Do you love your customers? Pity vs. Empathy and Compassion.

We all like to think we love our customers, but if we really loved our customers we’d feel:

• empathy for them regarding their challenges and issues and
• the compassion required ready to help them solve their problems

We’d create products and services to make their lives better. We’d communicate with them not with the intent to sell, but with the intent to help them lead a better life, knowing that our products could offer them that. We’d want to collaborate with them to create solutions. We’d welcome their calls.

 

As I was working on the product Empathy Exercises today, I was contemplating what it means to feel pity for someone versus empathy and compassion. To start, there is a range of emotion in this category:

 

Pity > Sympathy > Empathy > Compassion

 

Pity is the most detached emotion to feel for others; compassion is the most engaged and involved. UX and CX work centers around empathy and compassion. Products are typically forged in those emotional expressions, as is marketing. So I could better understand why people need Empathy Exercises, I decided today to research pity and understand more about what it really is. 

 

I learned that pity as an emotion carries a lot of baggage. It starts like any of its brethren expressions with sorrow and sadness, but it takes an odd turn. Some key characteristics that differentiate pity from its brethren:

• With pity, you are removed from the subject 
• When you feel pity, you really don’t think the subject can fix the situation he is in his or herself
• And that attitude is condescending
• Condescension invokes contempt, or anger and disgust
• And those negative emotions encourage one to objectify another person

If you don’t think someone can solve their own problems, obviously, you aren’t seeing the possibility of that person’s full potential. You are objectifying that person in the same way a man objectifies a woman when he sees her as a sex object.

 

How do you know if you feel pity or empathy and compassion for your customer? 

 

Let’s look at the chart below:

 

 

 

Sure, we all can flip between both sides of the chart at any time. But the key question remains - do you love your customers? If respect is there, I’d say love is there, so yes, you do. Otherwise, you may want to explore why you feel pity for them. Do you not really understand their problems? Are you not able to relate to them? Is there a connection missing? Do you just not like them as people? 

 

Unforgettable experiences are created when you are authentic. And you are most authentic as a person or company when you feel empathy and compassion for your customer. If you feel pity and it approaches contempt, there is no way to create an unforgettable experience. You are authentic, but not in the right mindset to help a customer. You really need at least empathy to do that. More coming on this soon!

Comments

[Jasmine]

Thanks for such an beautiful article....I work in BPO where we face many queries of the customers....So this post is very helpful in making me know my kind of customer and some ways are gather into mind on how to handle such customers.