Empathy is one of the most important skills you need to learn to be a successful customer service representative (for a full explanation of what empathy in customer service is, see this in-depth article I wrote about it here), and having gone through this journey myself, I know that it can take some time to master – see what I did there. That’s why I wrote this complete guide that will show you exactly how to empathize with a customer, step by step.
1. Be Genuinely Interested in Their Experience
The first step to empathizing with a customer is to be genuinely interested in their experience and ultimately their satisfaction. Now you wouldn’t be a customer service agent if you weren’t a people person and didn’t want to help others, but being genuinely interested in the customer takes all that to another level.
That’s because the only way to be genuinely interested in others is to be the kind of person who cares about others, and if you’re the kind of person who cares about others then you’ll naturally come to empathize with them. All you need to do now is find out what there is to empathize about and express it – which is the subject of the rest of this article.
Of course, your interest has to be a genuine desire to understand so that you can assist the customer, otherwise you’re just a nosy busybody who happens to be dealing with the issue at hand. However, if you have genuine interest, then you hold the key to outstanding customer service in your hands, as customers can sense sincere empathy and will respond to it by opening up and sharing everything you need to know to provide complete customer satisfaction.
2. Actively Listen to What They’re Saying
The next step to empathizing with a customer is to actively listen to what they’re saying. Active listening is more than just hearing the words that the customer is saying. It’s about listening so well that you understand their entire message including their thoughts and feelings.
To practice active listening you need to give the customer your undivided attention, you need to eliminate all other thoughts and distractions, and you need to focus completely and utterly on the customer. Let the customer speak without interruption – even if you think you know what they’re going to say, as their unique way of expressing themselves will give you additional insights into their perspective.
And pay close attention to both the actual words the customer is saying and their non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. Non-verbal cues can convey a wealth of information in their own right and sometimes that which words alone cannot express.
But these are just the technical details of what you need to do. Once again, just as with empathy as a whole, the key that underpins active listening is to show genuine interest in what the customer is saying. If you can do that then it becomes very easy to truly understand and empathize with a customer, as everything you do will be with that goal in mind.
Active listening in customer service is so important that I wrote a separate in-depth article about what it is, which you can find here, as well as a separate in-depth article about how to actively listen to a customer, which you can find here.
3. Use Verbal and Non-Verbal Minimal Encouragers
As mentioned above, when actively listening to a customer you need to let them speak without interruption. However, this can lead to two problems. First, after a prolonged silence on your part, the customer may become unsure whether you understand what they’re saying and second, without stopping them to find out more details about some of the crucial points they mention, important information may be left unexplored, making empathizing with the customer much more difficult.
That’s where using minimal encouragers comes in handy. Minimal encouragers are brief responses that either signal to the customer that you understand what they’re saying, or gently prompts them to share more details about a particular point so you can fully explore it. The beauty of minimal encouragers is that they allow you to show you understand or guide the conversation without causing disruption, as their minimal nature means that customers don’t perceive them as interruptions.
Minimal encouragers can be verbal or non-verbal. Non-verbal minimal encouragers are nodding and smiling which shows the customer that you’ve understood, and verbal minimal encouragers can be any short phrase that indicates either that you’ve understood or that you want the customer to elaborate on the point they’re making. If you’re not sure what to say, check out the following table for examples of some simple but effective verbal minimal encouragers that you can use, for inspiration:
| Verbal Encouragers Showing Understanding | Verbal Encouragers Prompting Elaboration |
|---|---|
| I understand. | Please, go on. |
| I’m following. | Tell me more about that. |
| That makes sense. | What happened next? |
| I see where you’re coming from. | Can you share more details? |
| It sounds like you’re saying… | How has this impacted you? |
4. Ask Open-Ended Questions to Uncover More Details
Active listening allows you to empathize with a customer, but only if the customer expresses their thoughts and feelings. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had where customers don’t explain themselves fully either because they assume I know what they mean or because for some reason, they struggle to articulate their issue. It’s also possible for customers to be unable to express themselves properly because they’re not fully aware of the extent of their needs.
Even if a customer can express themselves relatively well, it’s useful to ensure that they’ve told you everything they can, because the more they say the more you’ll understand their perspective and the more you’ll be able to empathize with and help them. And one of the most powerful ways to do this is by asking open-ended questions, as they encourage the customer to express themselves without limitations and give detailed and nuanced responses about their experiences, preferences, and concerns.
