The role of empathy in Covid-era customer support
- Summary:
- How do you ensure automation doesn't squeeze out humanity? Zendesk's Tiffany Apcyznski maps out how tech can help build empathy in customer support
Building community is what people do best. It's what differentiates us from the machines – and it's where we often glean our happiness. However much we automate our interactions, we must still find room for human contact and empathy.
But even before Covid-19 transformed the world overnight, scientists had identified a loneliness epidemic, spread across generations. Technology is an easy scapegoat for this growing separation, but the root causes are more complex, quite analog, and ultimately very human. Remember the days of crowded elevators? We all knew we didn't have to whip out the phone for that 90-second ride to the 7th floor. Or use texting to hide from a tricky face-to-face interaction or phone call. One good thing to come out of the current lockdown is that it has reminded us of the importance of human contact.
But what about technology – is it driving us apart or can it help bring us together? At Zendesk, we have always believed that tech can foster connectedness. Below are three ways we promote the empathy-building power of tech – in the era of Covid-19, and for whatever might come beyond it.
Promote community in support teams
Last year we partnered with IDEO, a renowned design consultancy. The goal? Examine our Advocacy team, the support agents who devote themselves to giving Zendesk customers the best possible support. Anyone looking to better foster community among their team or organization would find the study results useful.
Customer support can present the greatest challenges in community building. Increasing ticket volume and skyrocketing customer expectations mean that many customer service teams must reexamine their model of support – especially given the contradictions of the tech involved. The convenience of email, social media, SMS, AI, is invaluable to customers and agents alike. With a very big but – these fast-moving tools can result in a support team that fatigue quickly, their empathy well drained, creating and experiencing fewer of those human moments that are so critical to fill the role successfully.
Out of our work came several prototypes to help agents survive a new era of tech support – and maybe even thrive in their careers. We had planned to launch our Empathy Lab in person at Zendesk Relate conference in Miami, which we canceled due to the then early days of COVID-19 and coronavirus. Instead, we'll bring a set of community-building practices that can be easily implemented within any team structure to other events and digital spaces. The moment when support agent and customer 'meet' is a huge opportunity to cultivate both a sense of community and person-to-person relationships.
Make tools that make space for empathy
When Zendesk launched in 2007, one of our goals was to see how empathetic customer support software could be. There's always been a division between what software feels like when it's business software – official, clunky, heavy, not easy on the eyes – versus the fun, personal-use apps. We get to be free and enjoy ourselves in one space but not the other.
How we as users experience a business platform should be no different from the way we experience very consumer-friendly apps – Facebook, Twitter. Why shouldn't the people who use it and administer support tools enjoy doing so?
Any company who wants to succeed, especially in these uncharted waters, must work like never before to make tools available that are relevant, responsive and consumer friendly. When the people using highly technical tools can have an enjoyable experience, then it limits frustration and creates a greater capacity to deliver empathy.
Be relevant and stay relevant
Being relevant in and of itself is core to creating empathy between your business product offerings and the consumers who are using it. We've all been in that situation where suddenly you go to call customer service and realize the company you're contacting apparently hasn't updated their tools or their ways of communicating with you for 20 years. It's super frustrating because you don't feel heard. You're like, How are they still doing business this way? We know that everybody just wants to be able to tweet at them.
It's self-evident that more modern tools are a better foundation for empathy in customer service. But when companies are thinking through how they develop their products for empathy, it's foundational to consider and consult the people who are going to be administering them. I always call our support agents the unsung heroes of any company. Often these are the overlooked employees who haven't received the kind of software and the kind of tools that feel 21st century, that feel like they're actually responding to today's needs.
How vendors like Zendesk bring empathy into development also plays its part. Our recent acquisition of Smooch, for instance, brought more natural messaging capabilities and real-time analysis. We're looking at these highly monitored communications tools, looking at what people are using to communicate. We're on the front lines of understanding how real-world consumers are communicating.
Empower your support agents to make the right calls
The empathy potential of your technology will lie dormant without people. When you decide not to micromanage, to instead train and create the right protocols and encourage people to collaborate, then you are empowering your employees, empowering your support agents to make the right calls.
If you're the customer, it can feel like one person is helping you – but it's often a team of people who are behind the scenes, who are collaborating, who are asking each other questions. When empathy is built into a company's core mission, leaders will encourage agents to have a culture, to build relationships, to honor their hunger for knowledge and for career growth.
In doing all of this, you go a long way toward creating a healthy customer experience: An empowered human being with confidence and ambition is helping to solve your customers' problems. Now more than ever, if you have a call center and everyone's remote, you have to accelerate that way of thinking – that you can trust that the person who is helping to supply your product, knows how to do this and is going to do right by you. But you have to do right by them too.