I had a wonderful time at the Big Design Dallas 2018 conference - as always! They do a great job organizing and have wonderful speakers participating. I had a great time and got a lot out of it.
Access the slides that I created for the presentation.
Here is an audio recording of the talk:
My grandmother died when I was 10.
My mother had a difficult time overcoming the loss of her mother, so she mourned by playing video games. We would play games all day, every day. I thought I hit the jackpot!
But after about a month solid of this, I wanted to go outside and do something.
Heck, it was summer vacation! I couldn't just play video games inside all summer, even though, sadly, that’s all she really wanted to do. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I went to the only place I could go by myself unsupervised at 10 – the local library.
I used to go there every few days to find something to read to take a break from the games. But I didn’t read in great lighting, and often read in interesting positions. My favorite position was hanging my head upside down from the seat of couch, putting my feet where my head and neck should be. My dad used to threaten that if I kept it up, I’d get poor vision. He didn’t realize how prophetic he was.
I continued reading in these weird positions every day until I was 12/13 years old and my eyesight got progressively worse - 20/200 vision in one eye and 20/300 vision in the other. No one knew this was happening because I never really complained about it. Then again, I thought poor eyesight was normal and didn’t really notice it. In school, I worked around my fading eyesight by closely listening to the teachers and focused all my attention to what they were saying.
After a while, I realized I didn’t really need to take notes because I could remember exactly what they said. This overcompensation with listening to balance my poor vision helped me develop an amazing memory. And by mapping what was in my notes with what I remembered that they said in class, I tested very well. With all As, I figured I was doing something right.
However, when it came to my social life, that was a different story.
I had a hard time fitting in, so when I did find a group to hang out with, I was a little desperate to be accepted. I wanted to be the “perfect friend” and not say or do anything wrong. So I would spend a lot of time watching from the sidelines, observing people’s actions, basically discovering what made people tick like a little psychologist.
I became a student of what it means to listen – listen to words, listen to actions, listen to behaviors. And I kept using this approach when I met new people because it worked.
Today, I want to share some tips on how to become a better listener, expand your definition of listening, and build empathy through conversations. Together, these will help you design better conversations and customer experiences, which will improve your company’s customer relationships and ultimately, help your company make more money.
We don’t realize that the motivation behind our actions speaks volumes about our true purpose. Intent is important, especially when it comes to listening and curiosity.
One example of listening with curiosity is a meditation that I’ll do to ground me using my senses starting with sight, then smell, then touch, then listening. I’ll sit in the same place to meditate, so my experience each time is more or less the same, except for listening. The sounds I hear always change. It’s like I’m having a type of conversation with my apartment and developing a relationship with my space, always discovering something new. Inside my apartment I’ll hear the air vents humming or the dishwasher running, and sometimes outside of my apartment I’ll hear the birds singing, dogs barking in the hallway, construction, or my neighbors doing something. Sound waves can travel very far, giving me a lot of information…but it’s not like I’m asking for it…it just comes.
When I’m being present and allowing information to just come to me, it’s the same experience as when I’m listening to understand rather than listening to respond in a conversation. There is a natural curiosity when you listen to understand that can change a conversation’s tone and immediately help you to become a better listener.
I think it’s because I’m focused on gathering information, like the discovery phase of a project.
You don’t yet have any answers. You’re curious, learning and accepting the information that’s being provided. Sometimes I’ll look at this as a gift someone is sharing with me and this really shifts my perspective about what I’m receiving.
But let’s contrast that with listening to respond where you’re focused on explaining your thoughts and your message.
One scenario where I’m particularly guilty of listening to respond is when I’m brainstorming with a team. I’ll get an idea and I’m so excited to communicate it that I blurt it out, interrupting everyone. I think I’m helping the brainstorming process, but I just communicated through my actions that I’m more concerned about sharing my idea than listening to what others have just contributed. It’s not intentional, not mean-spirited, but that’s what I just did.
When we interrupt others, we communicate through our actions that we’re not really concerned with what they have to say. Our ideas come first.
I think sometimes we often do this in companies– we get so focused on making sure our message is heard and we’re noticed, that we forget to be curious to listen to customer feedback.
Lynn Borton hosts a talk show in Virginia about curiosity, called Choose to be Curious. I first met Lynn a few years ago when I was co-hosting a podcast for a women’s leadership site. She introduced me to the idea of curiosity as a discipline. She’s a lovely person precisely for this reason – she’s genuinely interested – or curious – in who you are, what you do, and why.
