Customer empathy has become a differentiator in recent years. Every company wants to be more empathetic to gain more customers. Often companies find it challenging to define it in context to their product or service and how to implement it. 

What is customer empathy? 

Customer empathy is understanding your customers on a deeper level—who they are, what they’re going through, and what their motivations are for using your product or service. It helps to deliver a more meaningful experience and to understand the customer’s needs. Customer empathy sees users as real people and not just individuals trying to use your website for a given task. It rounds out customers into important people, and provides a larger context for how products and solutions fit into the much broader ecosystem of their lives, their jobs, and their environment.

How to implement customer empathy? 

There are various methods to understand your customer’s mindset on a deeper level and integrate the learning into your website. 

1) Usability testing: Usability Testing is a UX testing technique where an application is tested to determine if it is Useful, easy to Navigate, Accessible, Usable & Desirable. In essence, it ensures that the end-product satisfies user’s demands and can deliver a consistent & seamless user experience. Usability Testing is the key to success, and if done right, provides a good user experience that enriches a brand and leads to more uses, more users, and ultimately more growth. There are various types of user research, to learn more click here. 

2) UX Survey: UX Surveys are a quick and relatively easy way to get data about your users and potential users. But it’s equally risky as with a wrong line of questioning you will create a survey that will lie to you or of no use.

There are two types of questions in a survey

• Closed-ended Questions: These questions offer limited options to choose as answers and focus more on quantitative data. It doesn’t tell us about the context, the motivation, or the cause for the response. The data obtained can be easily visualized with the help of UXArmy’s reporting tools. 
  
• Open-ended questions: These are qualitative questions that offer the respondent a choice to explain a problem that he is facing. These questions require a text box to explain the cause. The Qualitative responses tend to take a lot longer to analyze.

3)Customer Service: Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during, and after a purchase. After sales service is an important element of customer empathy as it contributes to the overall experience of the customer but how to ensure customer satisfaction? Follow this Three Q rule to ensure customer satisfaction

• Quick Reply: Customer is the king and kings don’t wait. Therefore try to be as prompt as possible. 
• Quality information: Try to solve a customer’s problem without confusing him or overwhelming him with information. Try to keep the information concise but enough to solve the customer’s issue
• Quick Process: Keep the process quick and try to resolve the query within 24 hours. 

Conclusion 

In simple words, understanding the customer’s needs, wants and problems in depth and implementing the learnings in your website. If the learnings are implemented in the right way then it will improve your customer’s experience, brand image and will help you reel in more customers. Building customer empathy is a part of customer development process to know more about customer development click here.