153: Year in Review: The First Week

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello, and welcome to episode one hundred and fifty-three of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week I begin a year in review. Looking back to the first topic that I tackled on this podcast, the first broadcast of the year, the first tentative outings into the ethosphere, the first five speakers the first week. I chose a topic that was not only the one that gained the most votes on my little Google Form survey as I was seeking ideas for what to talk about on the podcast. But it's one that I have strong feelings about anyway, and indeed had written about before. That topic, that first week, five leaders joined me to talk about empathy. Empathy is high on the list of sought-after attributes for anyone looking to work in customer support. It's one of those immeasurable qualities, and it's highly mutable. And it's and yet it's repeatedly rolled out in job adverts, alluded to in resumes and grappled in interviews. What is it really? Empathy is that quality or skill, call it what you will, that allows you to put yourself in someone else's shoes and experience their view of and feelings about a situation. It's a very human quality which allows us to relate to and form genuine bonds with those around us. It's a word that the ancient Greeks used for physical affection or passion or suffering, can you imagine? It's a sort of very real physical and emotional response to the feelings of another person. That sort of very real physical and strong emotional response to the feelings of another person is what psychologists might call affective empathy or emotional empathy. It can range anywhere from general sympathy and pity and compassion for another person to really intense feelings of distress for someone else's suffering. The thing is that wherever on that scale the emotional response falls, it has a draining effect on the well-being of the empathizer. Sort of empathy is also very character-driven and highly personal. It's about who you are. This is about who you are and need to be with your family and friends. You bring your whole self to the party, your life history, your personal biases and your in the moment state of mind. But what about empathy and customer support? It's draining. You cannot possibly respond on that level to every customer that sends you an email or calls you or opens that chat box to you. You cannot afford to be that emotionally involved with your customers and their problems all day, every day. You'd burn out pretty quickly. Fortunately, that's where a different sort of empathy comes into play. Psychologists call it cognitive empathy. It's the ability to understand the mental state and the perspective and emotions experienced by another while at the same time maintaining that distinction between understanding and actually getting emotionally involved. It's actually a kind of detachment. I like to call it empathic emotional detachment. The ability to take someone else's perspective on board in an understanding and rational manner while maintaining a calm, productively helpful demeanor. And the good news is it's a skill you can practice and it's a skill you can hire for. And during that first week on the podcast, that's precisely what I talked about with my guests.

Jenny Dempsey: 4:06

So I think this looks different for every company. And it really also comes down to the culture. I think every company has to define what empathy really looks like for them. You know, we all have different ways of communicating with the customer. And in a nutshell, I mean, we could say it's understanding the customer's needs, asking the right questions, supporting them with supportive words, kind words. There's really no, at least in my opinion, and from working at so many different companies, empathy really looks different. Um, but there's the same underlying basics, but it's going to look different for every company. And there's an importance there for the company to define what empathy means to them. So when they're in the interview, um, they they do know what to look for and everyone's on the same page.

Matt Dale: 4:55

So, for example, our customer base is primarily teachers and educators. Most of us have gone through school at some point or another, uh, but we haven't been on the other side of the desk there. We haven't gone through what a teacher goes through. And so we spend a lot of time in the first couple weeks of training talking about what it's like to be a teacher, what they're experiencing in a day-to-day environment, what it's like with the, you know, how the different reporting structures happen in the district and where the pressures are coming from. Um, and that helps us, helps our people know more when they're talking to someone on the phone and they're having a, you know, they're they're quick and they're trying to get something done quickly. You know, it's because that person's got a prep period, and then this is the only time the day that they have students out of their classroom, they've got to get the grades set up properly so that that they can finish the grading process tonight. Understanding that.

Charlotte Ward: 5:39

So your agents have got a huge amount of context.

Matt Dale: 5:43

So they're not going, oh, this guy's just mad at me because he it's not because he's having a bad day. He's he's just got it like he's got five minutes right now, and this is the only time today that he can have to get help. He's not angry at me, he's frustrated, he doesn't know what he's doing. How can I help de-escalate the frustration so that I can get him to you know where he needs to be so he can get that information, get his problem solved, and he can do the job that he needs to do before his kids come rushing back in after recess, and and he can continue on with his day.

Natalie Ruhl: 6:08

Empathy can come in so many shapes and forms, and it can sometimes also be too much, you know. Empathy goes a certain length, but then you might not um want to empathize too much because it can cloud your judgment or it can it might be unhelpful in a situation.

Charlotte Ward: 6:26

Getting too personally involved. Um, yeah. And also it's not just about clouding judgment necessarily. It can stop you from coming to a solution and maybe also cross boundaries, you know. Yes, absolutely.

Craig Stoss: 6:39

My big take on empathy is that quite often within a support context, we we get we tell the customers how to contact us. We we set the rules uh for for how we want to be communicated with. We s we give strict forms with drop-down lists that are really rigid, and and you know, do you is this a billing question or or is this a you know a technical problem? And and and and even then breaking down technical problems, and and we start to frame the the submissions in the format that we want them as a support organization. And I think that is a lack of empathy for the customer. You know, quite often customers don't know what the problem is, they just know there's a problem.

Ash Rhodes: 7:22

I feel like you cannot create empathy in a person where none exists, but I feel like you can bring it out where it is buried deep. I don't think you can can spark something that is not there, but I do think that you can be like, okay, person, where they are saying, I am very upset. Uh what do we say here? Uh there are some there are some emotionally laden words here. Uh what do we what do we respond with? And there have actually been some some instances unf embarrassingly recently wherein they totally missed it. Compl like multiple people completely missed it. And I'm like, okay, maybe I should have required a nine or a ten in like my personal empathy scale. But just gotta keep working on it.

Charlotte Ward: 8:14

I think you make a valid point. It's about coaching the appropriate response as much as trying to foster the behavior as in it as a as a standalone thing. It's it is an ideal, but it's as much it's as important that the behavior is appropriate to the context. So you can coach what expected responses might be in certain scenarios with certain types of language that a customer's using or that kind of thing. And if you coach for those, I think I think that's the coachable part, isn't it? It's that appropriate detached response. How you deal rather than attempting to retrain someone's character, you can you can help them help them with that response. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one five three for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.