Lynn sees listening as a way to be open to learn new perspectives. When you are learning, typically you aren’t judging the information you receive as right or wrong. It just is. The earth is the third rock from the sun. Water is wet. My client would prefer if I offered an online course so he could attend when he wants.
I can see how the phrase “the customer is always right,” is connected to this idea. I would challenge that it’s not about the customer being right or wrong, or winning or losing, I mean, who wins a conversation?
But the challenge the business owner has is to not be defensive and instead be curious and open to consider the problem through the customer’s perspective and create a solution that solves that problem.
Julian Treasure is an expert on listening. He has written many books and has given a few TED talks about it. In his view, we Westerners are poor listeners because our culture doesn’t support it. He identified 4 main communication methods taught in school: reading, writing, speaking and listening. We’ll spend a lot of time learning how to read, a good amount of time learning how to write, a class here or there about public speaking or debate or something like that, and for listening, well, we just don’t practice that very much.
How many of you remember listening comprehension activities in school? What were they like for you? I know what they were like for me. The teacher would play a clip on a tape recorder or read a paragraph aloud. We listened. Then we answered a few multiple-choice questions to confirm that we understood what we just heard. We would then be graded, or rewarded, for answering correctly.
That model carried through to the discipline style of most teachers. The kids who didn’t follow instructions were punished in some way – yelled at, told to go to the office, whatever was suitable; the ones who did listen were rewarded with a complement, or left alone. The focus of listening was about obedience and avoiding consequences, not gaining insights into why we needed to do something, or more simply, to satisfy curiosity.
Luckily, I got more formal listening training in 7th grade. Our reading teacher, Mr. Kennedy had us listen to radio programs from the 1930s and 40s. Yes, radio programs. We would listen to the various dramatizations and then discuss insights into the characters and the storylines. He taught us that asking “why” was at the core of listening. Also we needed to enjoy what we are doing. Without curiosity or enjoyment, we’re only hearing to obey.
For example, when we were kids, a teacher would tell us to stand in a straight line. We would then do what we were told, either out of habit, fear of punishment, or reflex. No one ever questioned the teacher as to why we needed to stand in line. We were more concerned about the consequences of NOT being in the line.
This grows with us into adulthood. If there are no consequences for actions, no reason for curiosity, no reason for enjoyment, adults definitely don’t listen and follow instructions, especially to stand in a straight line.
I used to manage crowds at a large art museum in Boston. I worked in the ticket booth, and the event managers would send me out to manage the lines. I guess my voice carried and sounded authoritative. Museum management was concerned about people blocking the corridors because it was a fire code violation.
But it wasn’t easy to get a group of adults to stand in a single file line. I mean, it was like managing a pile of marbles, even with stanchions. They were in clumps of 3-4 people abreast, scattered everywhere.
The problem wasn’t that they were defiant; there were no motivations or consequences for them to stand in a single file line.
They only wanted to hear a lecture or see a movie, and didn’t care that museum management was worried about fire codes.
And even then, what was I going to do to them? Not let them into the lecture they already bought tickets to hear?
There are at least 7 official types of listening – many of them overlap. We already discussed listening to respond versus listening to understand.
- We have active listening, which of many of you already know, which could be synonymous with listening to understand. Personally, I’m not a fan of active listening mainly because I have observed the practice abused too many times. The listener will make the speaker feel heard, but the listener will later demonstrate through his actions that he didn’t really hear him. When I practice active listening, I’ll repeat back to the speaker what I heard in my own words to prove that I am indeed listening and understanding. To me, that is more representative of the practice.
- There is Appreciative Listening where the listener is focused on the speaker, looking to enjoy the story, music, or information being communicated. This is like the radio programs.
- Critical Listening is where you analyze what the speaker is saying and determine his agenda. You may identify key points to solidify your own opinion.
- Relationship Listening is known as therapeutic or empathetic listening. Or listening to understand. You may be providing a friend emotional support, but the main goal is to build trust for open communication.
- Discriminative Listening is when you look past the words you hear to detect the underlying message. This with relationship listening are the approaches we need when we are trying to understand our customers.
Unfortunately, we learn these methods socially, or what many would say “naturally” and think that’s enough – and that’s the problem.
If we need to take formal grammar classes to speak and write English well, shouldn’t it logically follow that we need formal training for listening?
