It’s one of the enduring mysteries of humanity: when you meet someone for the first time, or even if it’s been a while, how can you really know what they are dealing with? What they are going through? They may be masking their frustration, their exhaustion, their loneliness, their despair.
It’s in this space – between individuals – where empathy is needed to span the gap. For those on the front lines of service industries like credit unions, empathy is the bridge between member service and the true human connection of relationship building.
Beyond Member Service
Empathy is the ability to understand, share and relate to the feelings of another. It is the start of effective communication, getting a reading as well as you can of what they’re going through, what they’re worried about, what they may be suffering from. It’s not easy to think as clearly about someone else as you do about yourself, but empathy is that inner voice that speaks, “It’s not about you in this moment.” If you authentically want to demonstrate empathy you have to step outside of your own needs, assess and overcome bias, actively listen, and then take action.
In fact, the biggest obstacle to empathy is assuming that we already understand what the other person is thinking or feeling. Like any assumption, this gap in understanding results from a lack of knowledge. Without this crucial knowledge of the other person’s perspective, empathy is impossible: “The heart cannot embrace what the mind does not know.” How can you know, rather than just make guesses about that person’s subjective viewpoint? You ask them.
For businesses and their leaders, post-2020 may be a time when all of our experiences as customers and employees are ripe for re-imagining. This can be an inflection point in the shaping of both culture and brand identities.
⭑––According to a poll from Ipsos, Americans believe it is now more critical than ever that brands demonstrate empathetic qualities and take action to maintain customer loyalty and support. Brands built on a foundation of empathy will solidify their relationships with their customers.
True, there is always the danger that overuse of “empathy” as a term to conjure with will lead to listener fatigue, but I am glad that empathy is finally getting its due. It’s been part of the Support EXP model of customer service optimization and performance coaching for decades. As one of the five service dimensions of the time-tested SERVQUAL model for measuring service quality, we’ve been helping our clients measure how their frontline employees are demonstrating empathy to customers through both felt and observable behaviors.
In the SERVQUAL model, empathy refers to caring and individualized attention provided by frontline personnel to members, or by employees to each other within and across teams. Members need to feel that they are a priority, and empathy means paying personal attention. The core of it is conveying the feeling that both the member and the interaction are unique and special. You want the member to feel that you understand their situation and their frustrations. You want to cultivate the ability to affirm a member’s feelings and show that you can understand their pain or frustration, even if you cannot fix it. Certainly, there is an intuitive element involved, but these are also skills that can – and must – be learned, improved and consistently demonstrated.
Connecting the Workplace
Just as genuine empathy builds relationships with your members, it also strengthens the relationships among teammates, and between employees and organizational leadership. Empathy in the workplace results in an engaged workforce, and that translates into a stable business. How organizations address their employees’ behavioral health — a function of empathy — is no less important than how organizations address their financial health. Having engaged employees translates into better quality of work, more effective collaboration and lower turnover. Empathic workplaces also tend to enjoy less stress and greater morale, and their employees tend to show greater resilience during difficult times. Still, despite their efforts, many leaders struggle to make empathy part of their organizational culture. In fact, there’s often a measurable gap between the culture executives want and the one they actually have.
That act of bridging through empathy is truly transformative, not just of businesses but of hearts and minds longing for connection.
What’s the key to being able to show empathy, whether it’s frontline employee-to-member, employee-to-employee, or leader-to-employee? Feedback. As I said before, if you want to truly know what someone is thinking or feeling – ask them. It can be as simple a question as, “What can I do to help you?” Or when someone is frustrated, simply saying, “Let me help you find a solution.” Too often we don’t really listen to what other people are telling us they need, because we’re thinking about what’s next on our agenda or what point we want to make next. Instead, we approach the problem obliquely, based on incomplete or skewed data – with results that are at best inefficient and at worst ineffective.
For any organization, what it deems valuable is shown in what it measures, doubtless with the objective of improvement. If a company measures only performance outcomes, through lagging, static metrics, it’s missing the opportunity to capture the genuine feedback, in the voice of the customer or the employee, that can kindle genuine empathy.
Empathy Transforms the Ordinary
When we take the time to listen intentionally, and couple it with the ability to imagine what someone else is feeling, we are using our skills to bridge the gap that separates ordinary interactions from strong, lasting relationships. That act of bridging through empathy is truly transformative, not just of businesses but of hearts and minds longing for connection.
If you’re ready to go beyond customer service to learning the skills that build long-term customer relationships, get in touch with us today!
