Empathy has no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It’s simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of “You’re not alone” - by Brené Brown.
What is Empathy?
Empathy is a critical ingredient for successful customer engagement. By definition, empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. In customer success, empathy is about putting yourself in the customer's shoes to understand their needs better and provide a solution that meets those needs.
Understanding and sharing your customers' feelings can create a strong emotional connection that leads to loyalty and advocacy.
Types of Empathy:
- Cognitive empathy: an ability to understand another person's perspective.
- Emotional empathy: an ability to feel emotions that are similar to what others are feeling.
- Somatic empathy: an ability to sense or feel what another person is physically experiencing.
Types of Empathy certainly deserves a dedicated blog post covering its impact on customers.
Benefits of using Empathy during customer engagement:
- Improved communication
- Deeper relationships
- Increased sales
- Resolve conflicts
- Build long-lasting trust
Use Empathy in strategies to connect with Customers:
Injecting Empathy while designing your customer engagement strategies helps in seeing things from the customer's perspective. By doing this, you will be able to serve them better and meet their expectations.
Focus on your customer’s needs, desires, and intentions
- Attention: meticulously pay attention to what the customer says verbally and non-verbally. Try to understand not only the words but the emotions.
- Interest: show your time-bound interest by asking questions. This will help you gather more information about what they want, need, desire, and intend to do.
- Data: visualize and present the data that you have collected about your customers. This could include surveys, social media data, or research studies.
Recognize and Appreciate your Customers
- Recognizing and appreciating your customer is one of the most effective ways of displaying Empathy. This means taking the time to get to know your customers as people rather than just treating them as another number or faceless entity.
- Recognize your customer's hard work, achievements, and results through cadence calls, chats, or emails. Ensure none of their key milestones, such as product launch, doesn't without your appreciation.
Smartly utilize storytelling
- Storytelling facilitates empathetic connect with customers emotionally by sharing relatable stories of yourself or someone else. Storytelling can create an instant connection with others as it engages different parts of our brain, the rational and the emotional side.
- Storytelling also allows us to share valuable lessons without coming across as didactic – instead of telling people what they should do, which often leads to resistance.
Adopting, leveraging and cultivating the Empathy driven customer engagement is essential for long lasting loyaty and trust which further transforms into the Customer Success.