Empathy isn't everything, but not having it is | Ep. 91

[Rob] (0:00 - 0:08)

This strategy that you guys might have heard me refer to called feel felt found, right? So you express that you feel where the customer, what the customer is feeling.

[Dillon] (0:08 - 0:40)

Framework Rob. Framework Rob enters the chat. What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas like JP sneakers. Every single day. I got my man Rob here.

Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up lifers? And we've got JP here.

JP, can you say hi?

[JP] (0:41 - 0:43)

What's up MFers? Monday through Friday.

[Dillon] (0:45 - 0:53)

And I am your host, the chief MFer. My name is Dillon Young. JP, tell me what you got today.

[JP] (0:54 - 2:35)

Hey, every once in a while, we got to see what's on our mind. And I'm going to say, what's on my mind today, we have a lot of conversations in CS. And one of those things that we often talk about is empathy.

I'm sure you hear about empathy, emotional intelligence, all that stuff all the time. And I think that on this show, we really like to be realistic about things, right? You got three of the realest CS individuals in the room right now.

Three of the realest ones. All right. Whatever that means.

Inbox 25 all day. You know what I mean? So I feel like we want to have a more nuanced discussion.

That's that key word. More nuanced discussion around empathy. We want to talk about it in an actionable way.

Instead of the soft puppy dog way that I think sometimes... And I love soft puppy dogs. I won't get me wrong.

I love soft puppy dogs. I love hot dogs. I love all kinds of dogs.

But today, we want to talk about how do you... I don't want to say operationalize empathy, but I want to say, how do we use empathy in a way that is more maybe tactical in a way that really serves us? Because I do think it's true.

We do leverage empathy. It's more just like the nuance around how we discuss it that I think sometimes can be a bit shallow or vague. Who wants to start?

Come on. All right. Come on, man.

[Dillon] (2:36 - 2:39)

Everybody knows my thoughts on empathy. So I'm going to let Rob...

[JP] (2:39 - 2:41)

Oh, that's a cop out.

[Dillon] (2:41 - 2:46)

Come on. Tell the people, Dillon. Tell the people how it's your lowest ranked skill.

Come on, Dillon. Come on, man. No, yeah.

[JP] (2:47 - 2:47)

Exactly.

[Dillon] (2:48 - 4:33)

This is the bottom of the CliftonStrengths barrel. But what I think... I've come around to empathy because I had a conversation a long time ago on this podcast with somebody who said...

We were talking about it in the context of relationships, where it's the ticket to ride. Because I'm a big fan of like, brother, it doesn't matter if you're best friends with the person. If the dollars and cents don't make sense, then you're going to be out the door.

That's just the way it goes. The business works. But in order to have difficult conversations, in order to get in certain rooms to have conversations, relationships are super important.

And I do believe in the power of empathy to help build relationships. Talking about people's families, the struggles they deal with personally, their aspirations within their career. Those are all ways that I have...

I want to say weaponized, because it almost sounds nefarious. I've got an end in mind I'm trying to reach. But I think that's just how you deal with people, even internally.

That's why I don't even know that it's a customer success conversation. I've used a lot of empathy to talk with my product guys, with my sales guys, about what it is they're trying to accomplish. What are their dreams?

And customers, yeah. But my point is, it's a method of connecting. I hate the conversation of empathy and customer success, because we say, I just want to help people.

In this day and age, in customer success, that's a load of crap. That doesn't get you a job. Being an empathetic person helps you do your job.

So that's why... See, I could just keep going.

[Rob] (4:33 - 5:36)

Rob, you go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll tell you how it can help get a job, because I've been on either side of the interview table where empathy has come up without calling it empathy.

It's often labeled as a skill, but it's a skill by a different name. So here's an example. A lot of people who might be listening to this podcast, they might be in the job search, they might be asked to do a role play.

The role play might be like, here you have a difficult customer. The customer wants to cancel. The customer has escalated.

Your job is to retain the customer. This is a situation that comes up all the time. To just say, I have empathy is one thing.

But to instead say, I have a framework that I follow, that starts with reflecting back the customer's needs, using mirroring techniques, using labeling techniques. These are all studied negotiation strategies. Expressing my expertise and my experience.

Asking the customer permission to then share what I've found. Now, I've collectively batched this myself into this strategy that you guys might have heard me refer to called Feel Felt Found. So you express that you feel where the customer, what the customer's feeling.

[Dillon] (5:36 - 5:37)

Framework Rob.

[Rob] (5:39 - 7:14)

Framework Rob enters the chat. Welcome. So Feel Felt Found is this great strategy, if you want to put empathy in practice, where when you have a customer that you're disagreeing with, you express, you feel what the customer is feeling.

