What are some of the skills and tools that you use to empathize with customers and understand their needs?

Most people “hear out” clients but to practice “active listening” is a gift. When you listen, you take things in the client’s perspective not just hearing them vent. You take things in and understand to find solutions or even just to learn from the situation to prevent from happening again.

This is interesting, and important! It seems to me that there are two dimensions/kinds of interaction with other people based on transactions or relationships. The oft quoted stages of development of any interaction are: know, like, trust. These are potentially informative, but primarily transactional. Might I suggest a different, and more relationship-oriented, sequence of stages: aware, care, share. These might replace the transaction-oriented stages, but, more likely, might apply orthogonally. ??♂?

Listening for understanding is key. The purpose of active listening is to show not that you've heard the customer, but that you've understood them. In communicating this understanding (not just repeating what they've said), you are also more likely to uncover even more insights above the initial answers they've provided.

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is being able to perceive, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions both by yourself and your clients. Not everyone can easily empathise but through experience, learning to develop and practice this skill over time, EI can potentially help improve good customer service. One of the secrets of being good natured .

We must remember when doing any empathy work for customer research, design thinking, etc. that our emotions are irrelevant and we must tune down our emotions and tune into the emotions of others, validate them, and respond appropriately. In research this is to record, in customer service this is to acknowledge, sympathize and assist.

Many organizations underinvest in customer research, either because they don’t know how to do it or because they don’t want to spend the money to do it. But investing in customer research delivers a powerful return on investment in a number of different ways (when the findings are implemented), including: 1. Increased sales 2. Decreased costs 3. Higher stock price To find out how to get there, check out my article on the HCLTech blog: https://www.hcltech.com/blogs/starting-point-great-customer-experience-work

An underutilized part of customer feedback is to give recognition to the contact center agents. Complaints are the most common form of feedback and can make important improvements, however, when someone takes the time to provide feedback to praise the effort of an agent, it needs to be widely and publicly acknowledged. Even if there is no quantified award, just being recognized in front of their peers, the agent will feel valued, and the others will see that not all feedback is negative. Finding reasons for praise is crucial to team morale and agent satisfaction. If nothing else, if there is a prolonged reduction the the volume of complaints, that should be recognized, and then investigated for root causes

It is very important to understand how different touchpoints sequence and interact across the steps customers go through, and good customer journey maps will not only help you capture all of this information in one place, but to visualize the customer journey for people all across the organization. And customer journey maps can be very useful for onboarding new employees and vendors more quickly as well!

Another way to think through B2B customer experience is to think about your customers' jobs to be done. In B2B, who is the actual target persona? Does a business have a single person who is the ONE customer? Likely not. Therefore, to have greater empathy for another business, learn to understand their jobs to be done. Once you understand them, then you can work on your customer experience to address those needs. Fulfilling those needs and making your customers' jobs easier - now that's great CX!

When it comes to personas, be sure and go beyond the demographics and photos that populate most personas to truly capture what makes each persona different from the others. What drives their behavior? What do they truly care about? Capture actionable data that anyone who picks up the persona can truly learn from and leverage in better serving them!

Sympathy gets confused with empathy frequently. Beginning a statement with "I'm sorry" shows more sympathy than empathy. True empathy is more about seeking to understand than judging, evaluating, or trying to fix it. To truly be empathetic we must first seek to understand what empathy itself is. ;-)

People often underestimate the power of customer personas and journey maps, feeling like they are a waste of time when in fact they serve a valuable purpose in helping employees new and old quickly ground themselves in how customers experience the business. They also help people stick their head up above the walls of their individual role to see how it connects with the rest of the business to serve the customer and to more easily put themselves in the shoes of the customer in everything they do.