Julian Treasure tries to fix that by providing a number of acronyms to help you listen better, like:
- RASA - a Sanskrit word for juice or essence, standing for Receive, Appreciate, Summary, Ask –
- or HARAH – humility, awareness, respect, attention, humor –
- or the 4Cs – commitment, consciousness, compassion, curiosity.
(from Julian Treasure's book, How to be Heard)
These are all great ways to remember actions you can take to improve your listening.
Personally, I’m usually not great at remembering these types of words, so the best perspectives for listening that I got from him are first, don’t assume that we all listen the same way and have the same listening experience. We don’t. I think this is why you can never be too clear in how you communicate.
Everyone’s life is different, and each person brings their own experience to a conversation, and therefore their own interpretations. Everyone takes away from a conversation what they want and that’s hard to manage.
Second, you can’t control the information you get from someone else. Don’t enter a conversation with expectations for what you are going to get out of it. You may get something you didn’t expect – or something beyond what you expected.
Third, communication is personal and messy and involves interaction with others. Structured flows and experiences and linear thinking won’t necessarily help you establish a conversation. People don’t give neatly packaged groups of facts. You get what they give through banter and trial and error.
Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT, has a similar message. In one TED Talk, she talks about communication through new media and how we edit and censor ourselves, which isn’t a very human way to communicate in the first place.
One example she gives includes texting and how you’ll see someone typing a response with the dot dot dot for what seems like an eternity, only to read “Yes.”
We know that is edited conversation, trying not to be messy but direct, polite and to the point. But if you think about it, this type of interaction introduces a different type of communication. Should you listen to the action for long typing to determine if there is more to the message? Or simply the text someone sent? Which is more meaningful to the person and to you?
It’s not that straightforward.
In our digital age with the various communication styles available, we may like to have cleaner communications and conversations, but is that really how we work as humans?
This is why I think it may be time for us to expand our definition of conversations beyond verbal or written communication.
A conversation is really an interaction between two people or entities that build a relationship….it could be through an online app, social media engagement, a focus group, survey, purchase activity, or a support center call. This means that listening should include observing. And we shouldn’t forget that actions speak louder than words.
Our customer’s communication comes through metrics and results. That’s why we should approach them with curiosity – it’s a way for us to listen. And sometimes in business we get so focused on the bottom line or we want to prove that we were right that we often miss what our customers are really telling us in that data. We overlook trends that may not fit our narratives or contradict our understanding of our customers. We may dismiss outlier data as a fluke because it doesn’t support the main story that we or our managers want to see. But in doing this, we miss key insights that lead us to customer experience nirvana, or empathy.
I know that empathy doesn't emerge from stats. It really starts inside your organization. We all like to think that our employees love our customers, but do they? I mean, do they talk about them behind their backs? Is respect there? Does your team think your customers are generally smart and capable people who make great decisions?
If you listen to your team and observe their actions you can discover if your team even likes your customers or do they feel pity and contempt for them?
You see, pity to compassion is a sliding scale. With pity you feel a type of contempt and believe that your customer got themselves into their unfortunate situation and probably can’t help themselves get out of it even if they wanted to. If you feel sympathy, you feel bad for someone for getting into that situation, but you aren’t up to the task to help them solve their problem. If you feel empathy, you can feel your customer’s feelings and understand their emotions. There isn’t really a desire to help – the focus is on understanding. If you feel compassion, you don’t care how your customer got into that situation, but you can understand how they are feeling objectively and want to help them solve their problem.
It makes you wonder if we should instead be focused on compassion rather than empathy.
Empathy is defined as “the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does” which is the problem with empathy in a nutshell. No two people have the same shared experience, and no one really knows what someone else is feeling, which is why connection with other people is hard.
But it gets even more complex because there isn’t just one type of empathy….there are 3 (or possibly more if the researchers find them in the future):
- Emotional empathy: literally feeling another's emotions. If you believe in empaths, this is their experience.
- Compassionate empathy: ability to recognize another's emotional state, feel in tune with it, and if it is a negative/distressful emotion, feel and show appropriate concern.
- Cognitive empathy: see things from another's point of view by putting yourself in someone else's shoes. This is what many of us may consider to be empathy, but it’s slightly different. There is a removed quality about this form of empathy because it isn’t based in experiencing emotions, but logically understanding them.
To illustrate the differences, let’s say you are watching a romantic love story and the characters have to break up.
If you are watching it with cognitive empathy, you may feel bad, but know that it is a movie and will turn out just fine. You may even wonder if the characters are meant for each other anyway. If you felt compassionate empathy, you’d feel concerned about the split and want to console the characters with a hug. If you were experiencing emotional empathy, you would cry with the characters and literally feel their pain.
