What is Empathy?

Empathy is a natural human trait and is about understanding and feeling what someone else is feeling as if those feelings were their own.  We see empathy in action in all walks of life:  Some obvious examples would be:
  • Helping an elderly person cross a road
  • Opening your own mouth when trying to feed a baby
  • Teaching and medical professions are full of empathetic interactions
  • etc.
It is clear that demonstrable empathetic behaviour encourages better relations and friendships are predominantly built on empathy. There are many associated words such as trust, respect, courtesy etc. that whilst all different in their own way all build on common empathetic values.  There is a wonderful video by Jeremy Rifkin which clearly articulates the base groundings of empathy in society.  I thoroughly recommend it to you.  Click on 'The Empathic Civilization' to view video. Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.

In the corporate environment we only have a few tools available to us to build empathy with our customers and, over the past 18 years, we have designed and developed measurement tools and intervention Programmes that improve an organisation's relations with their internal and external customers through empathy engagements.  In 2009 academics were able to prove a high correlation between empathetic behaviour and profitability.  To the best of our knowledge this is the only customer experience metric in the World to achieve this accolade.
For more information please contact Jamie Lywood on +44(0)7850 202030

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