Which is why it’s important to understand the difference between open-ended questions and closed-ended questions. Open-ended questions invite elaboration and fosters a more expansive and genuine dialogue, whereas closed-ended questions typically lead to a conversation stalling “yes”, “no” or other one word answer. The following table contains some useful open-ended questions you can try out and their closed-ended version for comparison:
| Open-Ended Questions | Closed-Ended Versions |
|---|---|
| What challenges are you currently facing? | Are you facing any specific challenges at the moment? |
| Can you provide more details about that issue? | Is there a specific issue you’d like to elaborate on? |
| What features are you looking for in the product? | Are you looking for specific features in the product? |
| Tell me about your preferences. | Do you prefer option A or option B? |
| Describe your ideal solution. | Are you looking for a solution that includes XYZ feature? |
| How would you describe your experience? | Did you have a positive or negative experience? |
5. Tune in to Their Emotions
To empathize with a customer, it’s vital that as you listen to what they’re saying, you tune in to their emotions. Customers bring a range of emotions to their interactions – from frustration and disappointment to satisfaction and joy, and your ability to empathize with a customer will depend on your ability to recognize and respond to their emotions.
That’s because the emotions behind what the customer is saying constitutes another layer of meaning, and ignoring them will lead you to empathize with the wrong thing and the miss the point entirely. Moreover, it’s far more more important to empathize with a customer’s feelings than their words because emotions have a profound impact on people and affect them more deeply than the words they’re using to express them would otherwise indicate.
Customers express their emotions through verbal cues, such as the tone of their voice, and non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions and body language, so the way to tune in to a customer’s emotions is by watching out for these cues and becoming sensitive to their manifestations and the meaning(s) they convey. Don’t forget that some of these cues can be quite subtle – watch out for a furrowed brow, a sigh or a hesitant pause, and that emotions can evolve during an interaction.
6. Put Yourself in Their Shoes
Being genuinely interested in the customer’s perspective, actively listening to what they’re saying, encouraging them to express themselves fully and tuning into their emotions will get a you a long way to understanding the thoughts and feelings of the customer. However, these methods have their limitations. To truly understand and empathize with the customer, it’s essential to go beyond surface-level observations and put yourself in their shoes.
To do this you need to imagine yourself in the customer’s situation and look at the challenges they face from their point of view – more difficult to overcome than you think, see their perception of your products and services – not as good or helpful as you think, and consider how they see their needs, concerns and emotions – more important than you think.
Immersing yourself in the customer’s perspective will make empathizing with them very easy. After all, if you were actually in their situation it would be easy, so doing the next best thing and adopting the customer’s viewpoint to share their experience, is the ultimate shortcut to empathy.
7. Respond Reflectively to Show You’re Listening
Empathizing with a customer is essential, yet its impact remains limited if the customer isn’t aware of your efforts, which is why the next step is to demonstrate that not only have you’ve heard what the customer is saying but you’ve also truly understood them. To do this you need to respond reflectively by paraphrasing both the words that the customer has said and the emotions underlying them.
Paraphrasing is when you summarize what the customer has said or the emotions you’re picking up from them, in your own words. Don’t just parrot back back what the customer has said as it will make them think that you’re responding mechanically and lack genuine empathy. Instead, use your own words because it proves unquestionably that you’re completely engaged with what the customer is saying.
You don’t need to paraphrase every last point the customer makes as that will irritate them. (I know it irritates me when I’m on the receiving end of it!) The idea is to capture the essence of the customer’s message by identifying the main points or emotions that stand out.
Don’t be afraid of paraphrasing incorrectly. It’s completely OK to make a mistake and get things wrong. Actively listening doesn’t guarantee that you’ll understand the customer the first time around, and it’s perfectly reasonable to refine your understanding during the course of your conversation. The point is to show that you’re trying to understand what the customer is saying and responding reflectively does exactly that even if initially, you’re a little wide of the mark.
8. Acknowledge and Validate Their Perspective
After responding reflectively, you need to continue demonstrating your empathy by acknowledging and validating the customer’s perspective. And it’s important that you do both because each plays a distinct yet complementary role in empathizing with a customer.
