Empathy - The Number One Skill — Almohannad Alsbeai

Introduction

Everyone has heard the saying “walk in the customer’s shoes” — but many don’t fully grasp what it means or what its purpose is. Today’s article is about the most important skill or personality trait for elevating the human experience — whether of a customer, employee, patient, student, or beneficiary of any public or private service.

What Is Empathy?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines empathy as the ability to share another person’s feelings or experience by imagining how their situation would feel. Merriam-Webster gives a more comprehensive definition: understanding, awareness, sensitivity to, and feeling of the thoughts and feelings of another person (absent or unknown), past or present, without being directly or explicitly told by that person of their feelings, thoughts, or experience. (Definitions translated freely.)

What Is the Difference Between Empathy and Sympathy?

The conflation between empathy and sympathy is very common. Empathy means understanding the person’s situation and understanding their feelings (as if you were the one going through the situation). Sympathy is simply feeling pity or sorrow for what someone is going through — without feeling their emotions or understanding their needs. Sympathy usually leads to no change; empathy and the shared resonance it creates push the empathetic person to take up the other’s cause and defend them as if it were their own.

An Example: Yaman vs Yasar (Fictional Characters)

Yaman has high empathy, unlike Yasar. Both encountered a colleague (a new graduate) being battered by the waves of real working life — almost collapsing in his first job. Yasar will look at him with pity and perhaps toss him a passing line: “Everything bitter will pass… Thank God you have a job; others are unemployed,” and walk on. Yaman, on the other hand, will take him by the hand and say: “I was once in your place and I know how hard work life is, especially in the beginning.” He’ll then sit with him periodically and discuss the challenges he’s facing (without belittling or judging anything he hears) — he is always first to find excuses for him. Yaman plays a mentoring role: he asks questions without giving direct answers, wanting the colleague to reach the solution himself so he regains his confidence and builds his work stamina. There’s a stark difference between what Yaman offered and what Yasar offered. Yaman will make the new graduate a personal project, making him feel he believes in him and in his abilities more than the graduate himself does — until that becomes reality. Then Yaman is content. Yaman may listen to a story the new graduate has already told him before, but pretends to hear it for the first time and gives the same reactions. Yasar would interrupt and tell him he’s shared the same story before. Yaman won’t tire of the graduate’s negative emotions (he’s ultimately a human being — a bundle of feelings). Yasar will simply categorize him and avoid him.

What Does It Mean to Have High Empathy?

High empathy means a strong ability to recognize and understand others’ emotions and to imagine the world from their personal perspective. Understanding their emotions doesn’t necessarily mean showing pity — it means understanding the needs. It also means listening more (a desire to understand the other party’s motives) — listening not only to spoken words but to body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions; understanding viewpoints and respecting them despite disagreement. An empathetic person can express others’ feelings better than they can themselves — and that means others are drawn to talk with them because they help them describe their emotions more accurately. These traits are very important in customer experience because they give the person who has them the ability to build emotional bonds with those around them. That makes them earn trust faster, which lets them break through organizational silos with their relationships and create the desired change.

The empathetic are free of prejudice and far from quick assumptions or conclusions. They search for the motivations of those around them to create them, ask dozens of questions, and communicate through multiple channels (most importantly, face-to-face) to understand — building greater harmony with those around them and wider common ground. The empathetic see difference as a blessing and a balance.

Can Empathy Be Developed?

Some research suggests that prison guards, war criminals, and all who harm humanity have almost no empathy — they are even selected on that basis (may God keep them far from your path). Other research indicates empathy is a skill children acquire in their early years. The question is: can this skill be developed? The answer is yes — but the opportunity to develop it for those who partially possess it is much higher than for those who lack it entirely. And the opportunity to develop it in children is far greater than in adults.

How Can You Develop Empathy?

You can’t walk in your customer’s shoes unless you take off your own.

I heard the quote above from Mr. Hany Mokhtar nearly five years ago, when he was generously sharing from his deep knowledge in customer experience.

The shoe may be tight and uncomfortable, or have a high heel that makes you fall on your face — but as the quote suggests, there’s something you must do to learn. I mean practice.

