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Empathy is the experience of understanding another person’s condition from their perspective. You place yourself in their shoes and feel what they are feeling. It’s known to increase prosocial/helping behaviors. Culture might be socializing people into becoming more individualistic rather than empathic, research has uncovered the existence of “mirror neurons”, which react to emotions expressed by others and then reproduce them.
Empathy is the ability to successfully understand another individual’s perspective by viewing things through their point of view. It’s considered a vital “soft skill” within the business world, and one which has been receiving greater focus in recent years as businesses and brands attempt to overcome increasing competition by building stronger customer loyalty structures.
Soft skills – also known as core skills or common skills – are essentially personal attributes that all professionals require to support their situational awareness and help achieve tasks more effectively. The term is also closely related to emotional intelligence or the more commonly used people skills.
Why is empathy suddenly important in the business world?
With the current landscape encouraging deeper consumer-merchant relationships, businesses must develop and sustain such associations. This is because many buyers rank brand imaging and customer relationships as very important factors when choosing a product.
Benefits of Adopting This Soft Skill to Business Model
Increased Sales
It allows you to view the market through their unique perspective and understand the desires, challenges, and expectations they have. This allows you to adequately position your product or service in such a manner as to capitalize on these and drive more sales.
Greater Customer Retention
Employing an empathetic model allows you to preempt the thinking process of the average consumer and discover innovative ways to capitalize on these traits to build long-lasting business relationships. Many businesses maintain a dedicated mailing list because they understand that customers appreciate having a regular interactions with their favorite brands.
More Referrals
In the business world, a good reputation is probably one of the most important aspects of advertising. Customers are more likely to recommend brands that they have personally used and have found to be quite satisfactory. This is especially true if the brand has built a personal relationship with its clientele by understanding its basic needs and expectations.
Increased Productivity
Empathy is not only applied to the consumer-merchant dynamic, it’s also quite useful when dealing with employees as well. The goal of any employer should not be to run their employees to the ground in an outdated model of boosting productivity through longer hours and ever-increasing output quotas. By placing themselves in the shoes of employees, a good employer will be able to adapt methods that allow them to get the maximum output from their employees while still maintaining general well-being and cohesion within the workplace.
Enhanced Innovative Potential
Increased empathy within the workplace also has the potential to build confidence, creativity, and collaboration among workers. It boosts innovation, as it fosters an environment that promotes the sharing of ideas within the workplace and a drive to improve productivity.
Expanded Business Collaborations & Alliances
It also encourages businesses to consider the perspective of other companies around them as well. This can be used as an opportunity to look at your business through the eyes of a competitor and discover potential shortcomings they may wish to exploit.
Why do Businesses Fail To Apply Empathy?
Placing Company Goals Before Consumer Values
The primary goal of any business is to maximize its profit while successfully marketing its product or service to interested customers. The primary goal of any consumer is to obtain the best value from a product or service, both in terms of usefulness and cost. Most times this eventually leads to a steady equilibrium which both parties find mutually beneficial. In some situations, a business may make the mistake of placing its goals before the demands of its consumers.
Placing Shareholders Before Customers
It’s important to remember that in a manner, the customers are the greatest shareholders of any firm. The practice of placing shareholders of any firm. The practice of placing shareholders before your customers can lead not only to the failure of a product launch but catastrophic business failure as well.
Failing to Connect with Audience
One of the key advantages of employing an empathy map early on is that it allows you to correctly identify your customer segment early on before significant resources have been invested and plan the best way of building a sustainable relationship with them. This can save you from a catastrophic product launch down the line which may turn out to be damaging to your brand image.
Failing to Identify Your Customers
A product should always be launched with a particular market segment in mind, which helps maximize sales and allows you to streamline your product features toward providing maximum functionality for that specific customer segment. Releasing a product with no definitive customer is a recipe for disaster and typically leads to low sales and poor market adoption.
Failing to Foster a Supportive Work Environment
To build a successful workforce and maintain optimal productivity it is important to understand what motivates your workers and the challenges they face in the workforce. A good empathy map can help you do that and build a more productive working environment that operates smoothly. It is also important in terms of innovation.
Failing to Identify Weaknesses
The areas of weakness open up an opportunity for potential collaboration between your company and other allied businesses. This helps you streamline your services and focus on strengthening the areas you are most effective at, while the other allied companies focus on the different areas involved in the delivery of the product or service.
Understand the Empathy Map
- WHO are we empathizing with? Who is the person we want to understand? What is the situation they are in? What is their role in the situation?
