It’s a perfectly competitive world where a customer has endless choices for every single decision he/she takes including preferring or buying a product and service. In this attention-deficit world, it will not be wrong if we say that we as customers are spoilt with endless choices both for every need of ours. This precisely enhances the importance of innovation to engage, retain and bring more value to customers through a whole new outlook and approach. 

Creating something new or a culture of innovation is paramount for survival and growth. Consider this, if your customer is engaged with you and you can give value through products/services to their un-recognised and unmet needs, will it matter to them which competitor exists? 

Innovation and the process creativity in a business can be accelerated through a focus on Empathy. Empathy can be the unique differentiator in the competitive world today to engage and consequently retain all stakeholders, internal or external.

In today's times, Empathy can be one of the most underrated words, however, the latest Forbes study declared it as “The word of 2021”.  Intangible aspects like, Empathy are not discussed/utilised much because of three reasons:

1. Lack of understanding the term and its relation with innovation.

2. Lack of clarity on processes, methods to build an empathic culture

3. Lack of effective governance and objectivity on the ground

Empathy and Innovation seem to be two opposite ends of a fulcrum. Empathy being the softer aspect and innovation is the creative aspect with deeper knowledge and understanding.

But let the truth be told, all innovations originated from that human desire to combat the problems in hand. Take, for instance, Steve Jobs worked to build an i-pod as he was frustrated with the offerings for music lovers.

So before we get into the nitty gritty of infusing Empathy using it as a path to create magic,  let’s get to understanding the term empathy and why it is important for businesses. 

Empathy , simply put, is a skill to understand others feelings and emotions or just understanding others point of views. It supports an understanding of 

1. Why and how someone will behave

2. What inspires and motivates them, other’s belief systems, and

3. the way someone responds to various stimuli and situations.

From the customer behavior aspect, Empathy is important to predict and understand the customer reaction and deploy various strategies to support their journey and needs. The important point here is the approach one takes to comprehend Customer Behavior and  to implement Empathy. The two go hand in hand. Empathy allows you to interpret customer behavior or response mapped to  a particular event or situation.

Empathy thus supports the innovation process through more workable ideas, solutions through greater understanding.

5 Ways to Build a Culture of Empathy in your business and Innovate

1. Listen and observe your stakeholders regularly

Listening is an important skill to learn and understand what, why, and how different stakeholders are doing things or thinking. Most of the time different users will not and cannot verbalize their thoughts and actions. This enhances the importance of listening and observing body language, facial expressions keenly to understand the unexpressed and expressed motivations, needs, and beliefs. It’s an art and intense action because observation, listening is not about gathering simple information. It’s an action to understand the story behind the behaviour, actions in an unbiased manner to support ideation for innovation. 

In your business, build programs to listen and observe your stakeholders including customers, partners, and employees. For instance, consider to understand on 

- How do your partners/employees behave when they are maybe delivering a product/service, or when they are talking to the customers?

- How do your customers react when they get a product or service ?

When was the last time, you created and worked through a team to gather data points by observing your stakeholders? Put up your team with keen listening and observing minds together to randomly give you some insights by listening through interviews and observing your stakeholders.

2. Use structured feedback programs involving qualitative and quantitative surveys

Customer Obsession can also pave way for a well-structured feedback program that can involve behavioral studies, Csat programs, NPS to understand how an organization's product or service is meeting the  customer expectations, stakeholders/customer emotional responses, their engagement, and above all their thoughts about the product/service from the business.

In your business, you should build well-structured feedback programs at regular intervals to gather data with different insights of perception, expectations at various touch points across the complete journey.

The feedback program can be a qualitative study involving focus groups, interviews to gather insights at one particular point or a quantitative study that involves understanding of the sales data, the various Csat and NPS score data to draw conclusions and insights.

There is no ideal fit. Any organization can create a program based on their unique structure and business. If you have an NPS and Csat program already in place, use it along with some qualitative studies to affirm and create a lot of ideas to consequently prioritize and prototype.

3. Use maps such as empathy maps to understand others point of view

Customer Obsession also means that you can use empathy maps to understand and empathize with your stakeholders.

Traditionally, empathy maps are built to determine user/persona behavior, attitude by putting verbatim/quotes in four quadrants. The four quadrants put the user/persona in the middle and with verbatim/quotes in the four quadrants in form of Say, Thinks, Does, and Feels. Empathy maps can be created based on the existing data or understanding or a focussed study consisting of a single user and multiple users.

The idea is empathy maps can help an organization and the innovation team to build an understanding of how a user/persona or stakeholder will behave, think and feel while using a product/service. The outcome is endless ideas to further build on.

4. Connect with extreme users of your product and service

Extreme users are the people who have extreme views about your product or service. IF you have a structured NPS program in your organization, you will realize these are the people who are extreme in their thoughts. So the people who gave you a score of 10 are extreme users and so are the people who gave your score of 1,2 and 3.Engaging and understanding with them will give your organization clear insight on what you should continue doing, and what is not fitting well.

You can know more about the NPS program to implement in your organisation by clicking the link here.

5. Develop a beginner mindset to keep a check on biases

Mostly to go past your biases it is a good idea to practice a beginner mindset. Now the foremost question comes, why a beginner mindset. A beginner mindset helps one to get rid of their thoughts, biases which have been conditioned in the mind for a long time. Conscious and unconscious biases affect decision making and our interpretations. Developing a beginner's mindset envisages that a person gets rid of their developed/past thoughts and works to see things the way they are. This will lead to direct understanding of different user/stakeholders' thoughts thus creating and giving data for innovation.

For instance, take the example of Newton. We all know how Newton discovered gravity by observing an apple that dropped from a tree in his lap. If he would have thought that an apple would only come down, we never would have known about gravity. Newton developed a beginner mindset to understand the what, how, and why’s of an apple falling. Beginner’s mindset is the breeding ground for innovation.

Understanding users, their expectations, preferences, attitudes, thoughts are the necessary ingredients for innovation. Work to build a culture of empathy by engaging with your stakeholders and use structured programs to create innovations as your unique differentiator. Customer Obsession will provide the necessary impetus.  

Innovation is just not limited to a new invention in product or service, but involves novel ways to reduce friction through new ways to engage, create, thus delivering value to the customers. 

If you want to know how you can infuse a culture of empathy and innovation, write to us at contact@pinkguava.org.