Success and Growth in 2022 through "Empathy"
The year 2021 is drawing to a close. In retrospect, 2021 had been the year of reckoning as we were dealing with living with the pandemic. Vaccination and work started opening, but many dynamics have changed. Health is a priority, and we started embracing technology more. Digital learning, business, marketing, connecting with peers, customers, and employees have undergone a shift with the pandemic. Hybrid work is now a way of work, and thankfully we are seeing business sentiments coming back with growth in the economy. But the one thing that the pandemic taught us or changed for us is that it made a case for empathy with ourselves, our peers, our customers, and our suppliers."
Understanding Empathy
Empathy," by definition, is how we understand and connect with the feelings of others. However, this also involves a portion of emotional intelligence as empathy requires self-awareness, listening, and self-actualization skills. It all starts with the priority to imbibe empathy in the organizational culture to create and deliver solutions.
"Empathy for Business Success"
It can be a refreshing approach as we steer to 2022 with greater rigor. But, uncertainty is the only certainty, and there has been more significant change every day in business, work, and the way we connect with everyone around us.
Empathy is a pivotal way for solutions and deliveries that make the difference. It can enhance creativity because cultivating an empathetic attitude means paying attention to another point of view. It means stretching outside one's frame to realize and understand others. Thus, collaborating with different people, including customers and suppliers, can give a perspective on the actual problems, how the issues are shifting. What new perspective and thought process is needed to handle and tackle it differently. Thus, it means understanding "what is the problem" and "who has the problem." This will necessarily lead to developing solutions so that all stakeholders see through it in the same way. Thus value can be derived by overlaying all thoughts of the stakeholders involved.
Understanding and connecting with others has many advantages for business, including
Greater customer satisfaction and referral rates as products and deliverables will be tuned to deal with the customer's (internal and external) needs, motivations, and pain points.
Innovation and enhanced productivity
Competitive edge as customers will come back again and again and spread word of mouth.
Lesser employee attrition and enhanced collaboration
Operationalizing Empathy in your Business in 2022
Operationalizing empathy for new ideas starts by listening. Connecting and taking appropriate feedback to create combinations brings a unique perspective for employees, suppliers, and customers.
a) Understanding Customer Needs
Understanding your customer's "needs" more than desires is the first step to creating a focus to include empathy in deliverables. Pandemic has made it pertinent that some changes are necessary. Now, customers' safety and health are a priority, and deliverables include this. Also, consider reflecting at a regular point of intervals for the following questions -
What do your regular feedback surveys say about your deliverables? Are you considering them and taking them?
How is your customer relationship management evolving? How much priority does your customers (internal and external) give to it?
Are you connecting to your customers at a regular point?
What do your customers think about you?
What is essential for your customers, and how has the pandemic and uncertainty changed their worldview?
Collect all your data and create programs and actions to identify these goals for yourself and your team. Also, we are highlighting a few more ways through which you can bring more "empathy" to your business. Hence more ideas, more innovation, more productivity by identifying the issues and with whom it is happening.
b) Creating an empathetic culture
A culture is a collective thought process, priorities, and behavior of a group or group of people together. In your business, creating an empathetic culture would mean -
Focus on listening and understanding the needs, wants, and others' perspectives.
Leadership commitment to pave the way through policy actions while reinforcing values and holding people responsible.
Identify the culture leaders or champions who can support to build the case for an empathetic organization with renewed goals to listen, understand and contribute through new ideas, perspectives.
c) Tools to create empathy
Customer Journey Mapping is an effective tool to create new goals and identify deliverables for opportunities with customers, employees, and suppliers.
you can also create and outline some use cases, a storyboard with some pivotal customer interactions for reference, and reflections across the business/organization
Customer feedback assessment by making it a priority to listen and engage regularly.
We wish this new year brings new perspectives, ideas, and greater empathy to connect to your customer (internal and external) for more tremendous success and achievement of objectives.
Happy New Year!