How to win customer loyalty with empathy in your customer experience

As a customer experience (CX) leader, it's not all that difficult to put yourself in the mindset of your customers. Leaders are also consumers, which means you have firsthand experiences to draw from. The ability to maintain focus on the perspective of the customer, and to demonstrate an understanding of their needs through the delivery of empathetic customer experiences, can have a significant positive impact on customer loyalty.

Imagine waiting in a long line with a faulty product and a crumpled receipt in your hands. The last thing you want to be greeted with at the end of the queue is a dismissive tone from those who have the power to ease your frustration. Yes, you may want a working product or a refund — but you also want the brand to appreciate that the faulty product made for an underwhelming gift. Additionally, you had to drive back across the city to make the return and the slow line made you late for another commitment. Customers want to feel understood and how brands act in moments like these carries weight. This is as true in-store as it is online, in-app or on the phone with your support team.

Empathy plays an important role in establishing and strengthening loyalty across the entire customer experience. However, Forrester, in their report, Five Best Practices To Design For Empathy In Digital Experiences, suggests that brands often overlook how empathy can be embedded in their digital experiences. "Companies that ignore empathy in digital experiences put customer trust and loyalty at risk," the report asserts.

Whether you're designing outdoor apparel in such a way that shows you understand your customers' pain points, fine-tuning your chatbot to improve its emotional intelligence or revamping your mobile app to create a more intuitive user experience, applied empathy makes customers feel like you're out to make their lives easier. Let's take a closer look at the link between empathy and emotional connection, examples of empathy in customer experience and techniques for factoring empathy into your own business.

Foster emotional connection by embedding empathy in your customer experience

Empathy is generally described as the ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of another. Emotional connection, meanwhile, is the positive sentiment a customer feels toward a brand. The aforementioned Forrester report notes, "While building empathy in the research phase is crucial to understand customers, demonstrating empathy in the experiences shapes customers' perceptions and builds emotional connections." In other words, delivering experiences that show you're accounting for the customer's perspective can foster positive sentiment.

There's clear data that underlines the importance of establishing an emotional connection: In a survey of nine thousand consumers, Netimperative found that 82% of consumers who have a strong emotional attachment would always opt to purchase from the brand they are loyal to when making purchasing decisions. Elsewhere, a Gallup poll revealed that companies that establish an emotional connection outperform the sales growth of their competitors by 85%.

Forrester's report goes a step further to link emotional connection with empathy. The analyst firm introduces the concept of "levers of trust" — characteristics that customers base their purchasing decisions on, like the degree to which a brand demonstrates accountability, competence, consistency, dependability, empathy, integrity and transparency. Of these seven levers, it is only empathy that "directly tackles emotional connections," which are the "biggest driver of loyalty."

Consider a brand that sells clothing that is made ethically and sustainably, and that this brand differentiates themselves from competitors with its unyielding focus on social and environmental good. Customers become customers because they feel that their values are aligned with the brand's. As soon as they place an order, they receive a notification that explains when the order will be delivered, and crucially, that the delivery will arrive via electric vehicle and that they will be offsetting any other environmental impact related to the order. Here, the brand is delivering upon the values that attracted the customer in the first place, showing that they understand their customers and likely forming an important emotional connection.

Even something as seemingly straightforward as listening to the customers who reach out via your support channels, and doing what you can to prevent them from having to repeat themselves or bounce from one department to another, can make a big difference. If you make your customers think, 'that was easier than I expected,' you're creating a positive experience that shows empathy.

Empathy throughout your customer experience can engender emotional connection, and as a result, loyalty. As CX leaders know all too well, loyal customers are likely to be repeat customers: Bain & Company found that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by up to 85%.

Talkable empathy can be a differentiator

Joining us on our podcast, Questions for now, CX expert and author of Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers with Word-of-Mouth, Jay Baer, brought up the concept of talkable empathy. Put simply, it's the idea that delivering an empathetic experience can lead to positive word of mouth. "Somewhere along the way we lost our way and we find ourselves [...] in an era of empathy deficit," Baer explained. This deficit creates an opportunity for brands that are willing to embed empathy into their service delivery.

