How far can you get in cultivating enduring customer relationships, delightful customer experiences, and ’employee engagement’ without empathy?
What kind of world shows up when we put aside empathy? What kind of world shows up when we put aside kindness? The kind of world that arose as a direct result of the ‘age of machines’ – of the Industrial Revolution. When our way of life is centred on and around machines, we worship machines, and we go about life asking and expecting one another to be-act like machines. We have become great at showing up in the world as machines. And as result we have lost sight of kindness, generosity, empathy.
Why do I bring this up? Because it occurs to me that our age is calling out for empathy, for kindness, for the injection of the human back into business and our way of life. Also because, you cannot get far in cultivating meaningful relationships with customers nor designing customer experiences that delight customers, nor generating ’employee engagement’ without grappling with these topics. Look you and I can make the world accessible, convenient, hassle free and fast. And, if such a world is missing kindness, generosity, empathy, friendship and love then it is a world that is not fit for human beings.
Empathy is central to customer experience, customer-centricity, and employee engagement
With this context I share with you the following video that was brought to my attention by LinkedIn where Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO shared it:
If this video speaks to you, if it stimulates your interest in empathy then I invite you to take a look at the following posts:
What Does It Take To Generate Deep Contextual Customer Insight?
Customer Loyalty and Advocacy: what can we learn from Jonathan Ive and Zappos?
What does it take to generate ’employee engagement’? (Part IV)
Is this the access to profitable revenues, loyal customers and enduring success? (Part I)
Is kindness born of empathy fundamental to cultivating customer loyalty and employee engagement?
I say it is. What kind of kindness am I speaking about? I am speaking what Werner Erhard refers to as “ruthless compassion”. If you want to dig into this a little more then check out this talk.
I want to leave you with a quote of a hero of mine, Albert Schweitzer:
Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.
A Final Word
I am putting together a course on communication-empathy-relationship. And there is one slide that I wish to share with you:
