Handling Customers Bereavement and Empathy

Handling Customers Bereavement and Empathy

I am currently attempting to build a workshop on how to interact with customers who are experiencing bereavement.

The customers call us to receive medical emergency assistance, in this case coroner and repeat assistance. Any ideas of how to handle these sometimes difficult situations and activities that could reinforce this?

Also, looking at Empathy – any activities or ideas to help those who can not demonstrate empathy naturally and need coaching on this?

Question asked by cln494

Specialist Team

This is a tough one. Firstly I think that you probably need a specialist team to deal with this type of call. You need people who naturally have a good degree of empathy. This is something that is not easy to coach.

There are a couple of ideas in this article: How to Build Customer Empathy in Your Call Centre

I think that a lot of it will come down to role play and call listening. You could play calls that showed good and poor empathy. You could then lead a discussion on how this could be done better. You could then get the group to role play the calls.

I hope that this helps.

With thanks to Jonty

Make the Callers Feel at Ease

When dealing with customers’ bereavement it’s important to make the callers feel at ease. The biggest part of dealing with customers in this position is to actively listen before addressing the issue.

I also believe that empathy is an inherent human quality and that it’s important to reflect on the person’s issue and to put yourself in their shoes.

If your organization uses interaction analytics to assess agent behaviours consider building an “empathy” metric in your automated scorecard system. An “empathy metric” would score on tonal qualities in addition to expressions such as “I understand” or “I am sorry for your loss”.

With your agent “empathy score” in hand, you can target your better agents for benchmarking and your challenged agents for coaching, role-playing and provide agents with examples of the benchmarked good empathetic behaviours to assist in your training.

With thanks to Maureen