Pave your path to customer ❤️ with empathy and compassion

Too often, the world can be a customer service nightmare. Supply chains get strained, producer costs rise and get passed to buyers, we see product shortages and recalls. Patience wears thin in even the most understanding customer relationships. 

Empathy and compassion are critical tools in any company's arsenal for increasing customer ❤️, and that’s especially true in challenging times.

Empathy and compassion are different actions that show up best when walking hand-in-hand. When your team deliver both of these effectively, you've got the key to creating memorable customer experiences.

Empathy and compassion: How are they different?

In her essay in the compilation, Compassion@Work, my friend Stacey Oliver-Knappe writes about the difference between empathy and compassion. She states that empathy says “I understand” while compassion says “I get that this is rough, but I’ve got your back and I want to help.” I’m grateful to Stacey for inspiring my recent musings.

Empathy sounds like, “I’ve been frustrated, too. I can hear that you’re frustrated, I know what it’s like to feel frustrated”—it's sharing that you can relate to the customer’s problem. I see this with my clients when a customer has a common problem and the customer service representative knows they can help the customer find their answer. When the representative can say, “I know that’s frustrating,” that empowers and reassures. Customers know they are heard and that it’s okay for them to feel the way they feel.

Compassion adds a layer. It takes empathy’s “I understand” and bolts on, “and I’m here for you, and I’ve got your back.” This can be a comfort in any situation, and it's crucial when the customer situation is difficult, maybe not in any one person’s control of solving—like a supply chain issue, for example. Compassion offers more than understanding, it commits that the organization will see this problem through to the end. 

Empathy, compassion and customer ❤️

Empathy and compassion strengthen each other, like superheroes combining forces. Or like two ends of a bridge: you need both to hold up the connection.

So how do they interact in business?

Selling a product or service, especially in the world of business-to-business, means understanding a customers’ problems and presenting them with the solution. This means being empathetic about the problem they’re having, and showing compassion by following through until their issue is resolved. It's not selling a product or service, it's delivering a solution.

I found a great example of empathy and compassion a while back in an engagement with a company filling a critical niche in the tax preparation software marketplace.

The software itself is amazing, but their secret weapon is the company's balance of empathy and compassion when dealing with customers. In the customer interviews I conducted, I heard over and over again about the power of a video library they could access, featuring videos of the software vendor's tax experts walking viewers through not only nearly every aspect of successful implementation and onboarding, but addressing specific challenges that commonly arise as companies face more challenging tax preparation issues, like when companies prepare to seek investment capital.

The firm showed that they understood their clients’ environments and common frustrations — that they, too, had experienced the same tax problems, and had walked in their customers’ shoes. 

This showed empathy, but also compassion with their commitment to helping their customers work through their problems until they’d been solved. In addition to the library, they promised customers that if none of the videos were able to help, they had a group of people who could relate to their issues on standby, ready to jump in and get them to the finish line.

Two ingredients for a successful recipe

Empathy and compassion are delicately interwoven parts of building customer ❤️ and trust. Your customer service model must include both to be successful. Begin by teaching your team the difference between these two actions and what each one sounds like coming from your sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Then, show how they are stronger together and how both can be applied to their daily interactions with customers (and each other).