Helping Employees Demonstrate Empathy with Customers

Empathy does not always come naturally to employees, but they can learn to understand and validate their customers' emotions. Below is a short summary of solutions:

• Help your employees develop relevant, related experiences they can use to empathize with customers, such as giving them the opportunity to be customers themselves.
• Share stories and testimonials from real customers to remind your employees how delivering great service can make their customers feel understood and acknowledged.
• Hire employees who use your product or service, so they can easily relate to the people they serve.
• Train employees to understand how customers feel when they encounter a problem by asking employees to recall a similar experience they have had. Have them describe how the experience made them feel, then discuss ways they can help their customers avoid those negative feelings.
• Teach employees to use the pre-emptive acknowledgment as a technique to diffuse the negative emotions of customers before they explode.
• Show employees how to deliver service from their customers' perspective; you can start by demonstrating the correct way to hand change to a customer.
• Demonstrate empathy toward your employees when they experience negative emotions, to validate their feelings and prevent them from taking out their frustrations on a customer.
• Eliminate the sources of employee angst that could cause them to fail to identify and react to their customers' negative emotions.