Why do technology businesses need to invest in empathy?
Tech companies everywhere talk about ‘understanding’ their customers, but how many invest more deeply than that?
This article will cover why making empathy the cornerstone of a technology proposition allows organizations to create space for a different kind of customer relationship. Building empathy into the business model is an approach that allows technology partners to live up to their core values fully.
Mutual understanding – or empathy – is not just a way for technology partners to behave in an emergency; it’s an exceptionally effective business model for the long term. Of course, any good business builds meaningful relationships with customers – but going a step further and working with customers to define success – and failure – on their own terms is an opportunity to contribute more value, explains Stewart Smythe, CEO, Ascent.
In the business technology ecosystem, empathy is a highly underrated quality, especially when it applies to customer relationships. While the concept of ‘customer care’ is nothing new, the willingness of service-led tech companies to take this beyond processes that respond to the challenges customers face remains comparatively rare.
The problem this creates for the technology industry is that customers now expect more, and with good reason. In the digital economy, change comes quickly, and organizations increasingly want their tech partners to focus on their business ethos and culture as well as their IT problems. They want more meaningful commitment with a more equitable balance between their business goals and the needs of technology partners to turn a profit.
But let’s take a step back to understand why building genuine empathy between a company and its customers makes business sense. Research has indicated that when customers connect with a brand on an empathetic level (which you could unpack as sentiment and context), they are likely to feel more positive and satisfied. Specifically, one study found that nearly 73% of respondents felt more positive about a brand when their emotions were well understood and acknowledged. On the flip side, 61% described themselves as ‘very dissatisfied’ customers when they didn’t feel their emotions were acknowledged.
As the accompanying analysis in the study points out, “when customers are experiencing a gap between what they want and what they receive, an opportunity exists for a competitor to step in and fill the hole. Closing this ‘empathy gap’ is, therefore, an urgent business need. Disruptors, especially those smaller, nimbler organizations, often achieve success by meeting a need that established organizations have overlooked.”
If you take this at face value, traditional concepts of customer service not only seem outdated but completely unfit for purpose for today’s technology decision-makers.
Building back better relationships
A very important catalyst for increasing the importance of empathy in technology business relationships has been, of course, the pandemic. In common with many other aspects of the ‘old normal’, the development and implementation of technology strategy has been subject to huge change. While the media headlines have tended to focus on remote working and the ‘overnight’ digital transformation of shared office processes, there are also many more nuanced developments impacting the technology landscape.
Empathy is among them. Indeed, building mutual understanding into post-pandemic customer relationships offers technology businesses the chance to build lasting partnerships with their customers. These are characterized by a shared mindset that is grown up, resilient, flexible and commercially agile – an approach that is fundamentally different from one primarily focused on commercial priorities.
For instance, having experienced lockdowns and enforced isolation, some technology businesses saw first-hand that working closely together in exceptional circumstances brings out the best in everyone. In certain cases, this has driven in a permanent change in culture where truly collaborative customer relationships, driven by empathy, are now demonstrably delivering better outcomes.
For the majority of technology businesses, however, coping with the financial impact of the pandemic was much more tactical. Particularly in the short term, protecting revenues and sustaining momentum was more important than anything – customer relationships included.
Learning from challenging experiences
Speaking from personal experience, empathy has become central to the changes and adaptations made to our own business model over the past 18 months. In practical terms, this revolved around three key activities: 1) We wrote new contracts with more risk built-in for us against our customer commitments. The intention was to give unsettled customers a sense of certainty and give them the confidence to make technology investments during uncertain times. 2) We adapted delivery phasing to ensure customers saw value from their investments earlier in the development and delivery process. 3) We changed our approach to resourcing, which included making new hires with the express aim of guaranteeing resource continuity with customers. This was key for relationships where customers were focused on longer programmes, who attached huge importance to sustaining existing team dynamics and maintaining consistency and predictability.
Putting empathy into practice via this kind of approach helps turn what is, for some, a nebulous concept into a high-impact business model. It also gives organizations that aspire to these core values a way to understand the responsibilities faced by their customers and a way to share pressures. Wherever effective technology delivery holds the key to success, working with customers to define what this means on their own terms offers a great opportunity to contribute greater value.
READ MORE:
- Empathy and Agility: learnings from sales approaches during the pandemic to take into the future
- How to ensure you are selling with empathy during an economic crisis
- Treat World Mental Health Day as a reset in a complex and changing mental landscape
- The top challenges facing CTOs in a post-Covid era and how to solve them
In the context of technology partnerships, empathy is not just about going the extra mile to help customers in a crisis; it’s a compelling business model for the long term. Those IT decision-makers who have seen the benefits this approach can bring are now much more unlikely to settle for anything less.
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