Thursday, March 10, 2022

6 links to help you, your team, and others

Self-help for yourself

Empathy is a key customer service skill for good reason. But research indicates there are several different types of empathy.

If you can "get into the mind" of your customer then you can better understand their perspective. That's "cognitive empathy" and it helps you write support responses that are best framed for each specific customer's understanding.

Emotional empathy is the "I feel what you feel" form, which certainly helps create a connection but can become emotionally exhausting for customer support staff¹.

That is the theory, anyway. In practice your mixture of empathic response is different to mine and everyone else's. Packed inside your work bag, along with your healthy snack and laptop charger, is a hairy, messy blob of wins and losses and trauma and joy and fear and hope and stress².

And now we are all hauling an extra bag of war and pandemic and flood to work each day. Just like our customers are.

So take it easy on yourself, and conserve emotional energy for helping the people who desperately need it. Here are some things that may help.

¹ Sympathy is a whole other thing entirely.

² I imagine it looks like the amorphous nightmare I tip out of my kid's school bag on week 3 of the holidays.