Have we missed the point of empathy in CX?
Empathy in customer service doesn’t always look the way we expect. Sometimes it wears a disguise.
A few years ago, I bought my daughter a new mobile phone for Christmas. She planned to make a 3-hour drive, mostly through rural areas, to visit her cousins the next morning. We needed to get the phone working before she pulled out of the driveway.
But nothing we tried did the trick. So, late in the afternoon on Christmas day, we needed customer support.
Our service provider’s website offered two options, phone or chat. I hate chat for support, but the wait time for a phone call was more than I could commit to while getting ready for a family dinner. So, I fired up the chat and asked for help. At first, I wasn’t sure whether it was a bot or a human. I didn’t care either way as long as we got the phone working. Over nearly two hours, I alternated between the chat and my family. And in the end, the problem was fixed.
What does empathy actually look like in customer experience?
I don’t recall the agent (human after all) saying anything particularly compassionate. And yet, this was one of the most empathetic customer service experiences I’ve ever had. Here’s why:
- The interaction resolved my problem on my schedule without requiring a call or visit to the store.
- I had a clear choice between phone and chat and knew the current wait times.
- I got the problem resolved without missing Christmas dinner with my family.
The bottom line is that my service provider gave me options for how to engage and a convenient way to get what I needed.
This is how empathy sometimes wears a disguise. It masquerades as efficiency, convenience, and ease.
In an industry hyper-focused on the emotional side of empathy, we too often overlook this crucial practical side. But we shouldn’t. It matters to customers, a lot.
- 93% of customers expect their issue to be resolved on the first call
- 62% of customers would prefer to “hand out parking tickets” than wait in an automated phone tree for service or have to repeat themselves multiple times to different team members
- 80% of American consumers say efficiency is the most important factor in the customer experience, and more than half say it’s worth paying more for
The often-overlooked practical side of empathy in CX
In recent years, the CX industry has focused intently on empathy. Businesses spend time and resources to upskill agents on active listening, emotional intelligence, and expressing care and compassion. They even provide lists of empathetic phrases their agents can use. And a growing number of contact centers use AI to detect customer sentiment throughout each interaction. All of that is great. It reminds the agents that customers are human, too, and they need to hear that someone cares about their problem.
Validating a customer’s feelings is an important component of putting empathy into practice. But it’s only one component.
Caring alone doesn’t resolve a customer’s issue, and it doesn’t automatically make the process of reaching a resolution easy or convenient.
Long wait times, multiple interactions, and chatbot failures are not empathetic. Many CX leaders view those points of friction through the lens of contact center efficiency with metrics like transfer rates and digital containment. But friction also increases customer effort, which is an important component of empathy in CX. And too many contact centers deliver experiences that require a lot of customer effort – ineffective self-service, complicated IVR menus, disconnected channels, and more. An agent who says they understand your frustration can’t erase all that effort and wasted time.
Empathy in CX strategy: Are we making it too complicated?
The concept of empathy is somewhat vague and squishy, so it’s not surprising that CX leaders sometimes convert it into something else when crafting CX strategy. The problem is, they often convert empathy into the equally vague concept of customer-centricity. What does that mean? Keeping the customer front and center at all times, sure – but how? It isn’t always clear how centering the customer translates into actions and processes for the contact center to follow.
The vague nature of both empathy and customer-centricity tends to give rise to complex frameworks that attempt to make the strategy more concrete. For example, a framework might categorize elements in the CX ecosystem into systems of listening, understanding, action, and learning. Those frameworks can help shape perspectives within your business, but they still require additional translation to make them actionable for your frontline CX team.
Here’s a simpler approach. Embedding empathy into your CX strategy means consistently aiming to do these four things:
- Resolve the customer’s issue in the first interaction.
- Take up as little of the customer’s time as possible.
- Make the entire process easy and convenient.
- Treat your customers and employees like the human beings they are.
Getting to the point of empathy with generative AI
In contact centers, early AI implementations increased efficiency, but employees felt the impact more than customers. In some cases, AI deployments actually increased frustration by raising customers’ hopes with big promises of faster, more convenient service that didn’t ever materialize. Consider chatbots. Even with improved language processing, bots can’t take action to resolve a customer’s issue. So, they require time and effort from the customer but often, can’t truly help. When it comes to the practical side of empathy, they fail to deliver.
But that was then, and this is now. The technology has matured, and current implementations of generative AI are improving contact centers’ performance on both the emotional and practical sides of empathy. AI solutions increasingly take over repetitive and time-consuming tasks, freeing agents to focus more effectively on the customers they’re serving. This shift makes space to engage with more empathy across the board.
Customer-facing AI agents will generate a larger, even seismic, shift in how empathy is embedded into customer experiences. Generative AI agents can listen, understand, problem-solve, and take action to resolve customers’ issues. That ticks all the empathy boxes for me. This massive leap forward lays the groundwork for CX leaders to shift the emphasis of their AI investments toward solutions that do more than talk in a natural way.
Practical empathy that’s just a chat or call away
That Christmas a few years ago when I needed customer service, I didn’t care whether I chatted with a human or AI. I just wanted my problem resolved before my daughter left town, preferably without having to call or visit the store the next day. I got lucky that time. My service provider had agents available. But we all know that’s not always the case. With a generative AI agent ready to respond 24/7/365, the customer’s luck never runs out. Effective, efficient, and convenient service will always be just a call or chat away. For me, that’s the part of empathy in CX that too many businesses are missing today. But I suspect that’s about to change.