Understanding Empathy
Empathy is the art of seeing the world as someone else sees it. When you have empathy, it means you can understand what a person is feeling in a given moment, and understand why other people's actions made sense to them.
Empathy helps us to communicate our ideas in a way that makes sense to others, and it helps us understand others when they communicate with us. It is one of the foundational building blocks of great social interaction and, quite obviously, powerful stuff.
But how do you get empathy? How do you understand what someone else is feeling, if that isn't happening automatically?
Well, to a certain extent we are all designed to naturally empathize with others. Our brains are wired to experience the emotions that someone else is feeling. That's why we wince when someone hits their hand with a hammer, or why we're more likely to laugh if someone else is laughing too. There's an excellent book called Social Intelligence on this topic which explains all of the research behind this natural empathy.
Unfortunately, only a few people have excellent natural empathy. Our empathic wiring exists on a continuum. Some people have fantastic natural empathy, and can pick up how someone else is feeling just by looking at them. Some people have only a tiny amount of natural empathy, and won't notice that you are angry until you start yelling. Most people lie somewhere in the middle, and understand how someone else is feeling only part of the time.
Fortunately, empathy is part talent and part training. Depending on your starting level of ability, getting better at empathy might require more or less work than someone else---but no matter what your starting point, you can teach yourself to be better at empathy.
How to provide effective Empathy statement in a phone conversation?
In a Call Center, one of the reasons why VOC fails is lack of empathy on the call. Remember that empathy is on the first part of the call, and customer will build their impression on the first 5-10 seconds of your call. Use your imagination if you fail to empathize effectively...
Understanding Empathy:
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another or the capacity to place oneself in another's position.
Defining and understanding empathy is easy, the difficult part is how to express it properly, accordingly, appropriately and timely. Or shall we say, agents are not having difficulties doing that, I think the right word to use is “hesitant” because we’re not used to it. We’re used to the word “sorry” on simple thing even we don’t mean it.
Empathy is different, we just don’t say “sorry for the inconvenience” because customers been getting that statement everytime they vent out during calls. Take note, that’s everytime, unless the agent failed to empathize.
Why do we Empathize?
Some agents think it’s just a part of the call flow, if that’s the case we’ll just include empathy statement to comply with it. NO, we empathize not just to comply, but to let the customer's know that we can understand them, that we can relate to their experiences and that we feel how they feel. Bottom line is, we are also customers like them, having difficulties and inconvenience.
We don’t need to pretend that we understand them because we do, we just need to let them know that we mean it when we say “I understand…”. To do that, we need to invest a little emotion to the empathy statement; and to invest emotion, we need to relate to customer's experience; and to relate, we need to be the customer too. Remember, it should be done in timely manner.
Look at this example:
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Customer: Our cable is out for 3 days now! Fix it or I will terminate my services with you guys!
CAE: Three days?? That’s not fair, I can’t imagine myself missing my favorite programs in 1 day, yours is 3 days… no wonder why you’re upset. I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. Let me have this fixed, first I’ll have your TV working again then I’ll check your account and make up with the inconvenience you have experienced by making sure you’re getting the best out of your services...
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In this example, the agent was able to relate, empathize, assure & the last part can be considered as planting of seed that can be used later to pitch for sale after fixing the issue.
Remember, effective empathy statement is a MUST in every call, the keywords are relate & understand. Deliver it properly and it can be a start of a very good conversation with your customers.
