Register for ICMI’s Contact Center Expo: A Digital Experience on October 6 -7, 202 and attend my September 29 live virtual workshop for free!

Writing to Customers? Empathy is as Important as Accuracy

Whether they’re angry, satisfied, or searching for compensation, customers need to be convinced that we understand and care about them. They need our empathy. When we fail to show empathy, customers resist our solutions, insist on escalations, and contact us repeatedly. When we lack empathy, our customer service responses damage customers’ rapport with the brand. Plus, showing empathy is a form of decency. We owe our customers decency and kindness.

As a contact center manager, you’ve given your agents lots of tools—templates, knowledgebase articles, software—and plenty of training to enable them to write accurate responses to customers. But have you also devoted equal time to help them develop, and express, empathy in their responses?

Because customer service work can be stressful and repetitive, agents’ natural capacity for empathy can suffer on-the-job damage. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to protect and develop agents’ empathy, which is essential to successful customer service. You’ll receive a list of copy-and-paste empathy statements your frontline agents can use, and you’ll learn how develop sincere empathy statements specific to your business.

You will learn:

• How to analyze the customer’s incoming email, chat or tweet for the facts or feelings that call out for empathy
• Which empathy phrases will always sound sincere and which ones can sound cheesy
• How to express empathy without implying that the customer’s right when they’re actually wrong

Hands-on Activities

• Identify your team’s obstacles to expressing empathy to customers and develop a plan for overcoming those obstacles.
• Practice writing empathy statements for your company’s most difficult situations with customers.
• Practice crafting empathy statements that won’t make your legal team nervous.