You have felt this way before, or you've dealt with people who have felt this way before. That's the felt part. And what you found is, and then you share very scientifically and methodically, here's my findings.

You can very, in a very non-adversarial way, educate the customer in a way that implicitly is disagreeing with them, but it also comes out as perspective sharing. So this came up like today. We have one of my clients, the CSM is dealing with a customer who is trying to cancel, but they're already within their auto-renew clause, their 60-day auto-renew period.

And there's two ways to go about this. There's one way to go about this. Yeah.

You can just email the customer and say, are you really just not going to uphold the contract? Versus if he gets on a call with the customer and he says, look, I get it. Budgets are tight.

Times are difficult. It's happening to everybody. I'm right there with you.

I get this industry. Do you mind if I share my perspective on this? And then that permission-based approach allows him to then educate the customer and say, look, honestly, our hands are a bit tied given the contract.

And I want to see what I can do to help you through this. That is a much more educated conversation to have. Maybe even ask the customer, let's unpack why you want to cancel.

And we find some resolutions to that. Is it cashflow or is it features and functionality? Is it something else?

[Dillon] (7:15 - 7:19)

And that's all of what should have been done 90 days ago. Oh yeah.

[JP] (7:19 - 7:26)

Okay. Yeah. It should have been done, but that's, that's unrealistic.

We can't go back in time. We're going to have these eventualities.

[Dillon] (7:26 - 7:30)

No, but you said this was a one person team, Rob, is that right?

[Rob] (7:31 - 7:47)

One CSM on this team. Have they never CSM'd before? Oh no, they've CSM'd.

But the problem is this company does not have access to the right dashboard, their own contract details. No, no, no, no, no. The, the, the product details.

[JP] (7:48 - 7:55)

He's no, no, he's just at this point, he's just, look, I'm going to, I want to say this because I think that.

[Dillon] (7:55 - 7:56)

I agree with all that Rob though.

[JP] (7:57 - 10:34)

I think that empathy is going to like really prove it's worth more in difficult situations. So even though I think it can be used like Dillon said, anywhere doesn't have to be customer success. I think I'm going to call out two things.

One, which is what Rob said, which is something that I actually learned recently. I had a customer where I was talking with them and things got escalated. They were trying to keep pinging and talking.

And I'm thinking in my head, how do I reset these expectations? This customer is super noisy. This is like early when I started this position.

And really, even though this in the situation in particular, it wouldn't have been as good. And this is the more sales side of things. And I'm not calling out sales, like this is one of those, but I think the sales approach, which is one that I took more of, which was basically, I was trying to stave things off, really figure out everything behind the scenes, allow them some time to cool off.

Then we got on a call with him, but there was something different that my manager told me where she was like, here is a point. And she pointed into our email exchange where maybe it would have been good to just get on a call. And I've heard this echo with other people.

The one thing I don't want to do when someone's escalating is get on a call with them, because I'm like, you need to calm your ass down. I'm not here to do that. But that is not really empathetic.

That is me centered. Empathy helps me get out of my own way. The tactical thing is to get on the call.

That takes the courage, that takes the ability to step out of myself and say, okay, I represent this company here and I'm willing to do this. The other thing that I'll quickly call out is I had a situation where there was another very annoying customer. And it just seemed like the onboarding, things are just dragging behind and getting disjointed emails.

It's really weird. I come to find out they have a lot of internal dysfunction. Now, this is something you may not be able to know necessarily on the surface, you can't assume.

But through talking to sales and looking back on things, we realized there was actually a lot of internal dysfunction. Have I been working for a company where there's a lot of internal dysfunction?

[Dillon] (10:34 - 10:35)

Never.

[JP] (10:35 - 10:51)

And how does that come out on the other side? In that situation, even though the customer is annoying, I can find empathy for their situation. And that begins to change the framework for the way that we engage together.

[Dillon] (10:53 - 11:35)

It's good. I think at the end of the day, it's about taking every single scenario and teasing it apart, looking in your toolbox and deciding what's best. It is not, oh, I'm an extrovert, so I'll be really good at CSMing.

Or I really care about people. I like to volunteer at the hospital on the weekends, which is a great thing, by the way. I'm being hyperbolic here, so I'd be a great CSM.

It's that sort of stuff we got to get away from. And we got to get towards understanding how we actually use these skill sets. Because I agree with you guys that they're absolutely...

I didn't used to, similar to you, JP. Anyway, that's our time, guys. I'm sure we'll be talking about this within another 30 days.

So look forward to it, lifers. We'll talk to you soon.

[Voiceover] (12:05 - 12:10)

Find us on the socials at lifetimevaluemedia.com. Until next time.