Stacey Seronick
Abstract and Introduction
Abstract
Your bottom line depends on so many things, but if your brand is trusted, studies show your bottom line is improved exponentially. Building that trust takes creating a holistic approach to your customer’s experience with your brand, and the best way to achieve this is to build empathy into your business culture. Empathy for your customers begins with empathy within and among your teams and this book will show a path for businesses and non-profits small and large to engage the empathy lens for a solid return on time and investment.
Introduction
The ability to recognize the emotions of another person by reading their facial expressions, and verbal and non-verbal cues is a highly sought-after skill in the workplace. Being able to pick up on these unspoken shifts in the mood or tone of a room can be the key to knowing exactly when and how to sell your ideas to maximize your chances of hearing “Yes.” Being able to read people like this is called Emotional Intelligence (EI) or Emotional Quotient (EQ) and it can be difficult to screen for this talent in a job interview without taking a somewhat circuitous track. For this reason, it can be hard to find an employee who not only has a high EQ, but also possesses the self-awareness to use it in beneficial ways at work. Assuming your team is not all a bunch of empathetic rock stars already, this book aims to take you through the process of recognizing what empathy is, why it’s valuable in business – both internally and externally – and how to build a culture, whether enterprise-wide or within your division, of a truly customer-focused product or service. Taking the time to train your team members on EQ and empathy will be just the beginning of building your Empathy Circle. The Empathy Circle then gets extended to your users (internal) and customers (external). The return on your investment for taking the time and effort to do this will be tangible and immense, as what you will be helping to achieve in the eyes of your users and customers is a bond of trust. The empathy that you build in your team members will be woven into the fabric of your business culture, building a stronger sense of reliance, understanding and trust between your own teams and individual team members. This will, in turn, bleed into the very products and services you make and offer your customers and users. That empathy will be palpable to your users and will come across as a message of “You can trust us, we understand you.” That message – “we understand you” is one of the most powerful you can project – it is an emotional statement that very much plays upon the human desire to be heard and understood. And at the end of the day, if you have convinced your customers that they are being heard, they are understood, and someone (presumably your business) is looking out for their best interests, then you have established a customer for life.
What is Empathy? Why Is This so Important?
Empathy is one of the most powerful gifts a person can bestow on another – it is the feeling of, and assurance that, you understand what they’re going through. Empathy differs from sympathy in that it doesn’t look to fix the problem and it doesn’t look to add company to misery – feeling empathy for another person is not as simple as sympathizing with them. Empathy takes thought, and a willingness to actually explore the world through the eyes and in the shoes of another person. Often, this involves stepping way out of your comfort zone in order to really get “inside the head” of another person. Talented actors, copywriters, and experience designers all rely heavily on an innate or well-developed sense of empathy. However, all professions could stand a little injection of empathy, especially since it really isn’t that difficult, in most cases, to flex that muscle enough to make you want to understand more. When you empathize with a person, it becomes clearer to you how this person prefers to be treated, what motivates them, and what makes them smile (or cringe). When you build this understanding into your relationship with that individual then they become easier to work with, easier to understand, and easier to convince (sell) of your point of view (or service or product).
The empathy circle begins internally with your own team mates. Whether you are the CEO, Founder, a manager, or a leader – the circle may begin with you and your immediate team, but to be most effective, it must extend in all directions to all other spokes (teams, team members) on the wheel, before or in tandem with the empathy circle that you extend to your customers and users.
Building empathy for your customer or user can prove to be much more difficult, depending on who that person is. Particularly if you work in the Business-to-Business (B2B) sector, where your customers are corporations, feeling empathy for your customers can be trying. Corporations don’t have feelings and emotions and experiences like individual people do, but they are made up of people, just like you and I. Or, more likely, nothing like you and I – and that’s why establishing empathy for those individuals is so important, as you do not “naturally” think and act just like all of your users or customers. You may be laughing in your head at the ridiculousness of that statement, and you would be right. No two people are exactly alike, and no two users will engage with your product or service in exactly the same way for exactly the same reasons. This is why personas are created, and while that will be covered in greater detail later on, it is important to know now that there are methods for distilling your tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, or billions of users into a more manageable, smaller collection of archetypes – composites of actual users, based on research and feedback. It is these archetypes which we will learn to build empathy for; even if you work in a business-to-consumer (B2C) business, you will be building empathy for archetypes, not the actual countless users. That’s just asking too much!