Part 1 defines empathy and introduces the idea that empathy is about a shared experience. Now for the connection to Empathy Exercises.
Why do we like Monopoly?
Monopoly is fun because you get to experience what it is like to own and develop property. You may not have all of the challenges that property brings, like property repairs or loud tenants, but you get to experience enough to imagine how difficult it is.
It's a simulation of what life would be like if you were a landlord and property developer.
Games like this (simulation games) have two objectives:
- You learn what you need to do to win
- You learn about the premise of the game through the experience
To win Monopoly, you have to be the last man standing and own pretty much everything (or bump your competitors out of business).
What you learn in the experience of the game of Monopoly:
- How to buy property
- That location matters
- What success means in the land development/property business
- How to balance income and expenses
- When to build vs buy
- When it is a good time to mortgage
- When cash is king but credit may be a better idea
We find Monopoly fun because it allows us each to walk a bit in someone else's shoes. Sure, it doesn't exactly replicate what it means to develop property, but it gives you a "good enough" idea.
What if you could play a game like this to better understand your customers and prospects and what they experience with your products?
That's Empathy Exercises. But how does it work?
Let’s say you have a group of health insurance product managers who want to create a new insurance product that the average person with little understanding of insurance could "get," use and buy without a lot of background research. Sure, they would do some research about their customers to identify the base need. The product would be empathetic that way. But the research wouldn't necessarily identify the experiential challenge people have with insurance overall.
From research I've worked on in the past, the main challenge of health insurance is that most people don’t understand the terminology and how it works. The audience ranges in their knowledge of insurance, but most don’t understand it. Many fear it, find it confusing, and are afraid to make a decision. Some scare themselves in the process before they get started. And if they do make a decision, they often aren’t at ease with it.
What’s the best way to get a set of insurance product and marketing managers to understand how their customers may be feeling? To feel empathy for them? One solution: have them play a game that they never played before.
Let’s say the group of managers you work with have never played rugby. They don’t know the sport - it is completely new to them. What if you had them jump in and play with minimal instruction before the start? You had them learn the game as they played.
How would this experience help product managers have more empathy for their customers? The common/shared experience would be both the marketers/product managers and their customers experiencing a situation with new and unfamiliar terminology that some, but not all, understand. They are in the middle of a game/experience with unclear and unknown rules - that the officials know and understand, but they don't share that knowledge with you. This would cause people to not be able to make quick decisions or to feel like they are making an uninformed or bad decision.
After that game, one would assume that the product managers would be able to better relate to their customers because they would have experienced a situation that is shared with their customers. The experience is a metaphor of sorts. Buying insurance is like playing rugby without knowing the rules.
That's powerful. And that would allow the product managers to create a product that is easy to understand and familiar, recalling the experience with rugby and the challenges to just get through the game. And the marketers would be able to sell something in a more straightforward way, remembering that special terms make it harder to understand what to do and what's expected. Oh - and to keep the rules simple.
How the game stops pity
Pity would be expressed by the product managers looking at the customers, thinking, "Poor them!" There is no connection with the customers. But after the shared experience of a game, the product managers would understand what unites them together. And I've posted other pieces that address pity and why it prevents you from creating a product or understanding your customers. It really is about the connection.
What if you could have a custom game that would allow your team to feel empathy for your customers and prospects? To simulate for your team, in a game like Monopoly, what they experience?
This exists already for virtual teams and could be augmented for customer service teams. But there is more. The process to create the virtual team game will be outlined in a blog post coming soon.
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