Examples of talkable empathy in customer experience

There were several examples of talkable empathy from our podcast episode, How can brands deliver experiences that create loyal customer advocates?, shared by Jay Baer, as well as Ravjiv Dhand, regional vice president for Asia Pacific and Africa at TELUS Digital, and Brittany Hodak, customer experience speaker and author of Creating Superfans: How To Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates.

Baer pointed to online pet supply retailer, Chewy, as a brand with "an unyielding commitment to empathy that nobody else can match." He went on to explain that if you're a Chewy customer and they find out that your pet has passed away, they go out of their way to show that they feel your pain. "They have a thousand oil painters on staff. They will go on social [media] and they will find a picture of your pet," have their team paint your pet and then ship the painting directly to your house with a handwritten note — all without the customer having to ask or pay any sort of fee. Baer added, rhetorically, "Will the recipient of this box ever spend even a penny on pet supplies with any other provider for the rest of their lives?"

Dhand, meanwhile, shared an example of talkable empathy that came from TELUS Digital supporting a medical device company. Team members "collaborated closely to help an elderly widowed customer who was calling in for an issue with her device, which was preventing her from tracking her health." After trying to troubleshoot the out of warranty device herself, the customer was offered a discount for a new device. "Unfortunately," Dhand continued, "the customer could not afford the new device, even with the discount due to her high medical bills." The customer was provided a replacement device as a special exception, and as a result, she was "so delighted that she called to share her feedback, stating no one has ever shared such love and support to her."

Speaking about her experience visiting the LEGOLAND Florida Resort with her young family, Hodak highlighted a somewhat surprising example of a slow elevator at the vacation destination: "We've been to LEGOLAND a bunch of times. I've got two little boys and they love it. And there is an elevator there that is probably their favorite part of the entire resort." Hodak goes on to explain that the elevator has fun lights, music and LEGO decals. Given the slow nature of the elevator, Hodak said it "should have been a disaster, but instead of me being annoyed at how small or how slow this elevator was, it took me three solid days to notice. And once I noticed, I didn't mind because they had taken this small elevator and transformed it into an experience."

Each of these businesses have designed for empathy, and as a result, distinguished themselves from their competitors.

Best practices for creating an empathic customer experience

As Jay Baer put it, you can't just decide, "Okay, let's be empathetic tomorrow." Rather, for customers to feel understood, they must truly be understood. With that said, let's take a closer look at some of the best practices for creating empathetic moments in your customer experience.

Develop a deep understanding of your customers

If empathy is about conveying understanding, it stands to reason that you must understand your customers. Developing that understanding goes beyond listening to what customers are saying in one-to-one customer service interactions. To truly understand your customers, their wants, needs and frustrations, brands must develop strategies for generating insights from a number of different sources, both direct (like surveys) and indirect (like call logs, interactions with chatbots, website heatmaps and social media posts). A data-driven approach to CX will help you to form a clearer picture for your customers and their journeys, making it easier for you to identify opportunities to demonstrate your alignment with their interests.

Consult with customers throughout the design process

As Forrester's report on designing for empathy points out, "Many teams treat empathizing with the people you design for as a check-the-box exercise." To avoid this common misstep, brands can involve those who they are designing for — their customers — throughout the process. Conducting user experience tests (also called usability tests), interviews and focus groups on an ongoing basis can help brands in tailoring solutions to customer needs. The key, of course, is to maintain these feedback loops so that you can align with the customer perspective and discover opportunities for empathy both big and small. Even changes that are easy to implement, like incorporating inclusive language, can show you're looking out for your customers.

Share insights, overcome internal silos

The insights you glean from diving into your various data sources and customer consultations should be shared within your organization. The conclusion that one team, or one team member, comes to after learning about a customer pain point might differ dramatically from your own. Your customer experience team might leverage an insight to revamp agent-facing wikis for customer support, whereas your marketing team might use that same insight to revamp your messaging or even your product offering. Remember that creating empathetic moments is not a one and done exercise — diverse perspectives can lead to more ideas to show customer understanding throughout the customer journey.

Win customer loyalty with empathy in your customer experience

Demonstrating empathy in your customer experience shouldn't be seen as merely making your customers feel warm and fuzzy. It's an essential characteristic of a leading CX program with the potential of differentiating you from your competitors and fostering customer loyalty.

While we've shared some best practices with you, there's more depth we can offer through partnership. If you're looking to design for empathy and put these techniques to use, contact our sales team today.