You can see why psychologists and researchers say that empathy is not “the cure.” It seems that empathy makes the situation more complicated.
Harvard Business Review published the findings of a controversial study by Imperial College’s Johannes Hattula and his coresearchers Walter Herzog, Darren Dahl, and Sven Reinecke, which disputed using empathy in marketing. They asked marketing managers to describe a typical customer and imagine that person’s thoughts and reactions when creating plans and programs. The result?
“The more empathetic managers were, the more they used their personal preferences to predict what customers would want. Another key finding that should get people’s attention is that the more empathetic the managers were, the more they ignored the market research on customers that we provided them.”
Arguably, the research didn’t reflect empathy in the sense we may want it to, but it did reflect empathy according to the formal definitions – the act of coming to experience the world as you believe someone else does. And that’s how these marketing managers saw the world – not based on research, not on any level of connection of customers, but their own insights based on their own experiences.
Psychology researcher, Paul Bloom, wrote a book called Against Empathy. He mentions a few ways to look at empathy – for moral purposes, for connection, or to understand someone else. But at the raw definition, if you have empathy for someone who is feeling bad, then you feel bad too and is that useful? To him, this why compassion is better.
He shares an example of how you need to be caring yet emotionally neutral to comfort a scared child. But what he doesn’t get into is the motivation for why you are comforting the child in the first place. One could argue that you are comforting the child because at some point you were that child. You may have been afraid of the dark, the thunder, what’s under the bed or in the closet. This helps you relate to that child’s fear so you can help the child. You don’t need to directly feel that child’s emotions at that time, but you do need to understand them through your own personal experience to provide appropriate assistance.
In this case, empathy helps us understand what someone is feeling and thinking and gain insight into their motivations for their actions; compassion gives us the distance to help them solve their problem.
Some psychologists and neuroscientists believe that compassion and empathy are intertwined. Lynn E. O’Connor and Jack W. Berry wrote, “We can’t feel compassion without first feeling emotional empathy. Indeed compassion is the extension of emotional empathy by means of cognitive processes.” (from Bloom, Against Empathy)
This is why I propose a different definition of empathy - an attempt at understanding someone else’s emotional situation by relating through a similar physical and emotional event that occurred in their own life.
Here’s an example….let's say your best friend's dog passed away and your friend was very close to her dog. Let's say your pet hamster passed away, but you weren't particularly close to your hamster (it was one of 20 anyway). You can't say with any validity to your friend that you understand what she is going through. Sure, you both lost a pet, but you both didn't lose the same type of relationship with that pet. But let's say a couple of years earlier, you lost a cat and you were very close to that cat. You could say to your friend that you understand what she is going through. You both lost a pet, you both lost a close relationship with your pet, and there may be some differences between what you are both feeling because the animal is different.
When you are trying to connect with someone through empathy, you can’t simply recall the same exact situation in your life to understand how that person feels – and that’s part of the confusion. You review similar life events and find one that seems to have the same emotional severity for comparison.
This relates back to the fearful child. You can relate to the fearful child because you were one too. The motivation for the fear may have been different, but you know what it means to be a child afraid.
Let’s apply this to designing an experience that will build a relationship.
Here’s a process that I use when I do this.
- Research and understand your audience - This is true for anything. We don’t want to be like those marketers from the HBR study. Leverage customer data – quantitative and qualitative - as much as possible.
- Identify the emotional issue – First, identify the challenge that your customers are having and then determine the emotions they may be feeling about it. Use real data as much as possible. Without considering emotions, you may be fixing a purely transactional problem and that won’t necessarily help you build a relationship.
- Find a connection to what your customers are experiencing – Identify events in your own life that are comparable emotionally and physically, like the friend who lost the dog or comforting the child. This is the hardest part.
- Determine actionable ways to connect to your customers to solve their problem – Using what you discovered in the previous step, determine which strategies and tactics could connect with your customer’s emotions to create a positive experience and solve their problem. As always, be sure you reference customer data.
For this first example, I didn’t have this tool available at the time, so this is a hybrid theoretical/practical discussion.
Most consumers are petrified of health insurance. I witnessed this a while ago during a usability study. The participants openly admitted to being afraid to use an online tool to find a plan – even for the study. They thought that by choosing the wrong coverage they would either pay too much and throw money away or not spend enough money and have too little coverage if there was an accident. They were so scared that they were paralyzed to even get started and had no idea where to begin their analysis. Calling an agent for help wasn’t an option because they didn’t even know what to ask.
