Empathy is powerful- not only in business but even personally. Empathy means understanding another person’s experience from their perspective. Empathy drives actions, decisions, and creates a culture that is prosocial. When a business becomes empathetic for customers, they produce products that will help alleviate their concerns. Empathy for customer success is all about understanding what needs people around you have and providing them the same.

Empathy is what makes customers stick. This is cause the baseline of product development should be empathy which many companies lack. They are confused about the ideal profile, whether the product fits in the market, or whether the customer fit is right. There is a lack of empathy that leads to zero connection. This is why an empathy map is critical in understanding customers perfectly and improving their experience. It helps design and launch new products based on useful customer insights. In this post, you will learn what an empathy map is and how to create an empathy map.

What is an Empathy Map?

To ensure that customers are at the center always, you need to create a strong strategy. Customer empathy maps are methods that company teams such as engineers, customer success, product, and design can use to improve their understanding of customer needs. It is an effective and easy way to place various aspects of the customer’s mindset while using the product.

Empathy maps were developed by Dave Gray, a product strategy leader. The map has six quadrants that cover what a customer says, thinks, does, feels, hears, and goals in mind.

Quadrant 1: Who are we empathizing with and what are their goals?

In this case, we want to identify who the customer is and what their situation is. What is the remedy or solution they seek? We also need to understand what decisions they might be making and how we can trigger them to be successful.

Quadrant 2: What do they see?

What are the shifts in the market? Is there any similar product; any blog or article that talks about the product or similar? With empathy, you need to proactively talk to customers offer them with solutions and improve trust.

Quadrant 3: What do they say?

Customer opinions are important. What are they saying about the product? how much have their surroundings impacted them? Making sure customers are educated to know the product and its benefits is important.

Quadrant 4: What do they do?

What is the actual customer behaviour? Are there any inclinations? You must understand why they do what they do and map it out clearly. Exchange of value between customers will help create trust and improve performance.

Quadrant 5: What do they hear?

Recommendations are awesomely helpful. Guess what clicks the most- word of mouth. So what are your potential customers hearing from friends or colleagues? It is a compelling and powerful way of ensuring customers choose your product.

Quadrant 6: What do they feel?

Identify and understand customer pain points. What makes them anxious, worried, happy, or scared? Through needs and fears analysis, you can determine which product they would prefer and why.

Why is a customer empathy map Important?

• Helps keep the emotional hooks alive
• Helps organise customer insights
• Aligns goals around specific framework
• Keeps the logic at the center
• Ensures teams prioritise customer needs always
• Creates more customer-centric products

How To Create An Empathy Map?

There are some key steps to keep in mind while creating an empathy map.

• Define the key question
• Note down what you want to ask/test/know
• Conduct the test as per the above mentioned six quadrant theory
• Use data to get insights that will be helpful
• Observe how customers think
• Help solve customer problems with this map

Tips to Elevate Customer Experience with an Empathy Map

• Look beyond your ideal customer persona. Different audiences have different situations and surroundings; this means their response is different.
• Gather user data as much as possible. Through interviews, surveys, studies and more, you can uncover new challenges and opportunities.
• Visually understand your customers from a 360-degree view. This will help all teams with marketing, creating, or selling customers better.
• Readjust your products and services as per customer requirements and responses

How to Enhance Customer Success with Empathy Mapping?

The way your business engages with different customer persona brackets will build the effectiveness of the mapping. All elements of customer experience are based on brand building. This will create value for both customer and brand more than ever. Empathy mapping helps understand and uncover the real facets of customer’s situation. A customer empathy map can help understand critical customer issues. Leveraging empathy will help you meet customer demands in the true sense and actively engage with your audience.

Customer Empathy Map Template

Let us create an empathy map.

You might think entering these details might be hectic. However, these simple questions on empathy have the power to solve 90% of your customer experience issues internally. The empathy map will help you-

• Understand if you are solving the right problem
• Know if your value proposition is right
• Experience customer emotions

To get the best results in your empathy mapping exercise, you need to actively listen. Listening patiently without a judgemental attitude will help reveal key insights about users directly.

For example- If many customers feel too strongly against a product, chances are your product team can try to reduce or minimise the effect of the product.

Bottom Line

Empathy mapping is a great way for a business to engage with its customers. You can track multiple customer personas with their values, fears, motives, doubts, objections to achieve a final result. Customer empathy maps help product teams understand ideal personas. They also help marketing teams understand customer motivations better. You can also be prepared with scope of product improvement. This can be treated as feedback which will solidify your customers trust on you. Also, you can understand customer habits, behaviours and actions they took to achieve their goals.

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