Customers want Empathy, not Sympathy

by Denise Fitzgerald | June 11, 2010

I was doing some late-night reading about how we can provide better customer service (a topic that dominates most of my reading material) when I came across a topic that, while not ground breaking, was quite poignant. My focus started out on the subject of support communities and collaboration, as those are very hot topics for nGenera right now. Given my propensity for Internet-induced attention deficit disorder, I found myself fully engaged over the difference between Sympathy and Empathy. The article had some good points, some of which I had heard before, but the piece that struck me was how it relates to customer service.

If we first look at the definition of the two words “sympathy” and “empathy,” we see that on the surface, they appear to have similar meanings. (In fact, some dictionaries list them as synonyms… incorrectly, in my opinion.) A key commonality between the two adjectives is that they describe feelings concerning other people. Sympathy’s definition is ‘feeling with a sense of compassion for (or commiseration with) another person.’ Empathy, on the other hand, is described as ‘the ability to project one’s personality into another person to more fully understand that person.’ (That’s psychology speak for the ability to understand what it’s like to walk a mile in their shoes.)

Image source: http://www.guzer.com

This particular article discussed the preferred use of empathy, not sympathy, in a customer service environment. I have been in Technology Customer Service for a number of years and it seems that people have been trained (sometimes unconsciously) to be sympathetic when a customer complains. We are taught that we should do this so that we can understand their pain. Understanding someone’s pain is not a bad thing per se; it is immensely better than the alternative, which is appearing uncaring or as if we don’t understand the suffering someone is enduring. I think sympathy is the “easier” emotion. It is easier to view the issue sympathetically, as “someone else’s” problem (feelings concerning “other” people). A more appropriate reaction would be empathy because, in fact, we play(ed) a part in this customer’s issue. The difference is that in being sympathetic, you take the point of view that “I feel bad for you,” whereas in empathy the point of view is “I feel bad with you.” (I know it sounds small, but it is actually quite significant when you reflect on the meaning).

Conveying this sense that we not only share a customer’s pain but acknowledge our part in its cause makes us collaborators in the solution, and this translates to better support.

So the next time you are working with a customer in an uncomfortable situation, don’t opt for the easier route. Remember how the problem came about, share the onus in the relationship, offer your empathy, and partner with them to help get the issue resolved.

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Category: Customer service, customer experience

Reflections on Paul Greenberg’s Social CRM Summit

by Lauren Hall-Stigerts | May 27, 2010

Paul Greenberg (called “The Godfather of CRM”; considered the leading authority on the strategy, practice, and implementation of Social CRM; and all-around exceptional guy) graciously invited me to attend BPT Partners’ Social CRM Summit this week in Atlanta. I was excited to see a new locale—this was my first trip to Georgia—and even more excited to reconnect with Paul, engage in stimulating conversations with the industry’s brightest thinkers, and learn SCRM strategy from leading experts.

The content that was packed into two days is overwhelming; I could easily write a month’s worth of blog posts about everything that was discussed. From measuring loyalty and advocacy to appealing to customers’ emotions, the full spectrum of “service in the time of the social customer” was covered in 48 hours. Speakers adhered to high-level strategy and left out technical details, for which this non-techie was thankful. Information was detailed yet easy to understand, broad enough to fit any organization yet actionable. Perhaps the best way to approach this blog post is to avoid a dissertation on the teachings and focus on the topics that were the most provocative and surprising to me.

Paul was the bookends of the summit—he kicked things off with an overview of SCRM strategy and concluded with a segment about creating experiences for (and with!) the social customer. The three recurring themes throughout his discussions were:

social humans

2. Customers want personalized experiences, meaningful and emotional connections to products/services/brands/experiences, and the tools and freedom to create their own experiences according to their tastes.

