If you want to improve the customer experience (CX) and differentiate your business from your competitors in a noisy market, a powerful and proven way to do this is to foster deeper connections with your customers.
This article explores the critical role of empathy in customer service, and how it enhances the overall customer experience.
- Understanding empathy and its impact in customer service
- Strategies for incorporating empathy into customer service
- Leveraging technology to support empathy
Understanding empathy and its impact in customer service
1. What is empathy?
Empathy is the ability to sense and tune into the thoughts and feelings of another person, in this case, the customer. You can sum up empathy as the ability to put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
2. The emotional impact of empathy on customers
When customers feel understood that their concerns and needs are being met, they feel more valued. Empathy helps build trust and loyalty, which leads to customers developing an emotional connection with your brand. Satisfied customers keep coming back, and they also recommend your business to their circle.
3. How empathetic interactions can reduce customer frustration
If a customer has an issue to resolve and the customer service agent simply doesn’t understand, or doesn’t try to relate to the customer and their concerns, the customer will become frustrated, if not angry. Conversely, an empathetic listener who demonstrates that they do really understand the customer’s concerns will develop a valuable rapport with that customer.
Empathy is a skill that can be developed with the right training, if it’s not an inherent trait. Empathetic customer service agents make the effort to really listen and understand why the customer is frustrated, so that they can then resolve the issue effectively.
Strategies for incorporating empathy into customer service
Understanding why empathy is so important for great customer service and achieving customer satisfaction is one thing; but ensuring that your team is equipped to deliver empathy is another. Here’s a few strategies which may help.
A. The Right Training
Empathy training is essential for customer service agents to develop their empathetic skills. While some people are naturally more empathetic than others, it’s an ability that everyone can hone and develop with the right training.
One example of empathy training is learning to actively listen, rather than just waiting for the customer to cease talking so the agent can respond. Emotional intelligence development is also necessary for empathy to flourish. This is the ability to perceive, express and regulate emotions.
Role playing is an effective way to help customer service staff develop their empathy skills. One plays the role of the employee while the other plays the role of the customer. After the role playing session, an adjudicator will offer feedback on the agent’s performance, so they know what they’re doing right, and the areas where they need to improve.
B. Empathetic procedures and practices
Of course, to truly develop empathy skills and improve customer experiences, customer service representatives need to practise empathy with customers every day.
This can be achieved by personalising interactions, showing genuine concern, and following up with customers after resolving their issues. Just as after sales service fosters customer loyalty and satisfaction, so do follow calls from customer service agents.
It’s helpful to practise empathy statements. Some examples of empathy statements are:
- “I imagine how frustrating it is…”
- “I’m sorry to hear that…”
- “I understand how confusing it must be…”
Key ways customer service staff can practise empathy daily include:
- being respectful, and allowing the customer to to vent all their concerns and frustrations
- listening closely, and repeating what the customer says to assure them that they have been heard and understood.
- demonstrating that they really do care about solving the issue
and avoid assumptions at all costs.
- taking ownership of the customer’s problem, and ensuring it gets fixed to the customer’s satisfaction. If this can’t be done in one step, then follow up until it is.
C. Leadership and culture
To truly establish empathy in customer service, it needs to be a core value of the company. Good leadership develops quality employees, and fostering a culture of empathy in your organisation starts at the top. Business owners, board members, shareholders and managers are all responsible for behaving with empathy when it is needed, so that everyone feels comfortable and supported at work, and in their customer interactions.
Leveraging technology to support empathy
When your customer service teams are engaging with your customers via phone or digital channels, it’s important that they have instant access to customer history and relevant company data so that they can quickly understand what the issue is all about, and provide the right solution.
Our customer service solution Contact Point is equipped with a range of powerful features that make it easy for front line staff to deliver amazing service. From real time dashboards showing all customer communications history across multiple channels, to AI prompts suggesting relevant knowledge base solutions, we make sure your team members can concentrate on providing an empathetic service.
Premier Contact Point is your partner
When you partner with us, we provide you with the cutting edge technology and Australian based support to ensure your team can deliver outstanding customer experience, all day every day. Contact us today if you would like a chat or an obligation-free demonstration of Contact Point – 1300 851 111.
