It is no secret that customer care has become a crucial component of the way businesses do things. It is no longer enough to have the best product on the market or the most pervasive of advertising campaigns. These days, customers expect a business to actually treat them as more than bottom lines and wallets. Customer care has become just as critical a factor in success as sales or marketing, but this development has taken some time to fully sink in. Some companies still don’t quite understand that most important aspect of it: empathy.

An accurate definition of empathy goes “being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and walking a mile.” In essence, this is not merely acknowledging why the customer is unhappy with something, it extends to understanding why that is the case. The idea is that it humanizes both the company and the customer. From a customer’s perspective, it makes them feel like they are no longer just numbers to a monolithic organization. From a company’s perspective, it makes them feel human and personal to the customer, increasing their value on a personal level. However, while customer service personnel are told to empathize, they’re often not told how.

More often than not, these people end up relying on generalized scripts and rote memorization of responses. This behavior tends to lead to little more than poorly-falsified sincerity, giving the customer the impression that the other person is cold and has no concern for the issue at hand. Most customer service people find trouble deviating from the scripts, having little idea how to create a more personal empathic statement – defeating the purpose of attempting to empathize in the first place. In many cases, this is due to them never actually being trained to empathize properly.

That flaw can be disastrous for a business. Empathy is an excellent tool for defusing a complaining customer. Simply acknowledging that a problem exists and sincerely stating that the company understands the problem can go a long way towards instilling confidence in the customer that a solution will be found. However, since not all customers are alike and no two situations are going to be exactly the same, a single blanket spiel will not cover every possible instance. Flexibility and a genuine concern for the customer’s feelings are required, and while it is possible to train someone in the former, the latter is significantly harder to develop.