Extreme fear and frustration around the insurance business created the emotional issue. And this caused confusion – because they were experiencing two emotions at the same time.
The insurance product managers had a hard time accepting these insights. Again, I didn’t have this tool at the time, but if I did, I probably would have encouraged them to experience working within a system without understanding the rules.
We sometimes forget that health insurance is a system and making the wrong decision in any system can be costly.
Similarly, games are a type of system – there are spoken and unspoken rules and if you don’t know them, there can be risks and consequences, even as severe as injury. My favorite example of trying to understand a confusing system is playing a game of rugby without really understanding the rules.
Rugby can be a confusing game for Americans. We are definitely not familiar with it. But some of my friends in a high school summer program already knew how to play, and told me that it would be “easy.” I figured why not? As we were organizing the game, the other team cleverly had this muscular 6 ft tall guy cover me. I was petrified that if he tackled me, I’d be squished. I avoided him the entire game until one of my teammates threw me the ball out of desperation. I had a clear shot to the goal. But I saw the big guy running towards me for the tackle, so I ran away from the goal, off the field, across the street, and into the library, where I finally felt safe.
I think this example is fitting because it illustrates how extreme fear and frustration can cause an extreme escape reaction. It almost explains why many people avoid dealing with health insurance – the prospect of choosing the wrong carrier or plan is so scary that you want to hide and feel safe. If these health insurance product managers played an intense game like rugby without knowing the rules, they would be participating in a system that could endanger their well-being. A little like insurance.
A severe consequence of not understanding the rules of insurance could mean not being treated for an ailment or a hospital kicking you out or owing thousands of dollars. That is downright scary.
By understanding the consequences of not understanding the rules of a complex system could have helped the product managers feel empathetic towards their scared, angry, frustrated customers and improve their communications and interactions.
Some concrete ways that the insurance product managers could have helped people overcome their fears and anger:
- Explain how insurance works and provide an overview of healthcare legislation in plain English
- Explain why people need health insurance – knowing why gives context and could help them alleviate fear
- Provide tips for what they should be looking for in a plan, including the relationship between deductibles, office visits, and premiums.
As we know, education builds trust with customers, reduces anger and frustration, and removes the mystery which caused the fear.
As a second example, let’s look at how I used this approach to create a content marketing plan for an IT hardware company.
Hardware is a challenging market because there are so many technologies and approaches to solve the same problem, and each brand has its own approach, risks and costs. We were having some challenges trying to increase our market share in the Flash storage market. I decided to talk to sales to learn more about the problem and the IT professionals.
Between their insights, a bunch of past customer data from social media, the web site, and lead gen campaigns, and my own past experience working with IT professionals and interviews with them, I learned:
- IT professionals don’t get the credit they deserve. Marketing gets kudos for new leads. Sales, for revenue. Finance, for savings. But who says yay for IT keeping email up and running all year except that 1 hour on Christmas Day? Instead, they instead get criticized that.
- They have high risk jobs. We forget that work is automated and that a group of servers down for a day could be a very costly productivity loss.
- IT is overhead, which means that costs are always a factor in any decision. As well as reducing IT jobs with increased automation.
- They are a logical group. You need to connect facts very clearly when creating your story for them.
- They care about the business impact of new technologies and shy away from “science fair experiments.” To them, a science fair experiment is a new technology that doesn’t have a well-defined business use case.
- They consider compatibility, ease of use, installation, maintenance – and of course time and cost.
In our conversations we saw two issues happening.
First, there was confusion about flash technology and its business benefits. Sales was hearing a lot of myths. We found it surprising because at this time, flash was a fairly established technology. One logical explanation was that maybe they just weren’t keeping up with changes?
I considered times in my career when I didn’t keep up with industry changes. It would be so embarrassing when I would hear new jargon or terminology that I didn’t know – especially if it was in my direct work. Rather than directly ask someone what a term meant or research it on Google like most people would, I would spew out literal nonsense to pretended that I know what I didn’t know. I think some choose this option because it is a great way to cover ignorance, insecurity, and embarrassment.
After more discussions with the sales team about their experiences, we started realizing that they were experiencing just that - embarrassment.
To help these IT professionals overcome it, we needed to provide them education that wasn’t intimidating or call them out for not understanding flash. And we couldn’t make it only about the technology that they didn’t want to admit that they didn’t understand.
