How … and Why to Build Empathy for your Customers

This week I participated in a virtual dementia tour where I quite literally walked in the shoes of seniors with dementia.  Having spent a lot of time in the last few years visiting seniors in their homes, many of whom had this debilitating disease of aging, I thought I had a pretty good idea what it was all about.  In reality, I know nothing about what they experience on a daily basis.

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In the tour, we placed inserts in our shoes with sharp edges which felt like walking a handful of rocks.  We wore glasses that were yellowed and scratched, with black stickers on the lenses representing the blank spots in a senior’s vision.  We wore over-sized gloves that made our hands clumsy and ineffective.  And we wore head phones that broadcast a cacophony of sounds: people talking, static and the occasional loud siren or doorbell that made me jump each time it sounded.  We were given a list of few simple tasks, things like finding a sweater, setting the table or writing a note.  Then we were thrust into a darkened room for 5 minutes to complete those tasks.  After a minute, I wanted to crawl out of my skin, to escape to anywhere but here.  After two minutes, I stood to the side with my arms crossed, angry and ready to bite the head off of anyone who suggested I continue to attempt to complete my appointed tasks.

For me, this profound experience highlighted why it is so important to understand your solutions and business from the customer’s perspective.  From the outside, we can sympathize with people, shrugging our shoulders when they do something we don’t understand.  But from that outside perspective, while we can suggest solutions and hope that we got it right, we will never really create something that delivers deep and meaningful value to our customers.  Those compelling solutions are born from the empathy we develop for our customers, the understanding of what they are trying to achieve, and the trials and tribulations they experience along the way.

Empathy vs. Sympathy

Empathy is very different from sympathy.  When caring for a senior with dementia, sympathy will lead us to gently but firmly push them to get out of bed, go for a walk, and engage in housekeeping tasks, all the while patting their back for encouragement when they stubbornly refuse.  But empathy will lead us to provide them with some soft slippers, soothing classical music and a repetitive task they can lose themselves in, giving them space to rest when they are over stimulated or Tylenol to ease the nerve pain in their feet.  Because for them, the job to be done is to get through the day without feeling the overwhelming need to escape.

Talking to customers in interviews and observing them as they complete their tasks is the gateway to developing empathy, and empathy opens the door to innovative solutions.  This is why so many successful startups grow from the personal experience of one of their founders – they’ve lived the pain point they are addressing.  An established company can discover compelling solutions that deliver just as much value as startups, and they have the added advantage of ready business savvy that will allow them to scale.

compelling solutions are born from the empathy we develop for our customers

In a previous post, I provided a framework for developing empathy for customers.  To lead your team in this customer discovery process, I suggest developing a research plan that includes the following:

1. Use secondary research that includes market sizing to define a set of customers and markets that you could potentially serve.
2. Capture everything you already know about each customer set by developing a point of view – what do they say and do?
3. Document assumptions and unknowns – what do you want to know or confirm about this customer set?
4. Build an interview plan – who will you talk to and what will you ask them?  Start each interview by asking your customers what task they are working to achieve, and what success means to them as they work towards this goal.
5. Teach the team to approach interviews with curiosity, a lens of listening to understand and an openness to seeing the world from a different point of view.
6. After each interview, gather the team to share their insights, fill out more of that customer’s point of view and capture additional questions you’d like to explore. Instead of running each interview through the same questions, instead use each subsequent interview as an opportunity to delve deeper and understand more.
7. Look for pain points that are common across multiple sets of customers. Solutions for these problems have the potential to scale.
8. Use the collective passion of the team to solve the pain points for one set of customers as the source of your innovation efforts. This passion represents the empathy you have developed, the understanding of the problems the customer faces and the desire of the team to help that customer.

Tell us – how do you use the empathy you have developed for your customers to innovate new compelling and high value solutions?