3 ways to foster empathy among teams: CX Mini Masterclass – E86

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

And, an added side note for those who are already CCXPs, the Customer Experience Professionals Association is now recognizing CX Podcasts listening toward certification renewal credits. So be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to so that you can submit this towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 86, the fourth episode of May 2020. Today, I’d like to talk about empathy, which is the ability to understand and feel the emotions of another person by putting yourself in their shoes.

At the time of recording this episode, the world is still reeling from the health crisis brought about by the coronavirus pandemic. At this moment, consumers are seeking both empathy and compassion from the brands they know and trust. But empathy wasn’t any less important before the crisis, and it will be just as important, if not more, as we emerge into the new normal. Understanding customers and the context of their lives is the foundation of experience design.

It’s also the cornerstone of customer-centric culture, and one of the ways that we as customer experience professionals can rally teams around the customer. Empathy might be especially top of mind now, but it certainly isn’t going anywhere. So today, I’m going to give you three activities that you can use to help support a culture of empathy in your organization. These activities are varied.

I’ve got ideas that work with customer-facing teams and the corner office. While these are designed to be standalone activities, the concepts behind these exercises can be adapted so you can even make them subtle enough to weave into discussions or use as a meeting icebreaker without making a big fuss about it. So, if you’re looking for some ideas and inspiration on how to help team members at all levels build empathy for the customer, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down.

You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I see a lot of focus on building empathy with customer-facing teams. This makes sense, but we can’t forget that customer-centered culture is about rallying an entire organization around the customer, not just a few select teams. If those on the front lines are very much in touch with the context of customers’ lives, able to relate to them, and demonstrate this through their actions, then that’s all great, but it will have a limited impact if in other parts of the business, those who are defining experiences, building platforms, or making strategic decisions are unable to relate to the customer at all.

So I’ve built this list of suggested activities with a wide ranging audience in mind. I’m also of the opinion that it’s difficult to teach empathy as a concept and much more effective to gently guide people to an aha moment where they see this for themselves. Once people connect with what it means to feel empathy towards a customer, then it’s about helping them flex and train this muscle so they know when and how to use it. With that, let’s dive into the first activity.

This is a bit of a fun one. This activity involves explaining a modern object like a TV, a car, or a cell phone to someone who lived 200 years ago. Divide your group into teams of two. Have one person roleplay the modern day person describing the object and the other person asking questions based on the perspective of someone who lived 200 years ago.

It could even be 500 years ago if you want to. After a few minutes, ask them to swap roles. When you wrap up, ask the group how it felt to put themselves in the shoes of another person who lived so long ago, and also what it was like trying to explain something to someone who has a completely different context for the world. The idea is to get participants thinking about context and understanding others.

During your debrief discussion, connect the activity back to your customer base by asking participants what disconnects might exist between their frame of reference and that of your typical customer. This is a great one for a meeting where you are already pulling the team mindset away from their day-to-day activities. In that setting, this activity can be a nice icebreaker because it’s quite a quick one. I also think it works with a broad audience, from customer service reps to executives.

It’s quirky and fun. Just make sure that your group is in the right mindset. The next activity requires a bit of preparation, but it’s totally worth it. And it’s another great activity for a broad, diverse group of participants.

First, develop some customer personas. If you’re unsure about what customer personas are, be sure to check out episode 40. Next, identify a typical job to be done, or a customer journey, for this persona, and then a possible hurdle or a challenge that the persona might face. When you get your group of participants together, divide them into teams of four to five people.

Ask one person within the team to assume the role of the persona. This team member will read the persona example and explain the background information and scenario to others in their team. Then the team has the opportunity to ask questions and get to know our pretend customer before working on a course of action for how to help with the issue that this pretend customer is facing along their journey. At the end of the activity, each team can present their persona and the suggested next steps to the other groups.

During the debrief, be sure to probe with questions about how the team understood and related to the customer’s wants, needs, feelings, and expectations, as well as how this influenced their course of action. This particular activity requires a little more time to facilitate than the first example activity, so it’s an excellent one for a team off-site or when you have the luxury of time. When preparing for this, remember that you should have as many personas and corresponding journey challenges as there are teams. Your marketing department might have some personas on hand so that you don’t have to start this from scratch.

My third and final activity is the Goldilocks of empathy building activities. I think it works well with nearly any audience and it’s something that you can facilitate in 10 to 15 minutes or you can easily turn it into a longer activity with an in-depth follow-up discussion. For this one, ask your participants to write down the most ridiculous or outlandish customer request they’ve ever heard. It could be something they’ve heard from one of your customers or something they’ve seen or heard in their own personal experience as a consumer.

After they’ve written down their outlandish customer request in a piece of paper, they should pass this to the person to their right who now needs to read the request and come up with a backstory that justifies a seemingly strange request. I’ll give you an example just for context so you can see how this works. Let’s say that you’re participating in this activity and you receive a piece of paper from your colleague about a scenario involving a customer who’s making a scene at a local pizzeria because they’re insisting that their pizza be cut into squares instead of the traditional pizza wedges. It doesn’t sound particularly logical, but that’s not the point.

You are now tasked with inventing a backstory to justify this request. Your answer might be that the customer has a fussy eater child at home who refuses to eat pizza and wedge slices, or that the customer has a phobia of pizza wedges. The reasoning can be as outlandish as the customer request itself. It doesn’t matter.

The point is to get people thinking about and relating to what might have motivated an otherwise bizarre sounding customer request, and then empathize with the customer, understanding that everybody has a backstory and that we’re all humans. To close out this activity, ask participants to turn to the person who gave them the customer request scenario and explain the reasoning that they came up with. It can also be fun to pick a few participants to share their examples and discuss as a group. This activity can be adapted to almost any environment or audience.

It works really well as an icebreaker for a small group or as a longer activity if you want to integrate a nice reflective discussion at the end. So there you have it, three activities to help foster empathy among your team. Let me know if you try any of these out. I’d love to hear about the results.

If you’re looking for help getting teams to relate to the customer, please get in touch. I do a lot of work in this space, especially with leadership teams, and I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

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See you then.