3. Customers, not the company, always control the conversation.

The linchpin of Paul’s strategies is that Social CRM has moved away from MANAGING customers (CRM = “customer relationship management”) and toward ENGAGING customers. Success strategist Stephen Covey hinges an individual’s success on a rock-solid understanding of personal values and principles, and when these are held at the core of everything that person does, things fall into place (to put it simply). When customer service, sales, and marketing hold onto the message of engagement at their core, they will succeed beyond their competitors by creating lifelong advocates that understand they’re more than a dollar sign on the bottom line—they’re the lifeblood of the company through partnership.

I particularly appreciated Paul’s discussion on sales and marketing in a social world. In his no-nonsense way of saying things, he drove it home that the social customer does not respond well to traditional marketing channels and tactics. If you come across as too “salesy” on social channels such as Twitter and forums, you will be shut down—even worse than simply being ignored. Customers respond well to transparency and want to see a genuine and interactive side of the company. Even better, customers want information that is useful to them because everyone is self-motivated. (Yes, even Mother Theresa. Feel free to engage with me in a debate if you disagree.) The best way to generate interest, attention, and, most importantly, leads is to present information as a subject matter expert. Personally, this is my favorite form of marketing because everyone benefits: the customer obtains information that is useful to them, the company is recognized as a savvy thought leader, and the author strengthens their knowledge base along the way. The downside is that this form of marketing/sales takes more time and effort than simply copy-and-pasting company boilerplate—however, the ultimate payoff is potentially exponential.

That being said, I was surprised by Jeff Pedowitz’s (President and CEO of marketing automation and demand generation consulting firm The Pedowitz Group) presentation on the second day of the summit; it seemed to occasionally contradict Paul’s presentation. Granted, his focus was on AUTOMATING the sales and marketing process via social channels, so how do we automate what Paul is suggesting? The core of Paul’s strategy requires human interaction, and I couldn’t see the human element behind the automation. Jeff suggested that the core of Twitter marketing and sales strategy rotates around identifying “tweeps” who use keywords central to a business and automatically following the users with the hopes of a return-follow, increasing the size of the organization’s audience. Paul mentioned that the number of followers is not a good metric for Twitter success—perhaps those followers are simply returning the favor of an org following them. Hooray, everyone has a larger follower count, but this does not necessarily indicate engagement or even an audience that is actively reading a company’s tweets. I’ll take quality over quantity any day, and how can you determine quality if you’re automating your process?

Despite this, Jeff Pedowitz had some great tried-and-true advice on measuring success and focusing on bringing home the bacon. His waterfall sales pipeline model keeps things in perspective. Familiar with the statistic that campaigns typically generate a 2% response rate? Well, once you walk through all five steps in the qualification process (inquiries—marketing qualified leads—sales accepted leads—sales qualified leads—closed/won business), you only earn the business of roughly 0.25% of the 2% in your original response rate. That means if you had 2,000 inquiries generated from a campaign, only FIVE of them will close business with your organization!

Jeff identified sixteen areas that sales and marketing should focus on to maximize revenue. I won’t list them all here, but he ranked them visually like steps: you couldn’t have the steps toward the top without ensuring the steps on the bottom were in place. What were the four essential practices before you could move on to any other initiatives? Starting with the most critical: Plan, Data, Profile and Segment, and Email [as a marketing channel]. Social media doesn’t even come into play until step ten.

There were another several points in Jeff Pedowitz’s presentation that were “a-ha” moments for me, but in the interest of length, I’ll pick just one more. I love the idea of lead ranking/scoring; it’s a quick way to prioritize your sales and marketing efforts simply by following one key number. How it works is that you pick around five business requirements and assign each a weighted point value. It might look something like this:

After considering these rankings, you begin building a profile snapshot of every lead waiting for follow-up and can appropriately allocate your resources. Will you have immediate follow-up by an account manager, have inside sales touch base, or simply nurture them in future campaigns?