Practice is much easier than you might expect. You have a website or a mobile app — gather your employees and ask them to perform certain tasks (registration, for example), and you’ll be shocked by the volume of feedback on user experience and the difficulty of navigating the site or using the app. You did nothing more than walk in the customer’s shoes. Forget the text scattered in your process documents and company policies — at the end of the day, they’re just ink on paper unless you step into the field and live what your customer lives.

So, to answer briefly how to develop empathy:

Practice is the best tactic. Ask your employees to live the customer/employee experience themselves.
Observation. Ask your employees to go to the field and watch what happens. Many companies have head-office employees spend a few days on the front line where customer interaction takes place, or listen to and talk with customers in the contact center, before starting their roles at HQ.
Storytelling. Stories impact people far more than theoretical sermons and statistical reports. Example: telling the customer journey map as a story, with its highs and lows.
Volunteering. Encourage employees to engage in community volunteer programs.
Education. Educate them on the importance of this skill and its impact on customers, colleagues, and society as a whole.

Management by Walking Around (MBWA)

No one can reach solutions unless the problem crystallizes in their head. Walking-in-the-customer’s-shoes exercises of every kind are very useful in helping stakeholders crystallize problems in their minds — and thereby reach effective solutions.

This philosophy is believed to have been pioneered by Walt Disney, who began it in 1950. Its message, in short: don’t sit behind your desk and expect excellence. You and your employees must go into the field. You’ll feel the responsibility on your shoulders. He issued a directive for employees to eat their lunch in Disneyland to mingle with customers and observe firsthand, taking notes on what they liked and didn’t like, what they saw working as expected, and what wasn’t. Source: page 248 of The Experience: The 5 Principles of Disney Service and Relationship Excellence.

Often organization leaders aren’t convinced there’s a problem until they see it with their own eyes. The main purpose of get-out-of-the-office exercises and living the customer’s experience is for conviction to come from the depths of their being. When they go through the same problems customers go through, they’ll empathize with them and acknowledge that there are problems that need solving.

Other leaders are aware of the problems but, like an ostrich, bury their heads in the sand — or shove the problems under the rug so the scene looks clean to shareholders. Eventually pressure builds when everyone starts speaking with the customer’s voice and playing the defense attorney role, and these people are forced either to change or to leave the scene entirely.

GENBA | 現場

Another well-known walking-in-the-customer’s-shoes exercise is GENBA (also written as Gemba), from the Japanese management school. Toyota was one of the biggest adopters. The idea, briefly: it’s important for company leaders to go to the field to see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears what’s happening on the ground — instead of theorizing from afar (from their offices). Going to the field helps you empathize with both customers and employees and gain insights about them — to know what they think and feel. Practitioners of this approach believe that all problems are visible, and the best ideas and CX improvement initiatives will come from going to the field.

Surveys and market research aren’t enough. No matter how hard you try and how much you spend, you won’t be able to reach a sample that represents the entire population in a truly realistic way, for several reasons I can’t get into here. Similarly, no matter how effective and multi-channel your complaint management is, you’ll only get 5% of the actual problems at best — because only 1 in 20 people complain. The rest don’t prefer to express their frustration to you, but to their peers, relatives, and friends, or they simply move to your competitors without giving you any chance. That’s why you must go into the field, among them, to practice empathy. Show your interest — and you’ll discover many insights and inspiration.

In Closing

If you want your company to have a human-centered culture, you need to hire people with high empathy — because those are the ones who will turn this culture from theory into tangible practice. The empathetic don’t simply repeat “put yourself in the customer’s shoes” — they take off their own and put on the customer’s, suffering pain if it’s too tight or falling on their face if it’s too big (a metaphor). Their impact extends to colleagues, so the work environment becomes healthy and based on collaboration, sharing, and team spirit. One way I know to assess empathy is the Strength Finder test from Gallup, which ranks strengths in the test result. If empathy is among the top five strengths, don’t hesitate to hire that person — especially in customer-facing roles or in CX. Another resource for those who want to dig deeper into empathy tests: this treasure.

Related concepts: Moments That Matter, Customer Journey Mapping, Voice of Customer (VoC).

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