Probably the hardest thing about software development (or, probably, any other complicated endeavor) is knowing what to do next. It seems we’re constantly somewhere on the spectrum between high-minded strategy and myopic tactics. Choosing where on that spectrum we spend our day or week seems constantly up to the whims of fate… or, more precisely, the whims of customers. I believe the reason for a lot of this confusion is a lack of appreciation for something I’ve come to call “empathetic distance.”

I started at Fog Creek in support. Customer support. Tech support. Troubleshooting. Call it what you want. The job pretty much consists of combining empathy with acumen. It’s my job to make your problems into my problems, and to use my troubleshooting skills and product knowledge to make your problems go away. (I call that “flipping the golden bit” and it’s a topic for another post.)

So, once your problem is solved and you’re on your way, it then becomes my job to find the deeper fix. My boss, Joel, has put it as well as I ever could:

Almost every tech support problem has two solutions. The superficial and immediate solution is just to solve the customer’s problem. But when you think a little harder you can usually find a deeper solution: a way to prevent this particular problem from ever happening again.

Over the course of a customer call, your whole job was to actively reduce your empathetic distance to the customer, getting closer and closer to them. At the moment you hang up the phone or end the screen-sharing session, if you’ve done your job right, your point-of-view is very close to that of the customer, which makes you the right person to solve their problem, and exactly the wrong person to decide what to do about it. In short, you care too much. You need time to let the empathetic distance lengthen.

Empathetic distance is pretty inflexible. Once you’ve used your empathic skills on someone, it becomes hard to disentangle yourself from them. (Yes, this sounds very much like it’s lifted directly from Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

And it’s kind of like a concussion. You might think you’re thinking clearly, but your brain has been altered in a deep way and you are not thinking clearly. And unlike a concussion, it’s not a bad thing. It’s great to get yourself into the shoes of the customer. But what’s right for one (possibly angry, possibly impossibly demanding) customer is not necessarily right for the company.

This is why you feel the need to stroll down the hall to engineering and tell them “customers really need this” and why, after you’ve done that a dozen times, engineering stops listening.

At Fog Creek, we address the issue by clearly separating the customer interaction from any work generated by that interaction. The “work” of the customer case is to create a happy customer. Any other work gets its own case in FogBugz. This allows engineering to work on their (usually slower) response cycle without worrying about communication. Once the whole interaction is done, we spin off tasks into a separate “fix-everything-two-ways” queue (“fix it twice” for short) that we ideally address at leisure once we’re done empathizing for the day.

The concept of empathetic distance is not limited to customer service. It also weighs heavily on designers who do user testing or user interviews, but they’ve found ways to abstract the end user without losing the flavor of the interaction. Two methods I’m aware of are affinity mapping and personas. Affinity mapping entails de-personalizing the feedback, breaking it down into single ideas, and looking for patterns in the sea of ideas. No empathy necessary. Personas allow us to empathize with someone who doesn’t actually exist, but whose needs map to the needs of real-world users.

Customer service, alas, has no such luxury. The people we’re tasked with helping are real, messy human beings. We can’t abstract them away. Of course, the compensation is that we get to help actual people, make them happy and productive, and see the results of our work immediately. And that’s a feeling I can empathize with.