How to achieve empathy in customer service (with AI) 🥰

TL;DR

Use empathy to increase brand loyalty, customer retention, and recommendations for your business, even more so as we move towards increased automation
If customers aren’t happy, “most leave silently after one or multiple purchases” and, in the UK alone, CallMiner reports “companies lose nearly £33.4 billion per year due to customer switching”
Customer service agents can demonstrate empathy by doing things like matching customer emotion and you can use role play and empathy statements to create a culture of empathy
Gartner found “companies that deploy empathy significantly outperform those that don’t, in terms of sales and profit”
An AI assistant can help you get to know your customers better and give you more reliable feedback to make a marked improvement on your customer service efforts

What is empathy in customer service?

The Cambridge Dictionary says empathy is “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation”.

That means your customer service agents don’t have to have experienced for themselves what your customer is going through to appreciate that they feel happy or annoyed or excited or upset. They simply need to recognise the customer’s emotion and acknowledge it.

The difference between empathy and sympathy

Empathy is often confused with sympathy because both involve an emotional response, but your customers don’t want sympathy: ‘Oh, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry.’ They want empathy and action: ‘That must have really screwed up your day, let’s fix things.’ This more perceptive response shows a greater understanding of how the customer has been impacted, which helps nourish a deeper connection than simply offer a limp apology.

Sympathy is looking into the situation from the outside.
Empathy is being right there with your customer in the midst of how they’re feeling.

7 practical ways to improve agent empathy in customer service

Empathy might seem a big or somewhat loose idea to get your head around, but there are many small and simple ways your customer service agents can expertly demonstrate it:

1. Practice acceptance

When a customer tells you how they feel, accept it. As tempting as it might be to make a judgement, showing empathy leaves no room for debating if someone does or doesn’t have a right to feel the way they do. The focus is on turning things around and taking any negative emotions away.

2. Avoid being reactive

Reacting emotionally to a difficult customer can cause conflict because a negative reaction from one person can trigger negativity from another. You might then be deemed as being hostile and hostility won’t solve a situation. Keeping your cool and showing empathy instead can help you win the day.

3. Don’t take things personally

Even if you’ve made a mistake and a customer calls you out on it, try not to become defensive. When you feel wounded it’s hard to show empathy for the feelings of others. Accepting things will sometimes go wrong helps put the focus on simply making it right.

4. Let customers know you hear them

This is one of the simplest yet most powerful expressions of empathy. Even if you can’t solve a problem, your customer can still immediately feel better from having been able to express how they feel and have it acknowledged. Way to instantly calm down a situation and keep the customer onside.

5. Match your customer’s emotion

Working in a customer service role doesn’t mean you have to be jolly all the time. In fact, that can irritate customers if they’re getting in touch about a problem. Instead, match the customer’s tone. If they’re excited, their voice is probably higher and they’re speaking fast, so you can do the same. If they’re fed up, slow down your speech and quieten your voice to match. Tone matching is a known method to “show that you’re here to help”. (A sister method is to match the customer’s urgency and it’s especially useful as a B2B best practice.)

6. Check what you’ve heard

A quick confirmation: ‘You’re telling me X happened, is that right?’ or ‘If I’ve understood correctly, you need Y?’ is sometimes all a customer needs to hear to know you’re actively listening and they can trust you to resolve their query.
Did you know? AI-powered assistants are also trained by skilled conversation designers to regularly check the next step before taking action. Asking ‘Would you like me to do that for you now?’ is vital in all scenarios, so the customer is always getting exactly what they need.

7. Avoid telling customers you know how they feel

In trying to be emphatic, it can be easy to respond with ‘I know just how you feel’, but it’s always easier to keep your own feelings out of it. Keep a laser focus on how the customer feels and respond instead with: ‘I can understand why you feel that way’, so you don’t deviate in any way from solving their issue.

Nurture empathy across all your teams

Many companies will simply rely on their team members who naturally show strong empathic traits, but when that person is suddenly unavailable, you’re at a loss when there’s a difficult customer situation to deal with.

Journalist Helena Posniak writes for E&T: “Everyone – apart from some psychopaths – can learn to empathise, say neuroscientists. In fact, some primates demonstrate empathy, and even young babies show basic levels of empathy”. Companies increase their chances of building empathetic customer relationships across the board by knowing how empathy works and teaching their teams to actively practice it.

One of the best examples is Apple. They encourage all their Genius support staff to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes”, says Gizmodo, and this commitment to building empathy is clearly working for the pioneering brand. SurveyMonkey found the average Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures customer satisfaction, is 32; Apple’s is “a resounding 72“. They’re also still in the top two most valuable companies in the world.

Use role play to develop empathy skills

A great way to increase confidence in your teams is to use role play to practice showing empathy. Simulate real conversations you’ve had or might have with customers and teach your teams the best, most empathic ways to respond. Having the opportunity to practice this away from the pressure of dealing with a real customer can help customer service agents try out new tactics under the protection of a safe space. Everything they learn helps them improve.

Look at customer feedback and share stories

If you want your teams to empathise with customers, they first have to know how customers are feeling and examine that across all channels equally. Get your agents together to share their stories and experiences to look for common themes, then use everything you learn to show your customers how well you understand them, and so, know exactly what they need.

