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empathy and service, required?


When you think about the definition of empathy, which is to understand and share feelings of another, you may be curious why this would be included in posts regarding the operation of a service business. When I think about empathy from a service technicians point of view, and one who spent most of his career troubleshooting problems, empathy for me is as strong as one of my previous posts on LSD. The closer a person can get to understanding the initial design intent of a control system or operating environment, the better off they will be in suggesting potential modifications, repairs or updates. I never really thought about the sales side of the equation until my later years, and of course as you can imagine empathy plays a significant role with a salesperson, the closer you get to understanding the customers challenges, the higher the probability of close.



Over the years, while interacting with many different service providers, I have discovered that sometimes people just get lazy.   When you're designing a solution or attempting to repair a problem you must invest the time to put your head where your customer is, or where the previous person who designed the system was. This step is difficult,  it's certainly a lot easier to tell your customer this is how it should be done based on your own experience. Not to say that intuition and experience does not have value, it certainly does, however if you are always limiting your perspectives to just your own how will you ever learn? What is it about your solution that you think can't be improved? One challenge is; are you willing to take the time to really understand what's going on?  If you  aren't then don't be surprised when your service business is perceived as a pure commodity.



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Next post:  are manufacturers the best source of information?

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