Contact centers, despite the technology, are very people oriented organizations. Their purpose is to service, acquire or retain customers for the organization through personal contacts with the agents. One of the major challenges contact center agents have is sounding genuinely interested in their customers’ problems even when they have already handled dozens of calls about the same subject on the same day. This is the holy grail that is known as “empathy”. Customers buy on emotion. Emotion frequently plays a role even in business to business situations, which is why promotional gifts and corporate hospitality are big business.
Not a good approach to customer relations
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to share another person’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in their situation”. I would suggest that agents are not required to feel empathy for the customer, but they have to be able to demonstrate empathy.
First of all, this means recognizing how the customer feels. This is sometimes easier to understand when the customer is on the phone than when the customer is communicating through e-mail or chat. The agents then have to respond appropriately to the customer’s needs and the feelings they have expressed.
To measure how empathetic an agent is, the first question on an evaluation form would be to ask how upset the customer appeared to be. The evaluator will consider the customer’s language including the tone that the customer adopts. In written communications, this can be understood by obvious signs, such as the use of capitals and explanation marks (“!”) or strong language. There are also less obvious signs that might be lost on agents who are not native speakers of the customer’s language. These include the use of adverbs or sarcasm. (“I am just asking you to fix my product” – in this example, the word “just” speaks volumes about how the customer feels.)
The second question is whether the agent’s response was appropriate to the customer’s feelings. For example, if a customer is angry about his product not working, the agent might firstly respond that he sees why the customer is angry and then reassure the customer that he is working on his problem. Many times, when a person shows that he recognizes why the customer is angry, this will reduce the customer’s level of aggression. The customer feels his grievance has been recognized, even if the agent does not necessarily admit responsibility on the company’s behalf. On the other hand, telling a customer to “calm down” will rarely if ever solve anything. The agent who says this is showing that he does not understand why the customer is upset and is, in effect, dismissing his feelings as irrational behavior.
To drive the desired agent behavior, you will need to give agents high scores for correctly identifying when a customer is angry and further high scores for giving responses that show an understanding of how the customer feels. Low scores on these questions will lead to conversations about how to recognize customers’ feelings or how to respond correctly to specific situations where a customer is angry or upset. These conversations will focus agents on how they can handle customers’ feelings as skillfully as they handle the customer’s issue with the product.