- What do they need to DO? What do they need to do differently? What jobs do they want or need to get done? What decisions do they need to make? How will we know they were successful?
- What do they SEE? What do they see in the marketplace? What do they see in their immediate environment? What do they see others saying and coming? What are they watching & reading?
- What do they SAY? What have we heard them say? What can we imagine them saying?
- What do they DO? What do they do today? What behavior have we observed? What can we imagine them doing?
- What do they HEAR? What are they hearing others say? What are they hearing from friends? What are they hearing from colleagues? What are they hearing second-hand?
- What do they THINK & FEEL? Pains ‘What are their fears, frustrations, and anxieties?’ Gains ‘What are their wants, needs, hopes, and dreams?’
What Is An Empathy Map?
It’s a pictorial tool that can be used by various organizations and individuals as a framework for building, analyzing, and understanding the behavioral aspects of your customer base. The aim is to visually map out certain aspects of the client’s behavior that may be of key interest to you such as their needs, expectations, challenges, perceptions, actions, and so on.
The purpose of this is to build a better understanding of your customer segment, their problems, and how you can position your company to solve them. Therefore, it’s pertinent that at all times you remember that the consumer is the primary focus of the empathy map.
It’s important to avoid falling into the trap of attempting to preempt your customers without adequate data. Building a solid empathy map requires a significant amount of customer-merchant interaction, both in terms of listening and talking. This can be through market analysis, online questionnaires, product pre-sales, interviews, and so on. The key is to gather as much information from your potential customer base as possible and interpret this in a useful manner.
When to Employ an Empathy Map?
When Building Customer Segment with a business model canvas
When Attempting to Elaborate on a User Persona
During Customer Interviews
It can be used to craft a “User Story”
When Develop upselling and cross-selling opportunities
It can be used to plan a marketing campaign
Build a stronger customer relationship management department
Empathy Map Quadrants
SAYS Quadrant
The empathy map is designed to deal with the Verbal Information given to you by the customer. It should contain direct quotes obtained from both past & present customers/users as they interact with your product, customer services, or any other customer channel.
The quotes can be obtained from interviews, usability studies, surveys, online forums such as chat boards social media, and so on. The aim is to obtain unfiltered comments from your customer base and on that note, it’s ideal that these comments are quoted verbatim.
THINKS Quadrant
It can be regarded as a form of “inner monologue” or ideas that they failed to verbalize. This is important because users typically think a lot deeper than they bother to verbalize. The information can be obtained through surveys, interviews, etc. You must extract the information through the use of guided statements, such as asking what they were thinking when using particular features.
DOES Quadrant
It deals with the actions of the user during or after the use of a product/service. This may lend key info that even the user of the product is not aware of because every action is guided by a reason or cause, one that users may frequently be unaware of.
FEELS Quadrant
It has a profound effect on the popularity or success of a product, it’s related to the emotional state of the user while using the product. This section is usually the last part to be designed and helps tie together all the information obtained from previous sections.
Empathy Map Canvas
WHO are we empathizing with – Customer profile. What do they need to DO – Reponsibilities. What do they SEE, What do they SAY, what do they DO, what do they HEAR, what do they THINK & FEEL?
How To Create an Empathy Map?
Select Your Subject
The 1st step is to choose the ideal customer profile you will use to build your user persona or user story. It requires a strong understanding of the market & the various market segments within it. It involves some preliminary research which will help you obtain a holistic understanding of the marketplace, where your product/service fits within it, and the customer segments it could appeal to. You need to craft a separate empathy may for each user persona, which is designed to represent an ideal customer within a target demographic.
Gather Your Data
Source of information can come from a wide range of channels which may include surveys, online chat forums, social media, product reviews, interviews, product pre-launches, beta testing, etc. Remember to be as extensive as possible and ensure that your search for information is in-depth.
Gather Your Supplies
Crafting empathy can involve tools ranging from complex visualization software to simple items such as notebooks, sticky notes, and writing utensils. No particular method is advocated over the other, it is simply advisable to do what works best for you and is within your budget. If done correctly, they produce the same results.
Assemble Your Team
It involves bringing together everyone that is directly involved in product design as well as crafting the empathy map. This will also include any interviewees or market experts you may have identified as well. When all the members of the team have been identified, regular meetings should be set up at a suitable time, location, and date. Usually, crafting a functional empathy map may take more than one session, so plan for multiple meetings. Avoid making each session drawn out to prevent mental fatigue, burnout, and loss of creativity. The point is to be as productive as possible, so keep meetings short – and impactful.
