What do you do if your customer service response lacks empathy after a failure?

1 Why empathy matters

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. It's a key skill for customer service, as it helps you build trust, rapport, and loyalty with your customers. When you show empathy, you show that you care about their needs, concerns, and emotions, and that you're willing to help them solve their problems. Empathy also helps you diffuse negative emotions, prevent escalation, and reduce complaints.

2 How to avoid empathy gaps

An empathy gap is a situation where you fail to express empathy or show the wrong kind of empathy to your customer. This can happen due to stress, fatigue, distraction, or lack of training. To avoid empathy gaps, practice active listening, use positive language, and tailor your response to the customer's situation. Listen attentively to the customer's words, tone, and body language without interrupting or judging. Ask open-ended questions to clarify and confirm their issue and expectations. Utilize positive language that shows respect, appreciation, and encouragement instead of negative words that can trigger defensiveness, anger, or resentment. Additionally, tailor your response to the customer's situation and emotional state with sincere apologies and using their name. By doing so, you can prevent empathy gaps and ensure a better customer experience.

4 How to measure empathy

Empathy is not only a skill, but also a metric that can be used to evaluate and improve customer service operations. By measuring empathy, it is possible to identify strengths and weaknesses, track progress, and reward those who perform the best. To measure empathy, customer feedback surveys can be used to rate empathy on a scale of 1 to 5, or to provide comments about the service. Additionally, Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) can be employed to measure customer loyalty and happiness. Quality assurance reviews conducted by supervisors or peers can also provide feedback on empathy, using criteria such as tone, language, rapport, and resolution. Furthermore, tools such as sentiment analysis or emotion detection can be used to analyze customer emotions. Finally, self-assessment and reflection can be useful in understanding how one felt during and after the interaction, as well as what could have been done better. Learning from mistakes and successes can help set goals for improvement.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?