4 myth breaking Customer Success ideas (Part 3) Empathy

Fact #1 Customer Satisfaction (CSAT, NPS, CES) does does not drive Customer Loyalty  (Link to article)

Fact #2 Your product does not create Customer Value (Link to article)

Fact #3 Training won’t install empathy in your front line staff

Fact #4 Negative responses from customers are a cry for help, no response is the real danger! (Link to article)

We’ve talked a bit in this series about the Customer value formula. The first two articles arguably concluded with the Customer value formula as the ultimate resolution to the myths they were resolving. The Customer value formula is the equation that makes your product work for the Customer in their particular use case. It calculates the quantifiable value (and in some cases the intangible value) your solution delivers to a given Customer. This week we’re going to set the value formula aside for a moment and talk about empathy. 

How do you know this?

Is there a married human alive that doesn’t know the right question to ask after their spouse calls and admits to wrecking the new car? (“Are you ok?” is the right question.) Some of you may be thinking ‘but they’re on the phone, and they sound fine…It’s the NEW car!!’ but you don’t think it long enough for the wrong question to come out! In some cases, it’s not because that’s what you really want to know, it's because you know better than to ask for the information you really want to know! But how do you know that? The truly selfless may be shocked by this statement, the rest of us will smirk and read on. :-) As you read on, think about how you know what question to ask...    

Empathy is a long sought after EI (Emotional Intelligence) concept in service, sales, management and frankly, most of life in general. Empathy is a critical component to maintaining long standing business and personal relationships. If empathy isn’t naturally occurring in your staff, it is very difficult to make it occur. One large online marketplace/ retailer I worked with measured “empathy” as a construct for their service team for years. They contended it was paramount to who they were and core to their mission. It was consistently the worst score out of everything they measured and the most contested. It was so badly done and misunderstood by the judged (the front line agents) and the judges (supervisors and QA) that my recommendation at the time was to either define it better or eliminate it. (“Eliminate it” was the obviously false choice bordering on the sacrilegious - the equivalent of a coach quitting at intermission) Or so I thought… In what I can only describe as a “called bluff”, they actually chose to eliminate the measure rather than better define it!            

And it's hard

Empathy is a person’s ability to understand another person’s thoughts and feelings, from that person’s point of view, in a specific situation outside of their own. And it’s hard. Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman (renowned psychologists according to this article) identify 3 components of empathy.

1. Cognitive Empathy
2. Emotional Empathy
3. Compassionate Empathy

  The lesson comes from somewhere different than corporate training on empathy

They suggest that cognitive empathy is like ‘learned behavior’ and lacks the emotional connection of Emotional or Compassionate empathy. If you’ve ever tried to teach empathy, you realize that this ‘token’ definition of empathy is still nearly impossible to install in a human, in spite of it being defined as ‘learned’ behavior. The lesson comes from somewhere different than a corporate empathy training. (Think of how you really know what question not to ask in the car example - chances are, it's from personal experience asking the wrong question)  

More is not always better

The other two types of empathy are Emotional (when you actually feel the pain of the other person - genuine physical feelings) and Compassionate which seems to encompass only the healthy emotional feelings and combines them with a spontaneous need to help. I’ll leave it to you to decide what level of empathy you’d like your staff to display to your Customers. Empathy is important, but like everything, more is not always better.  

If your CSM doesn't know how your Customer is using your product, how could they ever have empathy with the customer?

Once you decide what level of empathy, how can you get it in a B2B setting? (We are setting aside the .1% of companies who are successful at universally hiring for this characteristic) At least some of your CSMs can’t relate to Customer situations because they haven’t been in business long enough to understand them. Simply telling them to care about a problem they don’t really understand isn’t the answer. To do this in a B2B setting, your CSMs need a deeper understanding of how your product is, or can, solve your Customers problems. It’s almost as if you need a formula that would define the successes or failures your Customers experience with your product, and quantify it in terms everyone can relate to and understand. Then everyone would be on the same page and know the value your solution is providing and the impact when it isn’t providing it. It's the measure you could show Customers over and over again as the value you create. It would be almost impossible not to be able to relate to your Customer’s challenges if those challenges were properly quantified. The opposite is also true, if your CSM doesn’t know how your Customer is using your product and the value it is providing, how could they ever have empathy with the Customer?    

Earlier in this article we set the Customer value formula aside … but, it turns out, only for about 4 paragraphs.

The customer value formula is is a critical piece of customer knowledge, and customer knowledge is power!

The Customer Value Formula, the thing that quantifies value to your Customer, can also help you and your team show empathy. It provides a deeper understanding of what your product or service provides to your Customer, or maybe more importantly in the case of empathy, doesn’t provide when your product or service isn’t working the way your Customer expects. As usual, I’m grossly oversimplifying the situation, but the concept should be clear. The Customer value formula is a critical piece of Customer knowledge, and Customer knowledge is power!  

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About the author: Daniel Hoesing is an accomplished leader with over 20 years experience in management & leadership; working in the SaaS B2B industry for over 12 years for fortune 100 companies as well as pre-equity startups. He is the creator of the Predictive Customer Behavior Index? assessment, a tool used to define and improve Customer Success capabilities of SaaS, ecommerce and subscription based organizations, that is indexed specifically for the size of the organization. The tool identifies gaps in current capabilities and reduces the complexity by providing a list of prioritized projects, as well as a roadmap of future capabilities to consider as the organization scales. Daniel also specializes in Customer Success leadership development and coaching. Please reach out to him for more information Daniel Hoesing on LinkedIn