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Customer empathy is the best way to better customer service.
December 19, 2007
This article originally published in Retail Customer Experience magazine, Jan. 2008.
Spanish-speaking shoppers pass a half dozen other cell-phone stores to go to the Cricket Wireless store in Clarksville, Ind. Why? They know two of the sales agents speak Spanish and will deal with them fairly.Owner Tim Agee sees hiring bilingual sales reps as one of the many steps he's taken to help himself and his employees see the world through their customers' eyes.
Savvy retailers like Agee know that old-fashioned customer service is dead. Welcome to the new world of customer empathy.
Creating a culture that puts employees in the customer's shoes is the challenge for companies who want to create sustainable brands that weather economic downturns and changing fads. The retail landscape is littered with the empty stores of retailers who let the focus slip from providing a memorable experience.
The Disney Institute found that more than two-thirds of customers leave a company because of the perception of employee indifference. If your employees can't solve problems for their customers, the customers most likely will shop at a store where the front-line employees are given free rein to meet their needs.
Forget about training everyone to follow a script. Despite — or perhaps because of — their familiarity with text messaging and social networking Web sites, young people crave authenticity. Repetitively plugging their name into a canned response is a sure way to lose not only that customer but also every one of their MySpace friends.
Whether word spreads through cyberspace or by old-fashioned word of mouth, a retailer's reputation for, or lack of, empathy will spread faster than any advertising message.
"Empathy is the understanding that customers really don't want to be there and they want to get in and out, or they are helpless and need some help." — Ross Shafer, customer empathy consultant |
What is empathy?
Simply put, empathy is the act of putting yourself in the other person's shoes or seeing a situation from the other person's perspective. For Agee, empathy means understanding that selecting a phone and a service plan can be intimidating for customers whose first language is Spanish.
For another good example, former talk show host and customer empathy consultant Ross Shafer looks no further than his mentor, Johnny Carson, the former host of the "Tonight Show."
"Johnny said, 'Never try to be the best guest on your own show; the show is about the guest,'" Shafer recalled. "If you're the clerk in a store, you're not the superstar; you're the person who needs to help the customer."
Shafer, author of "The Customer Shouts Back," cautions that empathy is different from 20th-century concepts of customer service. It's more than offering a forced smile and a perfunctory handshake.
"The biggest difference is the customer's point of view," he said. "In this situation, the only person that matters is the other person. What employees have to do, from the minute they clock in to the time they leave is — and this is horrifying for them to hear — stop thinking about themselves."
At Arkansas Children's Hospital in Little Rock, customer empathy comes from reminding all employees, from the custodial staff to the physicians, that patients and their families are there only because a child has suffered an illness or an accident.
"We help our staff understand that we see people at their rawest edge, that everyone won't be using their country club manners when they get here," said Scott Gordon, executive vice president for the hospital, the only children's hospital in the state.
Gordon and the hospital staff began working with the Disney Institute in 2002, and more than 60 employees have gone through training sessions that help other companies implement some the best practices that have made Disney's parks and resorts so popular with travelers.
The tectonic shift in customer relations can be seen in the passing of a long-held cliché: The customer is always right. Shafer said successful retailers realize that although the customer may or may not always be right, the customer always is vulnerable.
"Empathy is the understanding that customers really don't want to be there and they want to get in and out, or they are helpless and need some help," Shafer said. "There's no such thing as loyalty. The only thing that works is when customers feel an emotional connection to somebody in that store or have an overall good feeling for that store."
Can empathy be taught?
Fortunately, it doesn't take a staff of Dr. Phil wannabes to create a customer-empathy culture.
"The act of putting yourself in someone else's shoes is not a sophisticated emotional state of being," said Traci Entel, principal with Katzenbach Partners and one of the authors of "The Empathy Engine," a study of top customer-oriented companies. "While some people have this skill naturally, it is a trainable skill."
A customer-empathy culture does not necessarily mean the staff has to be touchy-feely and become the customer's best friend. An empathetic culture understands what the customer expects from the retail interaction.
"Part of empathy is understanding what the customer wants," Entel said. "Empathy can be delivering fast service when people come in to a fast-food restaurant. They don't necessarily expect the kind of service they might get in a Four Seasons hotel. Meeting a customer's expectation of what they come in for is excellent service."
Companies that have made the transition from a customer service outlook to a deeper customer empathy approach have found that it takes a cultural change in the organization. Like any major change, a commitment to customer empathy will wither and die without leadership from the top, whether it's the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or the owner of a bicycle shop. It's not an overnight shift, and it will require input from all levels of the organization, particularly those in daily contact with the customer.
The transformation requires a clear understanding of what an ideal customer experience looks and feels like.
