What is Customer Empathy and Why Is It Important?
Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. We feel empathy when putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes and truly feel with that person. In the business world, top brands need to build customer empathy. More than anything, customer empathy is about stepping back, remembering we are all humans, and understanding the struggles and needs of each customer.
If you want to understand your customer, you need to focus on how you make him or her feel.
Maintaining a tight connection with the customer is easy when your business is small, but with more growth comes less time to spend on connection. Everyone from C-suite executives to the newest hires should understand the concept of customer empathy.
Reasons for Adding Customer Empathy to Your Corporate Culture
Apple’s training manual explicitly details how their staff is to feel empathy toward customers. Their training manual even gives a scripted response which is, “I can appreciate how you feel…” when troubleshooting. A simple sentence like this can set the right trajectory for your corporate culture when it comes to thinking about empathy.
Why should your business connect with customers emotionally? The main uses of customer empathy in your business include:
- Building specific customer personas
- Generating innovation in products or services
- Understanding the voice of the individual customer
- Improving how you understand your customer segments
- Encouraging teamwork on cross-functional teams
Have you ever dealt with a company that just ‘gets it’ when you interact with them? What makes you prefer them?
Questions to Ask for Empathy Generation
When you are building empathy within your team, some people will find it natural while others may not. Just like a muscle, practicing emotional intelligence through a series of questions can lead to serious progress! The right way to focus on customer empathy is through asking these questions:
- What is the customer thinking or feeling (about your company and their own values)?
- What is the customer seeing (from other companies, in the stores)?
- What is the customer saying or doing (toward others and online)?
- What is the customer hearing (from friends, people online, people at work)?
Spend Time with Your Top Customers
Your early adopters and top customers are full of information they just want to share with you. These customers spend time using your product, so why not learn how they feel about it? Speaking to them directly might engage them further. Even monitoring parts like average time used, feature usage, average retention rate, and time of day can serve as your initial step. Once you identify patterns, you can then ask, “why?” An engaged user is the ideal!
The biggest trick is to be an actual user of your own products or services for a complete understanding. Companies like Adobe encourage this with their employees.
Add Customer Empathy to Your Culture Today
Every person has felt a strong sense of community at least once in their lifetime. In that moment, you feel connected with those around you both physically and mentally. This is the ultimate empathetic experience. If you are able to generate a sense of community through empathy with your customers, business will boom.
Kapiche was built for companies who want to empathize with their customers at scale. Our multi-structured analytics software helps companies truly understand what their customers are trying to tell them. Learn more at kapiche.com.
