At a time when the cost-of-living crisis continues to impact individuals and communities, empathy remains an essential topic for organisations striving to enhance customer experience.
To shed light on the importance of empathy and its practical applications, we spoke with Joana de Quintanilha, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester.
With her extensive expertise in CX and a focus on sparking, nurturing, and firing up empathy, Joana shares insights on striking the delicate balance between quantification and humanisation, addressing challenges in making empathy tangible whilst giving practical tools for connecting with customers on a human level.
Despite being a longstanding topic of focus, empathy remains highly relevant and applicable. For CX professionals, striking the right balance between quantification and humanisation can be challenging. In your opinion, what would be the most effective starting point to get the balance right?
There are of course teams who have neither qualitative nor quantitative data to back up their decisions. This type of decision making is what we call simply “careless guesswork.” We recommend starting with the qualitative to uncover the “why” and connect with the human(s). Start with ethnographic work, contextual interviews, focus groups, and the qualitative comments in customer feedback, and then turn to the results of quantitative surveys. A qualitative approach will save you time in the long run. Don’t skip the qualitative research, it helps you acknowledge how your products and services fit into customers’ lives, not the other way around.
Of course, with the right tools and metrics in place you can look for empathy signals: anomalies, trends, spikes, drop-offs, changes in behaviour, etc. Using Quantum Metric session replays, clothing retailer UNTUCKit identified an issue with category filters which allowed them to recoup an estimated $1 million in annual revenue once redesigned.
A financial-services company saw that seventy-five percent of mobile users were getting an error when making a deposit, and rage tapping to try and fix the problem. A session replay showed that there was a terms and conditions box that customers were not able to see. Able to detect that, show the exact experience, show it was happening to 75% of mobile users, and that it was linked to a drop in deposits, they were able to prioritise fixing the problem. That is the power of combining quantitative and qualitative data and research methods at speed.
What challenges do organisations face in pinning down and making empathy tangible?
Empathy is a hard thing to pin down, make tangible, and get right. In fact, only 62% of senior executives say that they can put themselves in their customers’ shoes. Philosopher and author Roman Krznaric defines empathy as “the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions.” Empathy can be cognitive (i.e., understanding another’s perspective) or affective (i.e., a shared emotional response). It involves gaining an understanding of someone’s feelings and perspectives and using that to guide our actions. I think that is where companies struggle, driving action from empathy. Real empathy starts from a place of radical humility. It’s not what you know; it’s what you’re willing to learn and how you “use that understanding to guide your actions” that provide space for empathy.
Empathy isn’t without its perils. It can be speculative when we lack context, selective when we struggle or refuse to put ourselves in someone’s shoes, incapacitating when we over-empathize and fall into empathic distress, dehumanising when we judge, inappropriate when it isn’t applied discerningly and situationally. Which is why we talk about reaching the right point of empathy. It all starts with a spark of empathy (for that we need to connect 1:1 with the individual on a human level), we nurture the embers of empathy, and then kindle the fire to drive empathy at scale. Companies need to do three things to make empathy tangible:
- Spark empathy by aligning on who they’re empathising with, connecting at a human level to uncover how people feel, behave, and think, and provoke debate.
- Nurture empathy by rightsizing through quantification, bringing stakeholders along with audience empathy, and showing your work.
- Fire up empathy by enabling employees to act with empathy at scale (through people, processes, and technology), kindling to engage and diversify, and using it to regenerate to rethink notions of value and push innovation.
How can organisations turn inward and apply audience empathy to bring people along on the empathy journey?
To drive action, we need to bring stakeholders along. The best way to bring people along is to have them participate in customer research and immersion sessions firsthand. When we conduct research, we can’t just provide a read-out and drop it on someone’s desk — we need to turn inward and use audience empathy. One company started using audience personas by level and function to gauge typical mindsets, beliefs, feelings, questions, and concerns. Using insights from interviews, they identified how each employee segment felt about the change effort and planned communications based on whether they were excited, frightened, or frustrated. Excited employees received a communication encouraging them to motivate more reluctant peers.
We also need to show our work. Like working on a mathematical problem at school, this is an essential part of the problem-solving process. One company developed 20 different use cases (e.g., payment confirmations, account and info updates, and real-time system outage notifications). Success in these use cases led to a broader journey solution and the company is now working on broader billing initiatives.
What strategies can organisations employ to enable employees to act on empathy and sustain it as a driving force for innovation?