Empathy in the Workplace
Is the lack of empathy affecting the quality of work or services in your organization?
In a recent conversation about things which could affect the quality of work for customer service based organizations, the idea of a lack of empathy being the cause was suggested. This might seem like a stretch, but it got me thinking, how much does empathy affect customer service, especially the quality of service?
First, let’s revisit the meaning of empathy;
From the University of California at Berkley’s Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life explains empathy is “the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.”
From the online Webster dictionary, “understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of others”
Empathy can be an important characteristic for anyone working in a customer based industry, as it allows an employee to truly see and sense how the customer is feeling, basically understanding how important something is to that customer, and how it affects them. Since I’m a Medical laboratory technologist, I believe empathy plays a large role in the quality of work lab techs perform. Most lab techs don’t have the opportunity to interact with patients; however, we need to understand the work we perform on patient samples are ultimately for that patient, not the Doctors and Nurses, which technically makes the patient the customer.
Without empathy, those providing the service may not be as willing to go above and beyond to satisfy customer needs/wants, or in the case of patient samples, maybe a technologist would be too quick to request repeat samples or do everything possible to ensure turn-around-time benchmarks are met. By feeling empathy, service providers would be more engaged in their work, realizing there is someone connected to that work, particularly in a healthcare setting, anything which can be done should be done.
According to Marsha Collier (@MarshaCollier, an author, radio personality and an educator specializing in technology and inspiring business), the ” Most essential qualities for a customer service rep” are;
1. Empathy
2. Patience
3. Sense of humor
4. Power to fix issues
Empathy being the most important of these items, allows service providers to truly understand what the customer’s concerns are, how they are feeling, and gives them the sense which empowers them to want to do all they can to help.
How does it improve customer service?
When employees demonstrate empathy, customers will have a better experience, and employees achieve better results, especially working as a team. When it comes to dealing with customer complaints and concerns, most people tend to want to just say sorry for the inconvenience and provide discounts or other items such as gift cards. However, what customers want more than anything else, they want to be understood, which is simply and inexpensive, we simply show empathy.
Can we teach empathy?
With all the continuing education, many organizations and professionals complete nowadays, we as a society are seeing less empathy, lower quality customer service, even though there is an increase in knowledge and competencies.
If we ask people in your organization how important showing customers empathy is, they would already know the correct answers. Training sessions often include handling of customer service issues and how empathy should play a part in treating customers they way the need to be. The part of this which doesn’t make sense is if we fast forward to the end of the training session, the employees didn’t really learn anything helpful as the already knew how customers should be treated. Can we really tell someone how to feel? It's like telling an employee at the Louvre museum they need to have more passion and love for the Mona Lisa more. It's just not possible to tell someone or train someone how to feel.
PJ Manney (2008), wrote an article “Empathy in the Time of Technology: How Storytelling is the Key to Empathy." In which he describes how storytelling is extremely important in developing empathy. He goes on to point out how empathy has slowly decreased over the decades and how this closely correlates with fewer people reading books nowadays. We all know that good book which instilled feelings which closely mirrored what the characters were going through and feeling, or how about the chick flick (for lack of a better word) which also created strong feelings. This is where empathy comes from.
If empathy is best and most effectively developed by either reading or watching stories, then why is it the primary method for organizations to “teach” empathy is training sessions or maybe online courses? If this is the case an hour-long training session is going to do very little to teach someone empathy. An organization would get far more impact by providing a required book club where employees would read a selected book and instead of training sessions, the organization holds simply meetings to discuss theses books.
Over the last decade, there has been a strong push to further knowledge and competencies which we find now includes our personal time being used for such activities. Organizations believe this has a great benefit to professionals, customer service, and to the bottom line. However, this seems to be having the opposite effect. We need to get back to activates which promote empathy. We need to slow down, take in a book or two and give back some of our personal time to activities which promote a better sense of well-being and empathy will follow.
Would like to know your thoughts on empathy, please leave a comment below.
References
Goh, Gareth. 2015. "Empathy: The Must-Have Skill for All Customer Service Reps." http://www.insightsquared.com/2015/02/empathy-the-must-have-skill-for-all-customer-service-reps/.
Manney, PJ. 2008. "Empathy in the Time of Technology: How Storytelling is the Key to Empathy." Journal of Evolution and Technology (http://jetpress.org/v19/manney.htm) 19 (1): 51-61. http://jetpress.org/v19/manney.htm.
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