Great Customer Service Takes Empathy

But even if technology can amplify an agent’s empathy, it can’t serve as a substitute for it.

“In one case, a dentist had moved his office to a new location and had advertised heavily in the community about his office and about having the best equipment,” Cavitt points out. “His goal was to be regarded as a top-quality dentist in the first year of operation and to be the most popular dentist in the area after two years. Instead, he lost 10 percent of his patients in the first year and nearly had to close down in the second year. That was when he called me in to take a look.”

It didn’t take Cavitt long to find the problem.

“The problem was sitting at the front desk,” he says. “The dentist’s receptionist—the first person everyone saw coming to the office—was exceptionally rude. People didn’t want to come back, and if they called, they didn’t want to call back.… The recommendation was to fire her. After the dentist did so, his business began to flourish.”

Cavitt says that companies have to build a top-down service attitude into their cultures.

“Last year, an East Coast company sent customer service agents to one of my seminars after the company experienced severe turnover,” he says. “This was a positive step, but it could have been more positive if some of the management had shown up at the seminar along with the employees. When management sends employees off to seminars and doesn’t invest the time themselves, it shows that they aren’t fully invested in the process or the goals. You need to show your team that you care about them and that you care about customer service, because service matters. Customers are willing to forgive almost anything, except the way that a company treated them.”

BEST PRACTICES 

So what can companies do to hire, train, and retain empathetic customer service agents?

Step No. 1: Hire the right people. “You need an upbeat personality for this job,” Cavitt says. “You have to want to help people solve their pain points and their problems. Good managers recognize the importance of these qualities and will hire the right talent for the right job.”

Step No. 2: Use effective interviewers. Even in first interviews, customer service job candidates display traits like interest in people and being active listeners. Qualities like these enable them to empathize and understand quickly what a customer is really asking for. These are usually traits that don’t come out on a resume, so you have to know how to determine if the candidate has them.

“This may sound unscientific, but when you interview individuals for customer service positions, it helps to first find an interviewer on your staff who can really read people,” Cavitt says. “Somehow, an interviewer must be able to get to the bottom of this question: How will this individual treat others? There are companies that give personality tests and try to evaluate the empathy factor objectively, but in the end, this can be a subjective judgment.”

In Cavitt’s experience, “women seem to have a natural feel for this and are often stronger interviewers than men when it comes to identifying the empathy factor.”

During the course of an interview, interviewers must take in the full measure of a candidate, focusing not only on what is said but on body language like eye contact, facial expressions, and other nonverbal cues that suggest whether the candidate will be able to empathize and engage with customers.

“One way you can use the interview process to determine if you have a candidate with a naturally strong empathy factor is by asking the candidate to tell you a story about an experience with a customer she had,” Tan adds. “By doing this, you can see if they formed an emotional connection with the customer, or if all they gave you was a mechanical account about a product problem and how they fixed it.”