Acknowledging the customer’s perspective is when you assure them that you have received and understood their message. To acknowledge the customer’s perspective you need to restate the thoughts or feelings they’ve expressed in a way that confirms that you’ve understood them – which makes this a step more than paraphrasing. For example, you could say something like, “I understand that you’re frustrated with the delayed delivery.”
But this is only showing empathy at a low level. To truly empathize with a customer you need to validate their perspective too – a step beyond acknowledging it, where you assure the customer that their thoughts and feelings are not only understood but are also valid. For example, you might say something like, “It’s completely reasonable to be concerned about this.” Now you’re empathizing with the customer at a rock star level.
Now in my experience, I have found that some customer service representatives are hesitant to validate the customer’s perspective because they think it implies agreement with it which they don’t want to do, but this is a mistake. Validating the customer’s perspective doesn’t mean you agree with it – it means that you recognize the significance of the customer’s experience, for them.
I want to conclude this section with a warning. Under no circumstances should you downplay or dismiss the customer’s perspective as that not only shows a lack of concern for it, it’s also the very antithesis of empathy. That’s because if empathy is when you try to understand and share the thoughts and feelings of the customer, then it’s opposite is when you try to persuade the customer that their point of view is not as significant as they thought!
9. Address Their Issue With Empathy
To show empathy to a customer, it’s imperative that you acknowledge and validate their perspective but of course you can’t stop there. You have to now take action to address their issue otherwise your earlier acknowledgement and validation will retroactively become meaningless. It’s not empathizing with a customer to merely say, “It’s completely reasonable to be concerned about this” and then not follow through with a genuine effort to address the matter.
And you can demonstrate empathy while you address the customer’s issue too. For instance, if a customer expresses frustration about a delayed delivery, not only should you work towards resolving the logistics of the problem, but you should also acknowledge the inconvenience caused and express genuine regret for the impact on their experience at the same time.
In other words, when you’re doing your job as a customer service representative and working to meet the needs of a customer, you should always go beyond the procedural aspects of what you’re doing and consider the customer’s perspective at the same time. That’s real empathy and if it’s genuine it will permeate your entire interaction with the customer, naturally shaping your every response and action, and allowing you to show empathy in a way that will truly resonate with the customer.
10. Things to Consider When Expressing Empathy
The steps so far have explained how to empathize with a customer in terms of what to do to understand their perspective and then what to do to effectively express that understanding. But empathy is not only about what you understand and what you say, it’s also about the way you say it. So here are the things you need to keep in mind when expressing empathy to a customer.
Use Clear Language & Avoid Technical Or Complex Terms
As a customer service agent you should always strive for clarity in communication but this is especially true when you want to express empathy to a customer. After all, if the customer doesn’t understand what you’re saying they won’t realize that you’re empathizing with them. That’s why you should make sure to use language that’s straightforward and easily understood, and steer clear of technical jargon (I appreciate the irony) or complex terms that will only lessen the impact of your empathetic response.
Frame Your Responses Positively
Framing your responses positively expresses empathy to a customer because it demonstrates a genuine appreciation for their perspective and desire to meet their needs. So instead of framing responses negatively or in a way that highlights limitations, focus on identifying solutions that align with what you know they want. For instance, instead of saying, “Unfortunately, that service is not available” say, “While that specific service may not be an option, let’s explore alternatives that could work for you.”
Use Empathetic Language That Resonates Emotionally
Of course, you should also use empathetic language to demonstrate your empathy! Empathetic language means expressing yourself in a way that resonates with the customer’s emotions and feelings. For example, instead of responding with a technical and impersonal, “Your issue has been noted,” you should use empathetic language like, “I understand that this situation is frustrating for you and I’m here to assist in resolving it.”
Pay Attention to Your Tone and Body Language
Part of the way you express empathy with a customer is through your tone and body language, which can convey almost as much information as the words you’re saying. That’s why you should pay close attention to what these non-verbal cues are communicating to the customer, and ensure that they align with and reinforce the empathetic message you’re expressing verbally.
Reflect the Customer’s Emotional State
Reflecting the customer’s emotional state is a crucial part of empathetic communication. And since you’re already tuning into their emotions and feelings, all you need to do is respond in a way that acknowledges and aligns with them. For instance, if a customer expresses frustration, your response should recognize it and convey your commitment to addressing it. But if a customer expresses joy, your response should be to share in their happiness, and express genuine delight and appreciation for their positive experience.