Finally, Dr. Jeff Tanner is an internationally-recognized expert in sales and sales management and teaches university classes on the discipline. He provided a very objective and analytical approach to measuring loyalty and advocacy (and knowing the difference), and where to even begin building your Social CRM strategy. Basically, a strategy is a theory that requires testing—concepts, operational definitions, relationships, and conditions must be identified and agreed upon before moving forward so there is a baseline to work from. When it comes to loyalty, behavior and attitude are two types that should be considered—the latter being far more difficult to measure but critical to understanding the customer’s emotional attachment to the business relationship. We were able to put our learning to the test in teams of four using a DirecTV case study: what is a working definition of “advocacy”, how should DirecTV identify advocacy, and how should the company nurture advocacy?

Paul summarized the entire two days of learning best by saying the outcome of Social CRM is for the customer to identify with a company so that they walk away saying “this is a company like me”. The road to get there is long, winding, and detailed and must continue to be nurtured. For example, we’ve seen a rollercoaster ride for Apple over the last several years through the eyes of customers. People are wrapped up in the brand on such a personal level that when something happens where customers’ expectations are thrown off by actions—oh, say, a high-profile product is lost and the company sends in a crack team to bully media sources into hiding information—customers feel betrayed. Did Apple lose sight of the social customer by trying to control the conversation? You bet they did, and now they have a lot of ground to make up for it.

If you’ve gotten to this point, thanks for diligently reading my impressions. It was difficult to even boil it down to this post, there was so much great information cram-packed into less than 48 hours. I’ll close by saying that I’m thankful I was able to go and make so many great connections with some exceptional people. Esteban Kolsky, one of the space’s leading independent analysts, was present. I valued his keen observations through our running Twitter conversation throughout the summit—he definitely has an experienced and critical eye, and doesn’t take anything at face-value. He earned my respect and made me realize how lucky nGenera is to have him as an advocate. He’s also super-awesome for letting us night owls borrow his rental car to go adventuring. I was so excited to meet some fellow Gen-Y professionals who are already making their mark in the customer service industry. Jacob Morgan, Principal at Chess Media Group, and Blake Landau, Senior Editor and blog/podcast extraordinaire at IQPC’s Customer Management IQ, are young, smart, and savvy people who inspired me to dream big. Keep your eye on them because they’re bound to become supernovas in their careers. Last, but oh-so-far from least, I feel fortunate to have made a great connection with Paul. He has so much passion, energy, and genuine interest in the people around him, I don’t know how he keeps it all going on top of being one of the smartest guys in the industry. I’m proud to call him a mentor and a friend.

Lauren (right) poses with Paul (center) and Jacob (left).
She apologizes for the poor quality of her Blackberry camera.

I had many other great conversations with bright individuals, and exchanged many business cards and Twitter handles, so this is certainly not a conclusive list. I’m looking forward to fostering the friendships and professional relationships I’ve made at the Social CRM Summit in addition to taking action on the top-notch information gleaned.

If you want to see the documented Social CRM Summit Twitter conversation for yourself, check it out here.

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Category: Events, Social CIM, Web 2.0

Social Media, Knowledge Management, Search: Hot Topics at TSIA Technology Services World

by Tara Sporrer | May 13, 2010

Last week, nGenera CIM attended and exhibited at the Technology Services Industry Association’s (TSIA) Technology Services World 2010 conference in Silicon Valley. We had a number of engaging conversations about issues facing the contact center and the future of customer service technology, saw many new faces and some old friends, demoed the new features in CIM 9, and even brought home a few awards.

Mark Briggs and I are ready to demo CIM 9 to John Ragsdale’s
Recognized Innovator tour group.

John Ragsdale (VP of Research at TSIA and our favorite Master of Ceremonies) kicked off the conference with some provocative conclusions based on his survey of association members that were corroborated by many of the conversations we had with attendees:

SERVICE PROFESSIONALS PLAN ON MAKING IT SOCIAL.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT HAS TAKEN A BACK SEAT TO SEARCH—ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE FROM ANY SOURCE. Many of the service professionals we spoke with were pulling out their hair trying to understand why it is so difficult to find content in their knowledge base—it was preventing user adoption and rendering the tool useless. Sometimes these were not true knowledge bases but content repositories, such as SharePoint, where the search tool was immature and the knowledge management infrastructure was incomprehensive. (Others, still, did not even own a knowledge management solution!) Here we were able to educate people about our partnership with Autonomy, the flexible self-learning search engine that comes with every nGen Knowledgebase implementation and can search multiple sources beyond the knowledge base.

