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Empathy

Empathy refers to the understanding of the needs, concerns and challenges other people face, be it clients or colleagues. One must be sensitivity to the circumstances and understand what other people feel or see things from their point of view and imagining yourself in their place. Empathy requires active listening and putting oneself in others’ shoes before offering solutions. 

In business, empathy is the ability to understand the customer experiences when they use the company products or services.  Which means customer service employees should possess empathy as quality.  Empathy will enable customer service to have a human interaction with a customer where they would intentionally put themselves in the customers shoes to understand their issue and find the best solution for them.

How does one empathize with a customer?

  • Active listening: This means genuinely hearing and acknowledging client concerns, ensuring they feel heard and valued throughout the process.
  • Provide feedback with sensitivity: When delivering feedback on financial matters, empathy involves delivering constructive criticism, showing the client where they need to improve, showing understanding of the impact it may have on the client’s confidence or morale.
  • Avoid sympathy:  When emailing a customer, switch from a mere sympathetic tone to using more empathetic statements in your interactions. Instead of saying, “that must be frustrating” you can try say “I understand how frustrating that is”.
  • Offering guidance: Beyond crunching numbers, empathetic Accountants guide clients through financial decisions considering not only the bottom line but also the personal and emotional implications.
  • Flexibility: Acknowledging that clients have different communication styles or levels of financial literacy requires adapting communication style and level of content accordingly.
  • Make customers a part of the solution: There are times when one thinks a customer is being unreasonable. However, note that sometimes the product or service might not have been built to solve that customer’s problem. In such a case, engage the customer on what they think the right solution may be and allow them an opportunity to put themselves in your shoes instead of being against you.

How can one build empathy?

Understand your biases: People generally make judgements based on language, color, gender, religion, accent and vocabulary. As a result, they do not notice when they are acting out of bias and treat some customers differently than others.For example, assuming that a customer would not be tech– savvy because they are younger and blaming them for failing to diagnose the problem. This leads to bias and this creates a barrier between agents and customers.                                                                                               

Therefore, to cultivate empathy, one needs to recognize their biases. Every time they assume something about someone and there is no data to support it, they should take a step back and self-introspect to find out if that was because of a bias.

Maintain positivity: Being empathetic to the first customer of the day is easy. However, to treat the last customer in the same way you treated the first customer, you need to remain positive and motivated. For example, you can stay positive by observing yourself for a week and noting down the times you feel a positive or negative emotion and the events that trigger it. This will give you a clear idea of activities to avoid when you have to remain positive to get through the day.                                                             

Understand your customer base: When you do not understand where the customer is coming from, it is easy to think that they are overreacting to a simple problem. Sometimes it is hard to mask those thoughts and act as if you are not empathetic. Accept feedback from your peers and customers. At the end of each conversation, ask your customers open ended questions like “What do you think would have made this conversation better?” If you hear a complaint about not being heard or respected, then you know that it is an empathy problem.

In conclusion, empathy plays a vital role in human relationships, communication, social bonding and in business. It helps to build trust, improve interactions, and foster compassion and kindness in various aspects of life. Businesses with empathetic staff have managed to build a loyal clientele base which have benefited them.

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