"We find that many organizations have not done the work to think about what it is they want their customers to be saying or doing if the experience were ideal," said Bruce Jones, programming director for the Disney Institute.
Visualizing that process often uncovers barriers that frontline employees know all too well, whether it's a parsimonious return policy or technology problems that slow transactions. The thought of improving the customer experience often seems like a daunting task, but breaking the job into smaller tasks makes it easier. "Once you see the barriers, they become obstacles to be overcome and the job becomes more defined," Jones said.
Where does empathy begin?
Interestingly, experts said that foundation for a culture that genuinely puts customers first develops from the inside out, starting with how the company treats its employees.
"A company can't act one way to its customers and a different way to the employees," Shafer said. "In this emotional economy, people work at a place for a long time because they feel loved by the people they work with."
Employees quickly can tell whether customer empathy will be the new mode for the company or just another flavor of the month.
"Companies intellectually buy into empathy," Shafer added, "but they apply it as a Band-Aid and it doesn't work. Employees can tell when a culture is authentic [and] whether the management feels that way at the front office."
Companies that see front-line employees as an expense rather than an asset shoehorn in training whenever they can make time for it. Retailers with a commitment to empathy make training an integral part of the employee experience.
"Invest in the person that comes to work each day, because then the employees will in turn invest in the
customer," Entel said. "They will be more motivated if they feel like their manager cares about them."
L A S T Service Recovery Standard The Arkansas Children's Hospital trains employees to use this approach when actions don't meet a customer's expectations. L listen A apologize S solve T thank Source: Arkansas Children's Hospital |
When a retailer wants to improve sales or customer retention, it's all too easy to focus on the wrong things, such as store fixtures and products. Sure, those things always are part of the mix, but employee satisfaction is the most important part of the equation.
Alex Frankel, author of "Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee," spent two years working in retail. At one struggling clothing retailer, he saw how an emphasis on store design overshadowed other problems.
"It was my experience that [the store] seemed to be aiming primarily at altering its premises without trying to ameliorate the employees' relationship to the company or the products being sold," Frankel said. "As an employee, I felt we were not so well trained and the products seemed uninspired, so I would have focused on those things first."
How does empathy spread?
Customer empathy produces "wow" moments, those satisfying experiences that customers share with friends. Internally, management should seek and share those same stories to spread the culture of empathy. Luxury retailer Nordstrom is widely known for its customer-empathy culture and employee dedication to service. For instance, in Alaska the store accepted a return of truck tires from a customer who bought them at the store that previously occupied Nordstrom's space in the mall.
Entel recommends companies share those stories through whatever channels are available, from start-of-shift meetings to closed-circuit TV shows.
"Management has to set standards around the values that each company wants to bring forward," Entel said. "Storytelling is a powerful way to set out the framework."
Customers will respond to "wow" moments, as well. Disney invests heavily in rides and attractions at its theme parks, but it's the people who receive the rave reviews.
"Disney spent $100 million on the Tower of Terror, but the letters we get are about the customers' commitment to our products and service because of the interaction with our cast members," Jones said.
Of course, it helps to start by hiring people who are naturally empathetic. Agee asks applicants how they handled their worst experience with a customer. "Most of them don't have much control, but I like to hear that they met with their manager and worked it out," he said.
Especially for today's front-line employees, putting someone else's needs first is a foreign concept, but it can be learned with practice.
"You don't tell people, 'From today forward you'll be a customer-empathy expert,'" Shafer said. "They don't know how to do that. You have to spend time with them and practice the conversations."In his training sessions, Shafer leads retail employees in asking questions without referring to themselves and, of course, answering a cell phone or texting is absolutely taboo. "We train people to be curious about people," he said.
Does empathy work?
With repetition, exhibiting customer empathy becomes habit. But like getting to Carnegie Hall, it takes practice, practice, practice.
"The reality was, some of our empathy was serendipitous," said Gordon of the Arkansas Children's Hospital. "Now we do it more deliberately."
Eventually, employees catch on and put empathy into daily practice, based on the values and training they receive. On the job, Frankel put his empathy training to work.
"At Starbucks, I remember seeing a couple sitting deep in conversation waiting for their coffee to be ready," he said. "Instead of yelling out their names I took their orders directly to their table and they were incredibly happy and thankful. Experiencing reactions like that did not necessarily come from any training, but from on-the-job experiences."
The best customer-empathy experiences come from employees who understand their company's values and from management that allows employees the leeway to make decisions for the customers' best interest. Despite the spread of technology into nearly every aspect of the retail environment, there's no substitute for an employee who cares about the customer.
"The most important piece of hardware we have is the human brain, and that's where the magic comes in," said Disney's Jones.
Gary Wollenhaupt is a freelance writer and regular contributer.
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