It was found that empathy is one of the five ways that customers evaluate service quality so it is a significant contributor.

So what is empathy?

As a psycho-social concept, empathy is defined as the response to and the ability to feel what others are feeling. Empathy includes both cognitive and affective components: cognitive factors relate to a person’s thought process to understand the emotions of others, while the affective component refers to an individual’s ability to feel what others are feeling without confusing oneself and others.

Customers evaluate empathy as to whether a business provides individual attention, whether it considers your convenience, if it has your best interests at heart and understands your specific needs. The customer wants to feel they are unique and special and important to the business.

Personnel in small businesses often know customers by name and can build up a knowledge of their requirements and preferences. In this way small firms can compete with larger companies advantageously by using empathy. The same holds true for B2B services and being able to offer a customised service is a strong position to be in. Neither should the internal market be forgotten where staff evaluate employers on their empathy – just replace the word ‘customer’ with ‘employee’.

This is why a business should listen to the customer to get feedback - and regularly converse in order to get updated insights into customer’s changing wants and needs. Many businesses are in daily contact with their customers but other customer voices are harder to hear from.

But how far do you analyse what the customer tells you - or omits? That silence could be saying something too?

Many feedback systems are simplistic in question design and often only require a number to be put in from the consumer or the ticking of a box. So that sort of question design assumes you know a range of possible answers already. But it doesn’t tell you anything new or surprising neither are the answers qualified. Some research design is about whether the service meets expectations - but that still doesn’t tell you anything really new.

So what other kinds of feedback can we get from customers?

Conducting semi-structured interviews where answers are carefully probed for clarification and background can explore the world of value formation, whether at an individual or system level. 

This kind of feedback can be applied to staff, as well as customers and other stakeholders.

The researcher needs a knowledge of value-creation, value-realisation, experiential aims and internal and external services marketing and behavioural theories in order to frame the questions and where to probe further. In the analysis of the transcribed interviews, the skill is to surface themes and motifs and to identify any patterns that relate to these theories and then to identify any new observations.

Finally – the sheer fact that your organisation is willing to invest time and energy into questioning them individually shows you are empathetic - ticking the boxes of being heard, valued and included.