Use AI as a bridge

With so many customer service tasks now being handled online, whether it’s through traditional digital channels like email or more time-efficient channels like live chat, it’s become easier for companies to dehumanise customer care practices, but technology shouldn’t be set up as a barrier to communication. Implement it in the right way and it’s another channel to open up your communications wider still and bring you closer to your customers.

Build deeper relationships with customers

Give your teams empathy statements to work with

Empathy doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but you can learn how to show it. To give your teams a head start, introduce empathy statements they can use when they’re assisting customers:

Thank you for sharing that with me.
I hear you.
I understand you can’t do X when you don’t have Y.
You’ve had a lot to contend with.
That makes sense.
Let’s work through this together.
I want things to be better for you.
I can understand how disappointing/upsetting/frustrating that is.
I can see why this is a problem.
I get it.
I’m glad you got in touch so we can fix this.
Tell me how I can make things better.
You’re right.
I would have asked the same question.
I appreciate your patience here.

These are all statements conversation designers are naturally programming into automated AI-driven customer service responses, so the customer feels heard and understood. Your teams should be no different in embedding these kinds of empathic statements into the language they’re using with customers daily.

Track customer satisfaction scores

Where customer service teams typically have targets to meet using frameworks like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), there are a few key customer goals vital to your success and customer satisfaction sits top of the list. Track metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) to see how your customers respond to your commitment to empathy and if it helps improve these metrics over time.

Be sure to praise the success when your scores go up 🎉

Support your customer service teams

In a 2022 study, the Institute of Customer Service found 60% of the customer service workers they interviewed had “experienced hostility in the past year” and 36% of those had “been threatened with violence”. Yet companies don’t always appreciate the toll this can take on people. This means agents don’t get the support they need to cope with the demands of the job and so the job becomes unenjoyable. Any negative feelings naturally start to seep into their communication with customers, and that puts a stop to any positive relationship that could be formed.

Showing empathy for the experience of your team members is just as important as showing empathy for your customers. A study by two Australian universities found “when employees believed they had the ability and authority to solve customer problems, they experienced positive emotions such as relief, satisfaction, and excitement”. Not only that, agents who “were thanked or recognised for delivering good service had enhanced feelings of self-esteem and a sense of pride,” all of which can only be a good thing for team morale.

Hire people with high emotional intelligence

The more people you have on your team with great empathy, the easier it becomes to practice it. People with high emotional intelligence (EI) are also good at managing their own emotions while also handling those of your customers. The problem is, as Harvard Business Review (HBR) points out, companies “struggle to assess EI when hiring” because they haven’t been taught how to do it. They rely on expensive personality tests or ask people to judge their own EI competency, which isn’t helpful if the candidate isn’t particularly self-aware.

They offer two solutions to this problem:

Get references and talk to the people who supply the reference, so you can ask them directly about the person’s EI.
When you interview a candidate, ask them about their experiences handling customer enquiries in both positive and negative situations, but go into great detail to fully understand how they make decisions and why they make the choices they do.

Set an example by leading from the top

It’s easier for customer service teams to work on empathy if they see a commitment to achieving it is evident throughout the business, from top to bottom. If you’re sensing some resistance, try showing your teams how it’s done and they might feel much more confident to follow your lead.

Using AI to master empathy in customer service

Using AI to personalise customer experiences is one of the biggest opportunities available to customer service leaders right now to improve support and drive innovation while you’re at it. Launch an AI assistant and you can immediately improve your processes by making them more efficient and putting your customer front and centre of your service:

Instant replies to queries
The same, accurate information across all channels, whether it’s online, offline or in-store
24-hour omnichannel service delivery
Efficient self-service so customers can easily find answers for themselves

Get to know what your customers want

McKinsey found 71% of consumers now expect personalisation and, what’s more, 76% of those customers “get frustrated when this doesn’t happen”.

Nobody wants to be treated like a statistic. Failing to get to know your customers better and understand what they want can quickly make a dent in both your popularity and profits, since the McKinsey report also shows “companies that excel at personalization generate 40 percent more revenue from those activities.”

An AI assistant can remember every preference for every one of your customers ― forever, even if there are tens of thousands of them, to give the strongest customer support tailored to their every need, every time.

Create a reliable feedback loop

Emotional intelligence expert, Josh Feast, says “we make that decision about whether we’re well-treated by the way we’re interacted with not by what people say. Customer service agents can follow exactly the same script… milliseconds between how fast they respond to a query of yours will make you decide whether you’ve been heard.” That makes it difficult to get reliable customer feedback since it might not be your information that’s the problem, but the way it’s delivered by a live agent.

In an AI chat scenario, every customer asking about the same topic gets the exact same response in the flow of an automated conversation, every time, so it’s easy to get feedback on this and see where improvements can be made to better connect with your customer. You can also use sentiment analysis for a real-time sense of customer feeling around the service they’re receiving, so you can improve customer experience across every channel.

Make a marked impact on customer service

“AI-enabled customer service is now the quickest and most effective route for institutions to deliver personalized, proactive experiences that drive customer engagement,” says McKinsey. “Emotionally connected customers not only generate greater value, but in every interaction become more and more convinced that ‘this company gets me,’” says Harvard Business Review. There’s every reason to strive to be that company your customers speak so highly of, using empathy and AI as your allies.

Ultimate Guide: How to achieve empathy in customer service (with AI)