What is a customer empathy?
Customer Empathy is the capacity to perceive things through the eyes of the consumer. Empathy in customer service refers to the ability to put yourself in the client’s shoes and comprehend their concerns. A company can understand what customers feel when they utilize its products or services.
Whether a client’s experience is positive, negative, or in the middle, empathy aids in the development of trust and an emotional bond between the customer and the organization. For example, it can assist a customer service representative deal with an angry customer. On the other hand, empathy isn’t simply crucial in customer-facing positions or when customers’ emotions are running high. Instead, customer empathy is essential in all areas of a business.
To be customer-centric, everyone in the organization, from product managers to content marketers, must consider everything they do from the customer’s perspective. Building customer empathy across an organization may result in better goods, customer experience, and customer happiness.
The Importance Of Customer Empathy
When developing a new product, service, or brand, it is critical to consider the target market’s needs. Developing an understanding of your target users — seeing the world through their eyes and comprehending how your company fits into their life — is the most fundamental approach to ensuring that you deliver on your promise of value.
Therefore, customer empathy is also a highly strategic commercial tool. If you can draw in a buyer by designing a product of actual value to them daily, you’ve got a recipe for success.
The Benefits Of Customer Empathy
Customer empathy can help define a company’s products or services and its approach to marketing, training, or industry leadership. This can be a good thing. The products or services a company provides must effectively solve customers’ problems. Otherwise, customers will leave for competitors who understand them better (in other words, competitors who have more empathy for the customer experience).
In a big, confusing world, the line is also blurred between what customers want transactionally and what they expect as human beings. Companies are now expected to act as agents of change.
How To Employ Customer Empathy
To be empathic, you must consider your consumers to be actual people.
Understanding who they are, where they come from, why they are required to accomplish a specific activity, what hurdles they may encounter and how that may make them feel are all important considerations.
To better understand and sympathize with your target audience, there are a variety of models and exercises to choose from.
User Persona
A user persona is much more than a collection of demographic data; it is a semi-fictional representation of the individual you are trying to reach with your product, brand, or service.
True, you will include facts such as gender, age, life stage, income, location, and so on in your user persona — but these specifics will not be enough to elicit empathy. To give your user persona more meaning, you need also evaluate who this individual is in real life. Not as a representative of a user group but as an individual.
Consider their life goals, who they admire, what they enjoy doing in their spare time, what they do for a living, and why they do it. Understanding their difficulties allows you to begin to put yourself in their shoes and travel through life with them. This is also a fantastic starting point for new product development. If you believe your target customer has a problem that needs to be solved, how could your company assist them in solving it?
You may wish to provide this individual with a name and a photograph so that you can recognize them; the more personal you can be with them, the simpler it will be for you to empathize with them.
Creating a map of customer empathy
Customer empathy maps are excellent tools for collecting information when a user persona is too loosely defined.
Customer Empathy – How To Get Started
Simple enough, take an A1 sheet of paper and divide it into six quadrants like follows:
– What are the user’s perceptions and emotions?
– What exactly do and say they do?
– What is it that they are hearing?
– What exactly do they see?
– What exactly are the user’s aches and pains?
– And what are the potential benefits for the user?
Then, in the center, place a photograph of your target user, and work your way around the map, filling in the blanks as you go, all within the framework of your product region.
For example, if you are designing an app to assist patients in scheduling doctor’s visits, you will consider the user’s healthcare experience.
Don’t rush through this exercise; the more time you spend putting yourself in the shoes of your users, the more insightful your learnings will be. It is recommended that you spend a significant amount of time in the ‘thinking and feeling’ section of the map because this is where you will investigate the internal conversation of your target user. What is it that they think they are not saying out loud?
“I don’t think it’s fair that I constantly show up for my appointments yet still have to wait weeks to be seen,” you might say in the context of healthcare. Despite this, some people cancel at the last minute.”
After learning from this experience, you’ve discovered an issue — patients waiting weeks to be seen — and a potential solution — using the app to alert patients of last-minute cancellations to see if they can fill the resulting vacancy.
Talking to customers through user research is the most thorough method of gaining customer empathy. You could use focus groups, one-on-one interviews, or even internet surveys to gather information. In the pursuit of more excellent knowledge, qualitative and open-ended questioning should always be preferred over data-driven quantitative procedures, according to our experience.
Customer advisory boards can also assist you in uncovering sympathetic insights from your customers. On the other hand, individual sessions are unbeatable when it comes to communicating with users personally.
