What does empathy mean in business? In which sectors can it be applied? In what ways does this skill impact results?
In this text, we indicate examples that illustrate how the practice of empathy can lead you to success, improving services, products and different processes.
So, read on and discover how to turn empathy into a strategic tool!
Ebook 24 reasons
Empathy: the best skill to develop
Being empathetic is, in short, knowing how to put yourself in the other’s shoes. Adopt your perspective to better understand needs, desires, tastes and difficulties.
In this way, when we manage to decipher someone else’s point of view, our responses become more assertive — which is the primary objective of any and every company.
So, regardless of the product or service you offer, you must have already realized that it is not enough to guarantee quality in raw materials and technology. Your focus must be the customer, who guides all stages of development. This is the foundation of business empathy.
Consumer sciences make this perspective stand out. Books, articles, courses, tools… Everything points to the need to privilege the person willing to pay for the item offered.
This logic is not new. However, in the current scenario — marked by fierce competition and a huge variety of options on the market — it reaches unprecedented importance, standing out as a strategy to be pursued with a strong foundation.
In other words, it is not enough to assume what the customer is looking for. It is necessary to know what will delight you, what will make your brand memorable and recurring in your consumer’s searches.
What does empathy mean in this clipping?
Empathy in this business segment is the basis of this connection, this bond between company and customer.
After all, the ability to put yourself in the other’s shoes, with property to interpret their demands and preferences, is what allows the business to establish the ideal communication, eliminating investments inconsistent with the consumer’s personality.
Undoubtedly, much research is crucial to achieving such success. The great incentive is to go deeper into the customer’s particularities. Not just knowing your age, social class and profession, but seeing you as a complex individual.
Information such as music you listen to, dream trip, profiles of social networks you follow, means of transport you use, vocabulary with which you express yourself, sport you practice, causes with which you get involved… They are more efficient in understanding you than know your financial status.
Start thinking of your business as good conversation. Your role is to be an excellent listener, listening and interpreting everything your customer has to say. This demonstrates business empathy.
Direct your efforts to discover, as accurately as possible, who your interlocutor is. What he thinks, feels and pursues.
After all, if your business is to be an answer, you must first make sure you identify which question it will serve.
What does empathy in design mean?
Imagine a company whose product is shoe creation. To conceive her production, she can be guided by research on trends, seek inspiration from well-accepted models in the market, and hire a creative and talented designer.
But is this enough to guarantee the success of your sales? If the company doesn’t know who its potential customer is in the first place, it can see perfect pairs of shoes run aground on shelves, without waking up to the reasons for this unpopularity.
The design — of the product, of the brand, of the packaging… — must be empathetic. Not just pretty and well-crafted. It needs to respond to real needs. The empathy response directly in business.
Remember: don’t impose an answer without investigating the questions! Forget what you think, believe, appreciate. Dedicate yourself to analyzing your customer’s culture, not yours.
Your product is a reflection of the interest you show for the consumer. When he opts for an item, he favors the one that is more in tune with his lifestyle. So the design needs to translate that connection. The more evident the empathy between product and customer, the greater its commercial viability.
Business empathy to understand the customer
Empathy helps you put yourself in the customer’s shoes and predict their choices
What does empathy mean in sales business?
Think about your experience as a consumer. There are spaces that you frequent with greater fidelity, isn’t there? Have you ever stopped to ponder the reasons that legitimize your choice?
You prefer places where you feel good. Where you find empathy between your wishes and what is offered. Where your personality is welcomed and well attended.
We feel satisfied as our goals are met. We don’t always know exactly what we’re looking for. The seller’s role is to see, through the clues that we are able to reveal, which solutions would be best suited to our purposes.
A good seller conquers. he doesn’the asks if he can help, but how he can help.
Note that one of the main adjectives used to praise a salesperson’s performance is to describe him as “attentive”. And attention is one of the commandments of empathy.
Knowing how to sell is knowing how to read the customer
The practice of empathy in business requires skill in interpretation, the ability to relate products and services with needs that are not always explicit. The good seller promotes encounters between subjective desires and their complementary objects.
Finally, more than knowing the features of the products, the sales professional needs to be a dedicated people connoisseur. Must be a natural and subtle “interviewer”, with the ability to make assertive inferences.
Delighting a consumer is not just about surrounding them with pleasantries or passing on as much information as possible in record time. It is essential to know how to listen more than knowing how to speak. Sympathy can even be appreciated. But it is empathy that guarantees the sale.
And to launch yourself in the knowledge of people, exercise your power of self-knowledge. In this way, you will develop greater emotional intelligence to adapt to the most diverse customer profiles.
self-knowledge banner
What does empathy mean in marketing business?
Marketing communicates. Therefore, it needs to be a link between what is promoted and who the dissemination message is aimed at.
When marketing knows the particularities of its recipient, it manages to send messages that will not be ignored. Because they will happen at the right time, with timely language and relevant content.
Effective marketing spells out what empathy means in relation to the market niche. See how the efforts of professionals in the field focus on this premise. They are dedicated to investigating, in depth, who is a company’s ideal customer, and then designing communication strategies.
In contemporary marketing, the ideal customer—called a persona—gets first and last name, hobbies, address, dreams, frustrations, idols, humor, style references. This makes it possible to imagine the person “on the other side” of the transmitted message, with greater propriety and, consequently, with greater chances of success in the chosen approach.
customer focus
Expensive marketing campaigns can bring disastrous results when they ignore—or know little about—the behavior of the consumers they target.
Again, it is not enough to invest in strategies that “everyone” bets on. It is necessary to focus on the specific profile of the customer that one seeks to attract, adopting the strategy aimed at the niche, not the whole.
It’s no use sponsoring Facebook ads if your customer isn’t there. It doesn’t work to hire the celebrity of the moment to be the face of your campaign, if your consumer doesn’t share the values that that famous person represents.
Nor is it favorable to copy the funny language of the company you admire, without first knowing if your interlocutor signals empathy for this way of obtaining information.
That is, forget what you assume, what you practice and choose. Marketing should talk with the ideal customer’s point of view, not with your criteria of good and beautiful.
At each step, ask how empathy is present. Check the harmony between what is broadcast and the identity of the one you need to enchant. The success of a message is proportional to the respect it gives to the taste of the interlocutor to which it is addressed.
Business Empathy Importance
Understanding your ideal customer is a consequence of showing empathy in your business
What does empathy mean in business innovation?
The relevant innovation is precisely the one that originates in empathy. The novelty cannot be superficial: it needs to remedy a difficulty, offer a valid resource.
Listen to your customers’ complaints. Realize your “gambiarras” to adapt products to your needs. Find out why they come home empty-handed after hours in a shopping mall.
Innovation facilitates a use, but also improves the correspondence between an object or service and the personality of the person paying for it. In other words, consistent innovation is both an extension of the customer’s identity and a surprising outlet for their dissatisfactions.
In fact, if we want to understand what empathy means in business, we need only look at innovations in products that we have acquired or intend to buy. We highlight how they make our life easier, express our taste inclinations, adapt to our daily lives.
look around and pay attention
Look at the items that surround you right now. See how each of them indicates an answer to your needs. Also notice what makes you think of substitutions. There is always a reason – subjective or objective – at play, which you define by arguing the empathy between the characteristics of the products and their needs or search for solutions.
When you’re the one who needs to think about innovations to propose, don’t forget to put yourself in their shoes.
