Customer contact builds empathy

To be efficient, company’s specialize the work their employees accomplish. Customer Service Representatives speak to clients all day long, they don’t organize financial reports or manage people. Likewise, those who manage Service Representatives aren’t likely to interact with a customer unless a problem arises. One step above them and customer interaction has been removed entirely - they are entirely isolated from the customers they serve.

The same happens on the product side of business. Software developers are buffered from interaction with customers so they can more efficiently finish their piece of code. If there is a position that interacts with customers at all it’s usually reserved to a single person such as a Product Manager. This creates a bottleneck for customer feedback; everyone assumes the Product Manager knows what the customers want, and the Product Manager doesn’t speak with the Customer Service Representatives.

When a company has organized itself to insulate large portions of its service and product employees, the people who make the product or serve the customer can no longer relate to the client. Customer Service Managers can become numbers-focused and resent the annoying customer instead of working to deliver excellent customer service. Software Managers can make design decisions based on personal preference or ease-of-delivery instead of the customer’s needs. The company may have every appearance of efficiency and action, yet all the energy is spent on work that doesn’t matter; even work that hinders the company’s future. Instead of making individual work more efficient by isolating people from customers, Etzkorn and Siegel suggest that the company “[remove] barriers that separate the company from the outside world ((Siegel, pg. 165)).”

After our last user conference, our CEO stated that he wants all software developers to have customer interactions, not only during our once-a-year user conference but throughout the year. The groans among software developers weren’t audible, but I could feel them and see the scowls on their faces. The average software developer loves their isolation from demanding, annoying, unimaginative customers; they want nothing more than to build the perfect system and take satisfaction from their efforts, not the customer’s feedback. Once a year the few who attend the user conference remember that the customers are real people, even fun people, who love their work and appreciate all that they do. Fortunately, these people tend to become leaders in the product department or customer interaction might disappear entirely.

I’ve seen first-hand the benefit of interacting with customers when it comes to building them a solution because I’ve done it myself. I’ve also noticed that, in a growing company, the product department may be adverse to interacting with clients (at least software departments). My application is to continue to advocate for our customers by encouraging developers on our team to interact with the clients they serve, get to know them and what they do, and ultimately build them better software because they empathize with the customers.

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