CUSTOMER SERVICE GOES MOBILE. (John reports that 34% of TSIA members are dedicating budget to service via mobile devices.) Like social media initiatives, service professionals are still trying to grasp how to deliver service through mobile devices such as iPads, iPhones, and BlackBerries. Based on our conversations, most customer service organizations are still focused on just trying to get a knowledge management solution working smoothly, let alone a mobile initiative.

Additionally, planned spending in 2010-2011 is “way up” over 2009! (Thank goodness—let’s get out of this recession, already.) The top five hottest trends in the contact center in order of most to least are—not surprisingly—mobile, intelligent search, social service, forum, and wiki. Is your organization focusing its efforts on any of these channels in the coming year?

TSIA is known for recognizing its partners and members for excellence in customer service solutions, best practices, and delivery—and this event was no exception. We were honored to accept the award for “Recognized Innovator in Value-Added Services” at the awards luncheon on the final day of the conference. We’ve been keenly developing our Expert Services program to better-serve the needs of our customers when they want to understand how to get the most out of their software investment. We were also a finalist (and on the heels of the winner, according to an inside source) as “Recognized Innovator in Emerging Channels” for nGen Social Media and nGen Community.

Lauren Hall-Stigerts holds the Recognized Innovator awards with Thomas Lah, TSIA Executive Director (left) and Stephen Smith, TSIA SVP, Operations.
Photo credit: Kira Grinberg

Finally, we’d like to congratulate EMC (an nGenera CIM customer) on being the star of the STAR Awards, where TSIA members are recognized for excellence in customer service delivery. EMC won the coveted Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award (a total of ten STAR awards) in addition to three new awards: Best Service Delivery Optimization, Best Support Staff Practices, and Best Use of Metrics and Business Intelligence. A well-deserved achievement for an amazing team!

As always, attendees walked away from Technology Services World Santa Clara with renewed clarity thanks to the great conversations and information gleaned. We enjoyed connecting with so many industry professionals and look forward to what the innovative future holds for customer service.

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Category: Customer success stories, Events, Knowledge management, Social CIM, Web 2.0

Plan For The Future with CIM Suite 9.0

by Wade Pfeiffer | January 26, 2010

It is said that many people look forward to the new year for a new start, disregarding the past. Here at nGenera CIM, we are looking forward to applying our experience in 2009 to the new year. I reflect on 2009 as a tough economic year where we as an organization came together to consolidate the strength of our offerings, continue our profitable growth and to help customers create exceptional customer experiences with strong ROI.

In 2009, we grew our business with over 70 great new customers. We’re very excited to start 2010 with a big win from Skype who chose nGen Chat and Email to power their International customer support strategy.

Last year has also brought our customers a new release of the nGen CIM Suite (version 8.3) as well as many new product enhancements. Our partnership with LiveLOOK, a leading provider of visual customer communication tools, promises to provide nGen CoBrowse customers with greater functionality through features such as browser-based software and connection to standard Internet ports.

We’re excited to have been awarded the following recognitions in the customer service technology industry:

- Product of the Year awarded by Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine

- Named to the list of 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management by KMWorld

- Assigned to the “Visionary” quadrant of the 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for eService Suites

While we see 2009 disappear in our rear-view mirror, we’re looking ahead to the opportunities 2010 will bring us. You can be sure that we’ll be providing you with more customer service best practices to help make your contact center the best it can be and more valuable events with industry thought leaders. (Keep your eye on our Twitter feed for more information.) nGenera CIM will also be launching the groundbreaking nGen CIM Suite 9.0 early this year, packed with more features including social media listening technologies as well as expanding our wiki and forum capabilities.

Here’s to a new year of building upon our best of 2009 to make 2010 our greatest year ever!

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Category: Multi-channel, Social CIM, Web 2.0