This week, I thought I’d share with you my thoughts on something I’m very passionate about: Customer Empathy. So, in this post, I’ll explain why this is so central to QQSolutions’ success to date and strategy going forward. And, why customer empathy should be central to YOUR strategy as well!
First, a quote from the tech world, which I really like:
“If you’re not talking to customers, you don’t uncover a lot of opportunity; you just keep upgrading and adding in features that customers may not want. By living the life, you can learn a lot.” — Scott Cook, Founder & Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit
What Is Customer Empathy?
So, what is customer empathy? It’s more than being nice to customers. It’s about “walking in your customer’s shoes.” It’s about understanding what keeps them up at night. And, it’s about being able to describe customers as human beings.
For us at QQSolutions, it’s about understanding our insurance agency customers and their businesses, including their workflows, regulatory and other requirements, their opportunities, their challenges and the pain they go through in deploying technology. We’ve even hired insurance agents as Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to help us better understand the needs of our customers as well as train and help our customers successfully use our technology in their agencies.
There are excellent examples of high-empathy companies. These include JetBlue, for example, whose CEO, David Neeleman, used to routinely board one of their flights at random and talk to customers, even to the point of serving them drinks and snacks. By being a traveler himself on his own airline, he gained real empathy for the traveler, which helped JetBlue become a service leader among airlines. Another great example is IBM, a company that has real empathy for corporate IT managers and delivers solutions and service that address their needs very well indeed.
In Booz & Company’s “The Empathy Engine® — Turning Customer Service Into a Sustainable Advantage”, the authors describe a great example of an insurance company with high customer empathy. “A woman called in and explained that she needed to find a doctor who could perform surgery on her husband. However, she explained, she was no longer a member in the insurance company’s network. She had changed insurance providers, but her current provider had not been able to help her. The representative took time to listen to the woman’s needs and found her a surgeon willing to perform the surgery for free. This is now a story that is told throughout the company as a way to remind representatives to get in their customers’ shoes and solve their problems.”
Here’s an example from the tech world as cited in “Wired to Care“, by Dev Patnaik. When Microsoft chose to enter the game console market, they faced a number of challenges. They were not a hardware supplier and were facing a steep uphill climb to compete with Sony Playstation, the market leader. They succeeded in building a game system that won over hard-core gamers. Yet the same team failed with the Zune. Why was Microsoft able to create such a compelling video game system only to churn out a mediocre portable music player? The competitive context was the same. The research was similar. The design and engineering resources brought to the challenge were significant in both cases. What makes a company deliver a bravura performance one day and fall flat the next? Empathy. As one member of the team confided: “The biggest challenge with Zune was trying to figure out whom we were building it for. With Xbox, we knew those guys. Hell, we were those guys.” It all turned on customer empathy.
Customer empathy is something we’ve always possessed as an organic part of our culture — and still have — at QQSolutions. It started early in the company’s history, because founder Mark Malis and others were very close to insurance agents—hell, some of them WERE (and still are) those guys, to paraphrase the Microsoft Xbox developer.
Today, we strive to become even better at this and turning customer needs, questions and feedback into product improvements and new products. Every “how-to” question, on-boarding issue, or other tech support issue represents a potential opportunity to innovate and to make new and better products and services. Taking advantage of such opportunities requires a more sophisticated approach to listening to customers. It takes active listening.
Active listening is a skill that goes beyond simply hearing what the customer is saying and then providing him/her with the right answer. It involves listening to the customer with empathy, repeating back to them what you believe they’re really saying and exploring with them what may be the root cause of their difficulty, confusion or other issue. Through active listening, you will learn a lot more from your customers than you would otherwise. And, by thinking about what you learn, you will be better able to translate customer questions and feedback into improvements that differentiate your agency.
This is real customer empathy at work. That’s the meaning of Scott Cook’s quote, above. The trick, of course, is to DO something about it! This means sharing what you learn and documenting it well. Then, you can use what we’ve learned as springboards for creating improvement.
Whose Responsibility Is It?
Everyone in your agency needs to actively listen to customers, consider what can be learned, and to then make recommendations that can lead to meaningful service improvements. You should employ this for all your contacts with your customers, whether they call you or you call or visit them.
This is why it’s important to spend time with customers. As Scott Cook puts it, “…follow the customer home, watch how he or she works, then create products that solve well the important problems the customer faces.”
Wrap-Up
At QQSolutions, we go beyond just responding to our customers’ questions and actively listen to them to learn more about how we can make our products better and easier-to-use. That’s why we’re constantly releasing new features and improvements in QQCatalyst®. Likewise, as an insurance agent, you need to actively listen to what your clients are saying and translate what your hear into actions that will take you from good to great.
Excellence and customer delight springs forth from developing real customer empathy throughout your organization.
