Business owners must understand the critical role of showing empathy in addressing their customers’ needs. With customer experience predicted to influence buying decisions more than factors like price, the shopper’s perspective matters now than ever.
Showing empathy not only allows you to engage your customers with more understanding and kind-heartedness but also encourages critical thinking and better problem resolution.
No wonder businesses consider empathy a critical tool in attracting and maintaining customers. But you can’t show concern if you do not understand what it feels like to be in a person’s situation. You need some clues into your customer’s feelings.
And empathy mapping is one process forward-thinking retailers use to track and understand their customers’ pain points.
The 4 Customer Reactions to Look at When Creating an Empathy Map
Understanding customer reactions and emotions is key in empathy mapping and making informed decisions for better customer experiences.
These days all the customer contact points are through the retailer’s website. All forms of support services like live chat, phone call support, self-help or email support happen through the ecommerce website.
When mapping, you should focus on one website visitor (or user) and base the whole study on them. The subject must identify as a customer from a specific segment.
The results you obtain can be used to create an empathy diagram that can help in better CX decisions.
Now, we analyze how shoppers react to understand their emotions and counteract with empathy.
This can be done analyzing what the shopper; (1) Says, (2) Does, (3) Feels and (4) Thinks.
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What the Customer Says.
Find out what a user says about your product or service. Think; what would a user say if your product landed on their hands. You can find such reviews from reliable sources like web-based forums, interviews and focused market surveys.
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What the Consumer Does?
This phase involves analyzing a shopper’s actions when using your service or product. Knowing how your clients actually use your products can give a retailer useful insights to include in their empathy of your strategy.
How? For instance, when courier companies did the research and realized ecommerce businesses are increasingly using their services, they designed expedited shipping services to address that specific niche’s concerns.
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What the Shopper Thinks.
This section requires a business owner to mull over what their clients have in mind. Focus on what would concern your prospects the most. By learning their prospects’ perspective and main concerns, (including those that they don’t voice or express), businesses can work to better their CX.
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What the Client Feels.
Understanding your client’s emotion as they use your brand’s products or services is key in responding with empathy.
Review the entire shopper’s journey in your business and try to analyze what a customer would feel about each stage.
Understanding these four customer reactions is an excellent place to start. Next you will need to match these thought, feelings and opinions into action and with compassion.
Why Empathy Mapping is Important
So what’s the critical role of empathy mapping to an organization looking to improve customer experience?
Here are the many ways it can save your bottom line.
- Looking into how your customers think and act can help you understand your customers and habits.
- It eases the process of classifying and breaking down qualitative data.
- Mapping allows you to identify problem areas and fill gaps with newly discovered information.
- It also allows you to create meaningful customer personas
- An empathy diagram can make it easier for a team to understand visitor habits and perspectives.
Lastly, it is important to note that you can always edit your empathy diagram anytime— with the changing needs of your audience.
In conclusion
Customer experience is a continuous process. You can’t nail it once and for all. What counts as desirable experience to day may be outdated and annoying to customers next year. That explains why you need to do empathy mapping and study customer behavior from time to time. Only that way can you source useful clues for your team to act on.
