How to communicate with customers: Put on their smelly shoes (Part 1)

You know me, I’m all about writing, joy, and badassery.

Let’s bring all of those together and talk about how we’re communicating with our customers – in a 3-part series because I tried to write all of this in one go and it got too long and if you know anything about me you know I advocate for short and concise and soooooooo… Here’s part 1 of 3!

Let me start by saying, I know you’re not an ego maniac. You DO think about your customers as you write to them on that live chat or by email or maybe in that newsletter or marketing material.

But I bet you’re not actually putting yourself in their shoes.

(OK, don’t wear other people’s shoes. That’s gross.)

How to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes

We call putting ourselves in others’ shoes all kinds of things: Customer-centric. People-centric. Reader-centric. What we really mean is empathy, and it requires 2 things:

• vulnerability

• authenticity

So it should be easy, right? Because vulnerable and authentic are the first words we’d use to describe **insert your organisation here**.

NOT.

So let’s talk empathy, vulnerability, authenticity, and smelly footwear.

Know your reader? Or imagine the experience of your reader?

I’ve never met anyone writing at work who isn’t aware of their audience. But thinking about who you’re writing to isn’t enough. We need to exercise empathy.

But to exercise empathy in helpful ways, we need to understand there are 3 kinds:

Cognitive Empathy
Cognitive empathy, also known as ‘perspective-taking’ is not really what most of us would think of as empathy at all. Cognitive empathy is basically being able to put yourself into someone else’s place and see their perspective. (For the record, even psychopaths experience cognitive empathy because if they want to cause pain, they need to know the concept of you experiencing pain. Just sayn’.)

Emotional Empathy
Emotional empathy is when you quite literally feel the other person’s emotions alongside them, as if you had ‘caught’ the emotions. Emotional empathy is also known as ‘personal distress’ or ‘emotional contagion’. This is closer to the usual understanding of the word ‘empathy’, but more emotional. Don’t do that in your writing.

Compassionate Empathy
Compassionate empathy is what we wanna go for. It’s feeling someone’s pain and also feeling driven to take action to help. It’s what you might also call compassion. It’s kind of like sympathy in that it’s about feeling concern for someone, but it has the additional element of a drive towards action to mitigate the problem.

How to increase empathy

The good news is that empathy is a quality we can nurture. We can train ourselves to be more empathetic by doing things like:

1. Challenging yourself

2. Getting out of your usual environment

3. Getting feedback

4. Exploring the heart not just the head

5. Walking in others' shoes

6. Examining your biases

7. Cultivating your sense of curiosity

8. Asking better questions

That’s just touching the surface.

The bad news is, empathy requires vulnerability. That’s right, sunshine, you don’t get to stay comfortable and well protected behind all the walls that make you feel safe if you want to increase your level of empathy (also if you want to build connection. Or innovate. Or be in a loving relationship. Or almost anything good in the world. Sorry ‘bout it.

So, to recap – if you want to improve your customer service communications, you need to strengthen your empathy muscles. That’s this week’s homework.

Next week, we’re going to talk about vulnerability. I know. Exciting.

Mmmmwahh!