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There’s a little secret about empathy in business that doesn’t get talked about much. Here it is: It’s a great thing to have at any time, but it’s never more important than when times turn sour. Take the recent example of a frequent GrubHub customer who’s disabled.
It began as a saga of a rude delivery driver upset with what he perceived to be a small tip. But it slowly grew into a viral phenomenon in videos seen by millions of people because of what happened afterward.
GrubHub’s response to its appropriately dissatisfied customer was the ultimate example of a public display lacking in empathy: First it offered 15% off of her next order. Then it said there was an investigation with details that couldn’t be shared. Finally, perhaps sensing it might be in the wrong, the company again tried to buy back her loyalty, offering a $100 gift card.
All of these concessions had to be dragged out of GrubHub over the course of many days. Documenting the whole thing on TikTok, the disabled customer took what in the past would’ve been a minor gripe and turned it into a public relations fail for a company that should’ve known better.
It isn’t just that GrubHub got bad press. It’s the fact that a digitally native company failed to recognize the power of a digitally distributed message—these people don’t care about their customers—that spread across the globe before executives could even begin to survey the damage.
It’s a scenario that plays out often. And if you review lists of the worst PR disasters of the year, you’ll begin to see how each and every situation would have benefited from a helping of empathy.
It’s vital to have empathetic leaders and employees who know they’re cared for. But it’s equally vital to have executives who are empathetic toward their most-prized constituents: their customers. For empathy to truly drive success, it has to be projected both inward and out. As the London School of Economics proved recently, empathy is a skill, a learned trait that can do everything from increasing retention to driving innovation.
That was especially true during the beginnings of Covid, when lockdowns increased a society-wide sense of isolation and forced much commerce to happen digitally. And it’s only becoming truer now, as the rapid shift in America’s economic standing has whipsawed from good times to bad.
The fact that every business, even those you’d think would be prepared, can be exposed instantly during their most unempathetic moments is also an opportunity that first looks like a problem.
Yes, executives at companies with millions of daily customers might be too busy to pay attention to just one. But if empathy is truly a skill, couldn’t the identification and proper resolution of just such a scenario be built within a company? And couldn’t that make the company’s relationship with its customers that much better?
Shouldn’t there be more greatly empowered social media minders who can more readily escalate such a situation? Couldn’t a similar TikTok video that showed a quick reaction and equitable solution to the problem have gotten just as many views? Could the virality of any confrontation work as much in companies like GrubHub’s favor as it does, occasionally, to their detriment?
These are the sorts of questions CEOs should be asking at any time, but especially at a moment when consumers not only have a maximum amount of choice but an increasingly dwindling amount of spending power.
Empathy isn’t just how you respond to a customer complaint, of course. But such a situation typifies the need to prioritize empathy in every step of a company’s interactions with its customers. Perhaps there was even an empathetically driven technical solution that could have prevented the problem in the first place.
Whether preventable or not, it’s merely a parable for what’s coming. As economic times turn difficult, whether briefly or for the long term, executives have a new set of opportunities to show their customers they care. Empathy matters, but never more than when it’s in short supply.
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