We talk about customer experience as an infallible strategy that we have to develop to build customer loyalty, but how do we do it? The empathy map tool is another way of understanding the customer experience.
The Empathy Map was designed by Dave Gray, author and founder of XPLANE, a consulting firm that uses visual tools to enhance its clients’ strategic vision.
To understand this tool, the first thing we have to do is to distinguish between empathy and sympathy.
- Sympathy is the feeling and expression of concern for someone, usually accompanied by the fact that we want that person to be better or happier. For example, if someone we know has been in a car accident and is in the hospital, we wish that person a speedy recovery. However, sympathy does not entail that the feelings we feel toward the other person are related to shared emotional experiences.
- Empathy is the ability to recognize and share the emotions of others, in short, it is the ability to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes.
When it comes to Customer Experience, it is important to take empathy into account, because if we are able to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes, we will know how to provide them with a better solution to their needs, making their experience an excellent one. We must go a step further and go beyond the basic physiological, demographic or social data we collect, we must try to understand how our customer thinks, feels and therefore acts. This is the only way we can give you the best value proposition.
How can we create an empathy map?
The empathy map is the tool that helps us develop empathy with our customers. To understand how it works I am going to show you an example of how we design the strategy:
Imagine you are an online marketing company and you want to reach small businesses of handmade products. We have to ask ourselves a number of questions:
- Who do we want to understand?
- For example, let’s take Sara, a 30-year-old woman who wants to launch her online brand of vegan beauty products.
- What do I need to do?
- You need to create engaging content for your website
- Positioning yourself well in social networks
- Partnering with a friend of hers who has a vegan food company with a wide network of contacts.
- What do you see?
- That there are major beauty brands coming to market with this particular range of products.
- That there are other artisanal brands in larger markets that are succeeding.
- What does it say?
- It is difficult to make a living in this business starting from scratch, but…
- That, if other people and brands can take the plunge, so can she.
- What does it do?
- He is training in online marketing to acquire knowledge He is trying to get together with people who have strong networks of contacts to make himself known
- Attends organic trade fairs to promote your products
- What do you hear?
- That living by these ideals is a utopia.
- That young people are becoming more and more aware of environmental issues and may be interested in this type of products.
- That anyone can set up an online business
- What does the customer think and feel? Differentiating between
- What are the efforts involved, taking into account your fears: Initial capital investment
- And what are the results you can get by being aware of your perceived benefit: Reach many people in a fast way.
By analyzing Sara’s empathy map, we understand that, in order to service small businesses, we must offer our services as online marketing experts, which will help these businesses get known in a fast and exponential way in digital media, in order to build their customer database and expand their market.
With this tool we can be empathetic with our customers and put ourselves in their shoes to really understand their personal situation and give them an excellent experience, which will turn them into promoters of our brand. Have you ever tried using the empathy map? If the answer is “yes”, it is a sign that you are on the right track, in case it is “no”, I encourage you to do it. At Moebius Consulting we will be glad to help you.
