Supervisor Snacks

What is Empathy exactly and why is it important to our positions as agents in an answering service or call center?  Simply put, empathy is the ability to share in another’s emotions, thoughts, or feelings. In many situations it would be synonymous with the word sympathy, in either case for us, showing empathy or sympathy is aligning your words and actions to those of our caller. It means gentling your voice and showing by your tone that you are sad for them when they call about a death in the family.  It means sounding concerned when someone calls the doctor because their child is running a fever.  It means sharing urgency when the call is about water flooding in from a leak in the apartment above.  And it also means sounding happy when someone calls to say that they won’t be in to work because their wife just had a baby. If we had to describe empathy in only one word, it would be CARING. In this business we try to hire people who care about people right from t...

  In the last issue of the Constellation, we discussed saying “I’m sorry” inappropriately, or excessively, when it is not warranted.   In this issue we are going to talk about NOT saying “I’m sorry” when it IS or might be warranted.   We are discussing OUR industry now and saying “I’m sorry” prematurely can be detrimental to our company. The words “I’m sorry” are seen as an admission of guilt.   And knowing whether we did something incorrectly is not something we can know for sure until we are able to research the incident, whatever it is. In OUR industry (and many others) the appropriate thing to say when someone has a complaint is to show empathy and promise to do something about the problem.   We must be careful NOT to admit guilt because once a client or caller hears, “I’m sorry” they are hearing you admit to being the cause of a problem, and that initial feeling is the one that sticks, even if it is later proven that the service handled everything exactly a...