is Empathy and Why Does it Matter to Your Business?

First, what is empathy? I asked Grok, it said empathy is “the ability to understand, share, and vicariously experience the feelings, thoughts, or experiences of another person.”

Yet, it’s not enough to simply understand our customer’s feelings, we have to be motivated to act on those feelings in a way that creates value for the customer.

Which in turn, creates value for the business.

Since customer service is typically the most critical touchpoint that a company has with the customer, let’s look at some of the stats on the value of customer service:

• 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies who offer excellent customer service. (HubSpot Research)

• If the company’s customer service is excellent, 78% of consumers will do business with them again after a mistake. (Salesforce Research)

• 83% of customers agree that they feel more loyal to brands that respond and resolve their complaints. (Khoros)

• Businesses can grow revenues between 4% and 8% above their market when prioritizing better customer service experiences. (Bain & Company)

Yet so much of providing solid support to the customer comes from listening to them, not selling to them. People who are emphatic are very often compassionate as well. They want to understand your feelings so they can relate to you, and help you. It’s why emphatic people are usually recruited by smart companies to work in customer support roles.

When the customer feels seen and heard, when they feel that you understand them, then they will trust you. And once they trust you, then they will advocate on your behalf.

I’ve told this story before. I once worked as a vendor for Lowes. Part of my job required that I sell directly to the customers who came in the store.

I had a great manager. He taught me that I couldn’t sell to the customer until I first listened to them, and understood what their problem was. Once I knew what their problem was, then I could offer them a solution. And he stressed that the solution may be a product that we don’t sell. He said it’s ok to recommend a competitor’s product, as long as I solved the customer’s problem.

A couple of weeks later I am stocking shelves when a customer comes up. He explains the problem he is having, asks me if I made a product for that. I told him that unfortunately my company did not, but then I motioned him toward a competitor’s product and told him based on the active ingredients, this product should solve your problem.

He slowly took the product, kinda side-eyed me as if to say he didn’t understand what was happening here, and walked off without saying a word.

A few days later, I am back in the same store, and as luck would have it a vendor from my competitor was working the same isle I am. I look up and see the customer from a few days ago walking down my isle and straight toward me.

The other vendor catches him, “Can I help you, sir?”

The customer doesn’t even stop, saying ‘Nope, I’m here to see HIM”, and points at me. The customer then explains that my suggestion from a few days prior had solved his problem, then added another problem he had. This time we DID sell a product that would help with that problem, which the customer happily bought.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

On the first trip, I’m sure the customer was expecting me to sell him on one of my products. When I instead told him to buy from the competitor that likely confused him. Then he got home and found out that the product worked, then he realized that I was trying to solve his problem first, and make a sale second. That earned his trust, which is why he came back to buy from me a second time. It’s why my manager taught me to LISTEN first to the customer so I can UNDERSTAND what their problem is, then sell them the solution.

This also communicated empathy for the customer. I made sure the customer understood that we both had the same main goal: To solve the customer’s problem.

Easy Ways to Add Empathy to Your Customer Service

Let’s recall that empathy is the ability to understand the feelings and emotions that someone is experiencing. When you interact with a customer, you want to communicate to that customer that you have empathy for their feelings. This also communicates that you aren’t taking the interaction with them for granted. It communicates that you care. Here’s some ways you can instantly show your customers that you have empathy for them:

Employ active listening when engaging with customers. One good way to do this is to repeat back key information to the customer. Such as using the customer’s name, and repeating back their issue to them, or information about the product or service they are interested in, etc. This not only communicates to the customer that you were listening, but it FORCES your employees to listen to the customer. That heightens the employee’s ability to understand the customer, which means they can better help the customer.

Ask questions that focus on the customer and their life. This can be incorporated more on the sales side, but you want to focus on the customer more so than your products. This communicates to the customer that you are thinking about them and the life they lead, and how your products can fit into and enhance that life. It helps illustrate thoughtfulness to the customer.

Leverage what you learn from engaging with customers and let it shape your future communications. As you interact with customers, and get a better understanding of who they are and how your products/services can fit into their lives, your messaging will change as a result. It’s a good idea to clearly communicate those changes to your customers, and make sure they know that the changes are a result of what they learned by talking to their customers. That communicates that the company appreciates its customers enough to change course based on customer feedback.

Here’s a couple of examples. I once hosted a customer retreat for a brand. It was an all-day event where customers came and shared their experiences with the brand, talked about support issues, product design, everything. The brand took copious notes and applied what they learned. The next year we had the group of customers back. During the event, the marketing team showed the customers a new commercial they would be running that would reflect a rebranding strategy that would incorporate ideas they had learned from their customers. They started showing the commercial, which showed snippets of interviews that the company had conducted with customers.

As our group was watching the commercial, suddenly one of the customers screamed and started bawling. Shocked, we all looked at her to see what was wrong. She fought back tears, whispering “That was me…you put me in your commercial!” As the group continued to watch, a couple more of them noticed they too had cameo appearances in the commercial. This is a literal example, but it shows the power of communicating to your customers that you are listening to them, and taking their feedback seriously.

Patagonia started getting suggestions/complaints from customers asking them to please stop using cardboard boxes to ship a single clothing item. Customers wanted them to just ship it in a plastic bag to create less packaging waste. Patagonia decided to take the suggestion seriously, and tried shipping single items in just a plastic shipping bag.

Photo by Tani Eisenstein on Unsplash

What they found was that the single item was often damaged before it even left Patagonia shipping warehouse. The brand used conveyor belts and often when the package reached a new section of the belt, there was a chance the metal at the connection could snag the bag and rip it, if not damage the clothing inside. Sidenote: I’ve worked in a shipping warehouse with similar belts, and we couldn’t ship in plastic bags for the same reason. While Patagonia couldn’t make the change customers asked for, they were able to communicate that they took the suggestion seriously enough to test it.

Really, that’s the underlying theme of this entire article: The value of communicating to your customers that you appreciate them enough to take their feedback seriously.

It starts with actively listening to the customer.

Then communicating to them that you have heard them, and am processing the information they gave you.

Finally, you take the customer’s feedback and incorporate it into your future communication with them.

All of these steps communicate to the customer that you hear them, you understand them, and you appreciate them. Then when you follow through with actions that reflects that appreciation, that’s how you win the customer’s trust and loyalty.

I hope you enjoyed this article, and if you did, please Like and Restack it to increase its visibility. On Thursday, I will have an article on the value of proving that your concepts work, aka ‘showing your work’. See you then, and thanks for reading!

Mack