Draw Your Map
If you are using the Empathy Map Canvas, it’s important to start from the goals sections and work your way through the other subsections in a clockwise manner, finally ending with the inner workings of the customer’s mind. To add a depth of realism you can create a fictional profile for your ideal customer which includes a name, age, background, hobbies, and other relevant info which may further aid you in creating a realistic user persona.
Summarize The Information
The key here is to bring out the salient points that were identified and craft them into well-thought-out business strategies. It also gives room for any flaws to be identified and promptly corrected. After this, the finished empathy nap is now ready to be distributed to the relevant departments.
How to Use Empathy Maps to Drive SaaS Growth
Empathy maps are quite useful when used within the SaaS industry, it’s most likely because software designers require significant knowledge about their customers to be able to design a product that will offer the best user experience. It involves placing themselves in their customer’s shoes from the moment the product is purchased to when it has been used successfully.
It led to the rise of various specialties within the software service industry, such as UX and UI design. Both terms refer to different concepts, but both have to do with designing a product from the viewpoint of the user.
Empathy Map Brings to the Marketing Strategy
Info Distributed In a Clear Visual Analysis
There are several advantages of information in a pictorial form since complex & vague concepts can be better conceptualized in concrete terms through the use of pictures & graphics. It also helps break them down into simpler ideas through the use of color coding, subdivision, and flowcharts.
Another advantage is that visual analysis makes it easier to remember large amounts of data. The human brain is wired to process visual data much more quickly and efficiently than any other type of info, which is why graphical presentations are so important during the learning process.
A Better Understanding Of The Brand’s Audience
At the end of the day, the main function of an empathy map is to create an immersive experience that gives you an in-depth understanding of your target demographic. The visual graph itself is just a pictorial tool and not the end goal, so it is important to always ensure that at the end of crafting an empathy map a user persona of your ideal customer has been made.
A key advantage of an empathy map is that the info is mainly sourced through direct interactions between the brand and its customers. This helps build a deeper personal relationship between the company and its target demographic. It also ensures that the information’s accuracy.
Quick Implementation & Low Costs
Another advantage of empathy maps is that they can be implemented quite quickly. Once all the required data has been obtained. The next step is to hold a brainstorming session with key team members aimed at building the empathy map. Empathy maps are also a low-cost alternative to other forms of user persona building. Even though some individuals may prefer to use expensive data visualization software, a good map can be drawn up with a few cheap writing utensils.
Important Insights From the Profile Analysis
Another feature of the empathy map is to succinctly bring out various important insights from the profile analysis of the customer, which may drive innovation or strategy changes that vastly increase profit and productivity. The insights may range from seemingly minor details such as the range of colors favored by a large variety of consumers, to industry-changing discoveries such as the emergence of new niches within the ever-changing market environment.
They Offer Versatility & Flexibility
Empathy maps are flexible tools that can be adapted to a wide range of uses, aside from just gaining useful insights into consumers. They can also be utilized by companies to better understand their workers as well and boost productivity.
They Are Repeatable & Reliable
The empathy maps can be repeated by different groups of individuals in the same market segment and obtain similar results as long as a large amount of data is obtained. This makes them repeatable and reliable, something that development teams appreciate.
Tips for Effective Empathy Maps
Avoid Biases Affect Your Decisions
It’s normal to have both conscious and unconscious biases on a wide range of topics. An empathy map is meant to be as unbiased and objective as possible. There are several ways to combat biases. The 1st step is to try to be aware of your biases and double-check every bit of info you accept or dismiss. Another good idea is to have several individuals look at the info from different perspectives. Lastly, every piece of info should be backed up with factual data.
Build Your Foundation On Factual Data
Using solid data isn’t just a way to avoid biases, it also helps add credence to your empathy map. An empathy map that is built with data from well-constructed questions and reputable sources is much more effective when implemented.
On the Lookout for New Opportunities
The market is extremely dynamic, new trends appear constantly and disappear just as quickly. Within these shifts in customer preferences, goals and challenges await numerous market opportunities that can be capitalized upon.
Invest In A Root Cause Analysis
Even though customers within a particular market segment can vary widely, there are usually similar characteristics that bind them together. Many of these common characteristics can be traced back to a deep-rooted set of ideas and beliefs that are prevalent among the particular target demographic.
Tips for Making Empathy Maps with Remote Teams
Invest in video conferencing technology; Use project management tools; and Use a shared document.