Sam Bloomfield, Practice Leader at Telwares for Contact Center Solutions, shares his commentary on a recent Harvard Business Review article, and offers his perspective on institutionalizing empathy in the customer experience:
A recent Harvard Business Review piece [Why Small Companies Are Better at Customer Service] addressed how large companies can learn about productive customer service from small companies. The article’s author related his personal experiences about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ customer service. The author concluded from those experiences that smaller companies have a lot to teach larger ones because the people in smaller companies can “empathize” with the customer and therefore deliver better service. And large companies need to learn to empathize more.
In fact, while empathy helps, it simply is not enough. The cited examples also showed, although not observed explicitly by the author, that smaller companies were able to resolve the problem – produce a satisfactory result for the customer. In the small company examples, the employee did not just empathize, s/he also satisfied our author. Those results I would suggest are the key to effective customer service and experience.
So empathy is fine – up to a point. When a customer service representative does not help you resolve your problem empathy alone loses its currency. Also, large organizations trying to appear more empathetic often devolve into a ‘script’ or canned responses like “I am so sorry” or “I apologize”. We simply don’t trust that they mean it, until we see what they can do for us. You can’t institutionalize caring, trust or empathy because those traits, if they are genuine, are not just words but sincere feelings. I would suggest that this customer in the article was ultimately really satisfied because of the actions taken.
Large companies are usually effective at creating processes that standardize activities for large numbers of interactions with repeating patterns. But they often fail at creating a standard process for establishing a trusting and sincere relationship with their customers, the very foundation upon which rests all successful call center interactions. In short, one cannot create a process to elicit a sincere human emotion. As consumers, we have all had experiences where the customer service agent tells us how ‘sorry’ she is regarding some service or product we don’t like. But more often than not this empathy is not sincere or appears to be insincere, because ‘sorry’ and apologies are, in most cases, only ultimately effective if they are supported by a specific remedy. Often the agent is not able to create that satisfaction because he has not been ‘empowered’ to do so.
So how can organizations that must operate, because of their size, in a disciplined and structured way, develop sincere empathy and really mean it? This usually requires nothing less than a cultural shift that goes to the very core of the organization’s values. Companies like Netflix and Zappos appear to have that culture and it is clearly reflected in the customer service they provide. But creating that kind of culture, particularly for an established organization, can take time and commitment. Sometimes transformation is the only effective way to develop truly empathetic relationships that deliver.
Large organizations must accept the need to recreate their cultures in order to provide the service that customers will value and to organizations to which they can be loyal. Empathy may be good foreplay but it will ultimately leave the customer even less than satisfied if that is all there is.
Posted by Michael V 
