Customer Service: Does Our Experience Dull Our Empathy?
by Kate Nasser | 8 Comments »
Former customer service agents and tech support reps often have empathy for customer service and technical support teams. They remember the pressure and are considerate.
It begs the question: Why do many customer service and tech support agents forget the experience of being a customer?
Experience should make it easier to give empathy, right?
Or Does Experience Dull Empathy?
Experience and knowledge can blind customer service agents and tech support reps to customers’ …
- Emotions of needing help
- Fear of not knowing
- Frustration of being delayed in lengthy procedures
- Impatience with being routed and transferred
- Anger at being trapped in the maze of customer support
- Vulnerability of having to trust others with their success
Experience and knowledge deliver confidence and a sense of control — the very things that lower fear and vulnerability. Unfortunately for some agents and reps this reduction in vulnerability also dulls their empathy.
And the saga isn’t over yet. When you add the pressure of customer service work to the picture, it often makes agents and reps even less empathetic to customers.
Consider: When you are under incredible pressure do you care less about other things that normally bug you? You just want to get rid of the big pressure so you minimize or overlook everything else?
YET … to the customer the things you want them to overlook still matter!
The best agents and reps overcome the dulling effects of experience and pressure by:
- Being aware of how they feel outside of work when they are customers.
- Repeating the following before each shift, one call at a time! This focus delivers empathy.
- Picturing the customer relaxing as their reassuring words manage customers’ emotions and experience meets customers’ requests and solves problems.
- Embracing the true role of service and support — to make life easier for the customer and/or get them productive again!
Agents — abandon the myth that your job is simply to solve the problem. Your job is to deliver a wonderful experience while solving the problem.
Turn your experience into a channel of empathy and an easy win for each and every customer!
From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™
Related Posts:
Best CSRs See Key Link in Chain, Not Life in Chains
Best CSRs Beat Attribution Error in Customer Service
©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, workshops, and keynotes on customer service experience, teamwork, and leading change. She turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.
Great article, Kate
This is such an important topic and one so many companies and customer service professionals get wrong. Empathy is a mental exercise as you point out and it does require effort–but it is extremely useful and makes the investment of effort worth-while to both customer and employee. If I may, here’s an article I wrote about an empathy exercise your readers might find helpful as well:
How To Test Your Empathy: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-squeaky-wheel/201103/how-test-your-empathy
Great job!
Guy
Many thanks Guy. It truly is critical for a great customer experience.
And grateful for the link you provided!
Kate
Good article Kate, thanks for sharing.
I always say you can teach people company policies, product features and functionality and so on, but you can’t teach them empathy. Careful hiring of customer service staff with the right personality is key to creating great service experiences. But all good intentions will be for nothing if the staff are not empowered to make decisions to resolve potential issues for customers in exceptional ways. Company policies have to be empathic as well.
Cheers Kate.
David,
Love your succinct addition — “Company policies have to be empathetic as well.” Bravo and thanks for lending your perspective to this discussion.
Best wishes,
Kate
Hi Kate,
Love the article, very thought provoking.
I would endorse the comments made earlier by Guy and David and would add that leadership and management in an organisation must also promote and support an empathetic culture. It becomes even more challenging for an individual to empathise with customers if the organisation is placing pressures upon them to behave differently. Interestingly, I have met lots of individuals who, in spite of opposing pressures, have the personality and determination to resist internal pressures, and manage to genuinely put themselves in the customer’s shoes. These are indeed the real shining gems of customer service.
Thanks for sharing.
John
Enjoyed reading this – thanks Kate!
This got me thinking about some of bad practices/processes/policies initiated by companies that prevent their staff from really making an empathetic connection with a customer. I encountered one organisation recently, for example, that wanted staff to engage in 4 web chats at a time – of course, the multi-tasking itself would be challenging enough but then connecting with the emotions in each chat session? No way…! Too often, companies do not give staff the time to consider the emotions of the customer – therefore, the employee will deal with the call concerned more about their own emotions and closing the call rather than investing the effort required to use empathy to really resolve the concerns raised in the call.
You make some really great, relevant points! This is well worth sharing with the agent side of our business, too! Thanks for the great post!
[...] skills coach Kate Nasser notes in her blog Customer Service: Does Our Experience Dull Our Sense of Empathy?, “Experience and knowledge can blind customer service agents and tech support reps to [...]