{"id":23905,"date":"2018-06-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-06-26T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/?p=23905"},"modified":"2024-08-09T08:26:50","modified_gmt":"2024-08-09T14:26:50","slug":"9-empathy-exercises-that-help-product-teams-improve-cx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/blog\/9-empathy-exercises-that-help-product-teams-improve-cx\/","title":{"rendered":"9 Empathy Exercises that Help Product Teams Improve CX"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><strong>What is Empathy?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. For Product Managers looking to improve customer experience (CX), that definition translates to doing more than understanding the user\u2019s pain points, but also looking at the emotional landscape of what it\u2019s like to use the product &#8211; when it is working, and when it isn\u2019t working.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Empathetic Product Managers ask themselves: <\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How does using the product make the customer feel?<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How does the customer want to feel when using your product? What would be the best possible emotional outcome for them?<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How do I ensure the product developers understand and take the customers\u2019 needs into consideration in their process?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The answers to those questions affect every facet of business, from acquisition to retention. It\u2019s how, through CX, you can generate rapid growth through word-of-mouth recommendations, and sustain your success with customers who never want to leave.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><strong>Tying Empathy into CX<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Empathy is a <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/blog\/soft-skills-are-real-skills-in-cx-you-need-these-10\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">soft skill,<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and while those are typically difficult to measure, the effects of empathetic product development can be seen in every CX metric: Customer satisfaction (CSAT), <a href=\"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/ces-customer-effort-score-survey-software\/\">Customer Effort Score<\/a> (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS). <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sinead Cochrane, Senior Product Researcher at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.intercom.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Intercom<\/span><\/a>, <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">wrote<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> \u201cFor product teams, empathy building activities such as observing research or doing customer support is often not considered \u2018real work\u2019. However, product teams that consistently keep customer needs in mind are able to maintain and evolve their products in ways that won\u2019t negatively impact the user experience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For her, empathy for product departments means \u201cWhen a customer tells you something is broken, you are able to imagine the impact it\u2019s having on the job they\u2019re trying to get done,\u201d and, \u201cyou realize the emotional impact the problem is having on that person.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But I think we can go further than just recognizing the emotional impact of problems. That\u2019s scratching the surface of what having empathy for customers can mean for producing superior customer experience.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Because empathy shouldn\u2019t be reduced to realizing customers feel bad when a product isn\u2019t working for them. A whole new world opens up when you also consider how you can design your product, updates, and expansions to enhance positive emotions as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Here are the questions that lie at the heart of empathetic product management:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How can you get more emotionally in sync with your customers?<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Which are the most important negative emotional outcomes to manage?<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Which emotions should you seek to heighten (and how?)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To answer these questions, try these empathy building exercises.<\/span><\/p>\n<h1><strong>Empathy Building Exercises for Product Managers and their Teams<\/strong><\/h1>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<h3>Listen actively to discover underlying needs and emotional motivations<\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Often relegated to customer service and customer success departments, \u2018active listening\u2019 to find out why your customers use your product and what they really want to achieve is very important. You can\u2019t get the depth and honesty of answers by just sending out a survey &#8211; this works much better if you do phone, Zoom or in-person interviews. In fact, Roman Pichler recommends product managers <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.romanpichler.com\/blog\/empathy-tips-product-management\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">meet real users<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> on a regular basis. You may find that your assumptions of why customers use your product aren\u2019t accurate, or don\u2019t tell nearly enough of the story.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cAt first, our assumption was that they wanted to make more money. That often was true, but frequently we heard something different. Many simply wanted to maintain the business but run it more efficiently so they could have more free time (we heard about golfing on Fridays more than once). Others wanted to build a sustainable business they could pass on to their son or daughter.\u201d &#8211; Jim Semick, Founder &amp; Chief Strategist at <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.productplan.com\/empathy-product-manager\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">ProductPlan<\/span><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To get down to customers\u2019 real motivations, ask open-ended questions beginning with \u201cwhy\u201d and \u201chow.\u201d Then make sure to record their answers in their own words (you can hand those assets to your copywriters for later use).<\/span><\/p>\n<ol start=\"2\">\n<li>\n<h3>Use your own product<\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Empathy is often described as \u2018putting yourself in someone else\u2019s shoes\u2019 &#8211; and there\u2019s no better way to do this for a product manager than to actually use the product, just like any user would. You\u2019ll empathize with users\u2019 frustrations as you experience your own product\u2019s shortcomings and hopefully find moments where it\u2019s possible to create more delight.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But always keep in mind &#8211; you are not the average user. You\u2019ll still need to listen to your users to get a complete picture of how they feel, and what problems they perceive as being severely aggravating.<\/span><\/p>\n<ol start=\"3\">\n<li>\n<h3>Share verbatim comments<\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Someone, somewhere, is tracking customer experience metrics, sending out surveys, and collecting the answers. That someone might even be you. When reading users\u2019 written responses, don\u2019t just look for problems to solve and ignore the positive comments. Read them for emotion and see what conclusions you can draw about what people are feeling, and want to feel.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pick a few relevant verbatim comments to bring to the rest of the product team. Reading these comments often<a href=\"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/blog\/the-joy-of-nps-sharing-promoter-comments-customer-praise\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> helps engineers and designers feel the same joy<\/a> or frustration as their users. This new emotional understanding will help you evangelize CX as a priority with everyone.<\/span><\/p>\n<ol start=\"4\">\n<li>\n<h3>Mine your qualitative data and quantify customer sentiment<\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Those open-ended response answers are a goldmine for user research that can alert you to problems &#8211; and give you hints into the customer\u2019s emotional state of mind. However, o<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">nce you are getting more than a hundred comments a month, seeing the forest for the trees can be a difficult exercise. Qualitative feedback is notoriously tough to quantify, but it is now possible and easy to quantify sentiment with the help of machine learning. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">AI-powered platforms, like Pearl-Plaza\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/digital-experience-software\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">CXInsight\u2122<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, automatically sort your customer comments into themes while simultaneously assigning positive or negative sentiment. This provides you with a big picture understanding of how customers feel about your product and why. Categories of feedback vary by business sector and business model&#8211;payment processes &amp; delivery for e-commerce, perhaps, while UX and usability may surface for SaaS products. Quantifying the sentiment of what your customers are talking about can help you track emotional trends over time. Presenting this kind of data alongside verbatim comments connects customer emotion with real business consequence.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><figure id=\"attachment_13853\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-13853\" style=\"width: 1024px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wootric.com\/text-sentiment-analysis-for-customer-feedback\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-13853 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/CXI-Tags-with-Sentiment-1-1024x690.png\" alt=\"Feedback categorized by theme with sentiment breakdown\" width=\"1024\" height=\"690\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-13853\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Example of auto-categorized NPS comments with sentiment assigned in a dashboard. Source: Wootric<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n<ol start=\"5\">\n<li>\n<h3>Set empathy KPIs<\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What gets measured gets done, and adding empathy into your product development work is no different. The KPIs for empathy may look a little different than your typical performance indicators, but the good news is: They\u2019re not difficult to get. You\u2019ll find key performance indicators like <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/blog\/net-promoter-score\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPS<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/xi-terms\/customer-effort-score\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CES<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/xi-terms\/customer-satisfaction\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CSAT<\/a><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> are a good start, and comments in the open-ended questions can give you insight into the metric. Start identifying what kinds of ratings and qualitative answers correlate to genuinely happy customers &#8211; and frustrated customers likely to churn.<\/span><\/p>\n<ol start=\"6\">\n<li>\n<h3>Chart out an empathy map<\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You\u2019ve done your user journey, but even though it\u2019s part of the buyer persona building process, you may not have done an empathy map.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What your user\u00a0sees &#8211; on competitors\u2019 websites, common visuals in their industries, maybe what they enjoy watching or reading<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What your user says &#8211; how they measure success, what they say they want, what they say about your product<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What your user hears &#8211; what their influencers are saying, not just about your product, but about their jobs and what constitutes success, what they enjoy, what they don\u2019t like about their experiences with your competitors, etc.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What your users think and feel &#8211; worries, aspirations, what they really want, what really annoys them<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Notice how the empathy map includes business\/industry-specific observations, but also branches out into the user\u2019s personal life and larger environment. People are not their jobs &#8211; or even their \u2018jobs to be done.\u2019 For true empathy, you have to look at the whole person.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is a great activity to get other teams involved in &#8211; consider hosting a meeting with Customer Success, Sales, Marketing and Customer Service for a wider scope of insights.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Activities involving multiple teams help to build a shared understanding of your customers\u2019 experiences that can strengthen the whole company.<\/span><\/p>\n<ol start=\"7\">\n<li>\n<h3>Add happy moments to your Customer Journey Map<\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You\u2019ve probably mapped out your customer\/user journey, but you probably didn\u2019t include this: Happy moments. See if you can take your old customer journey map and mark the points where positive, fun, delightful things happen. Can\u2019t think of any? Then you have some serious CX work to do!<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And of course, also note points where you\u2019ve observed friction, difficulties, and problems, and address those in the order of biggest impact + easiest to implement.<\/span><\/p>\n<ol start=\"8\">\n<li>\n<h3>Work in Customer Support for an afternoon<\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Whether that means answering the live chat questions, picking up the phone, or monitoring your product\u2019s customer Slack channel, try out being the Customer Support agent for an afternoon to and put yourself on the front lines! There\u2019s no better way to find problems than to let customers tell you exactly &#8211; and in great detail &#8211; what they are. And they\u2019ll likely throw in how frustrated it makes them feel too.<\/span><\/p>\n<ol start=\"9\">\n<li>\n<h3>Build a prototype to test your emotional hypotheses<\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">By now, you probably have a few ideas on how you can improve the <a href=\"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/blog\/customer-experience\/\">customer experience<\/a>, and it might be time to test those theories. Create a prototype for a select group of qualified users to try (and react to). And, if possible, have them test the prototype in a testing facility that allows you to observe their reactions as they use your product.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If there is a Golden Rule for empathy, it\u2019s a simple one: Forget your assumptions and be genuinely interested and curious about what people are feeling (not just what they\u2019re doing) while using your product. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Empathy is a learned skill that needs practice so don\u2019t forget to try out these <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">empathy exercises<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> on a frequent basis for enhanced customer experience.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To quote Maya Angelou: \u201cPeople will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"blog-cta-lines-sans\">\n<p>Be the customer experience champion at your company. Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score feedback with <a href=\"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/digital-experience-software\">Pearl-Plaza<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is Empathy? Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. For Product Managers looking to improve customer experience (CX), that definition translates to doing more than understanding the user\u2019s pain points, but also looking at the emotional landscape of what it\u2019s like to use the product &#8211; when it is <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/blog\/9-empathy-exercises-that-help-product-teams-improve-cx\/\">Read more&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":23908,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1023],"tags":[575],"industry":[34,580],"class_list":["post-23905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital-listening","tag-wootric","industry-b2b","industry-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23905\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23905"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmoment.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=23905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}