We needed more substance. We also had to have the message come from an expert who they respected.
We decided to make a video with the Director of Product Development and Marketing who was well known and highly respected in the industry. We filmed a casual conversation between him and a colleague in a bar, talking about what Flash technology was, how it worked, and its business benefits. It was casual yet trustworthy. And it presented new information about Flash and dispelled some myths in a non-confrontational way.
The video was well received because it helped people understand the technology without making them feel embarrassed for not keeping up. It reset their knowledge - and that’s exactly what we wanted to achieve.
The second issue was that people weren’t sure what to look for when they were going to buy a flash storage server. So again, confusion, but this time around fear and insecurity.
So again, there was a lot of competition in the market, with all of the brands claiming that they had the best technology.
There was even one competitor that loaned machines to prospective customer data centers so they could try before they buy.
A second factor that isn’t discussed often in IT sales is related to the IT staff keeping their job. Often, they make a “safe choice” regarding technology to reduce downtime and costs because it is a “safe” career choice. A wrong purchase decision could mean downtime or job risk. That’s where more fear originates. A strong technical choice with little risk usually means career safety.
The company I worked for won deals because the sales people would guide these companies in making the final product selection.
They would tell their customers the truth about all of the brands – even their own – which helped these IT professionals overcome their insecurity, and built trust to overcome the fear. But this approach wasn’t very scalable.
However, they were onto something. I think when most professionals are insecure or scared to make a costly decision – either a purchase or implement a new strategy - they research expert advice. I consider an award winner an expert too. As UX professionals, I think we often consult companies like the Nielsen Norman Group or Adaptive Path or Cooper to learn their opinions or check out the Webby award winners for inspiration and to discover trends. I think when you know what market leaders are thinking, it helps you feel more secure and confident in your decisions.
This IT company won a number of awards for their products, especially their Flash solution. And they were often rated top in the Gartner magic quadrant. They were definitely considered a leader and expert who could provide guidance about what to look for in a flash storage solution.
We created a flash storage buyers guide based on our insights into what customer data centers probably need now and in the future.
It was the top performing gated asset for driving leads for the division and got an annual update for the first 3-4 years after it was written. It continued winning.
Just to note, we used a similar approach for another product team in the company and they had similar success – top performing assets that needed to be removed because the content was dated.
By using empathy to connect to our IT audience and their emotional and physical challenges, we were able to create a way for them to connect emotionally with the company and build a trusted relationship that would lead to a sale – and more.
Because I can’t do anything without measuring ….Unfortunately, I’m not aware of many established ways to hold companies accountable for empathy or compassion. That’s something I’m working on now with my clients and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. But to get some ideas out there for discussion, you may want to consider:
- Engagement – social media is great for this. You can demonstrate that you can hold a conversation with your customer and connect to them in some way. If they like, share, or comment a social media post, you a building a connection. If they click thru a link to your site and keep interacting – you have started building a relationship.
- Loyalty – repeat buyers and visitors are in this category. If you can track end-to-end customers who consistently read emails, click to articles, use the product, provide great reviews and recommendations – you found gold!
- Accountability - An accountability metric could be product reviews that validate messaging about the problem you solve and how you solve it. This you could do today.
- Brand and Reputation – As always, net promoter score. You could also leverage accountability, or you could use some more traditional brand recall metrics.
So to wrap up….what did we learn today?
- There are many types of listening – up to 7 - but you’ll only understand someone if you are curious, present, have no expectations, and acknowledge that relationships are built on conversations.
- Listening isn’t just hearing words. We need to expand the definition of listening to include actions and observation – actions speak louder than words. They are the starting point to learn someone’s motivation and find a way to connect to them.
- Empathy will help us understand where someone is coming from. But empathy is more than just emotional connection. We need to share a similar life experience – physically and emotionally - to become compassionate and solve customer problems.
Don’t be like those managers from the study who think they are being empathetic because they think they understand their customers. Your customers aren’t you, you don’t really know what they are experiencing, and that’s why you need data to understand them. Own that through curiosity. You won’t always get it right, but you can come close if you recognize that feeling empathy for your customers can’t be a figment of your imagination and you can relate to your customers through similar physical and emotional events that occurred in your own life.
Empathy is the first step in building a connection and developing compassion to create the solutions customers need and to develop a relationship where they return to experience more.
All relationships are based on the same foundation – listening. Your best source of listening is to use the data footprint your customers leave behind. Start there, and the rest will follow.
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