Hi Reader,

In last week's email, I tried to set up the first part of a two-part argument where I was moving from the data-backed "empathy problem" in tech support (part one of the argument) to what seems to underlie that problem (part two, which was going to be what this week's email was about).

As I was sending last week's email I was thinking it wasn't as clear as I would have liked. But, you know. Deadlines. So off it went to your inbox.

I got a lot of replies from you about that email. I'm not yet sure if that confirms my feeling that it wasn't clear, or if there's some additional listening I could stand to do, or what. I didn't have time to dig deeper and reply to many of those replies this week. I'm still grateful for them, as they included valuable ideas to chew through.

This week has been, if anything, busier than last week. I don't want to further confuse the argument here—or worse, fail to take the time to properly understand and appreciate your perspectives.

So while I work on that, here's a bite-size thing I think I can add to the conversation this week: what are some of the obvious things that get in the way of tech support agents being empathetic towards customers?

One of the examples that landed in my inbox from a reader this week was the "just doing my job" phenomenon. I imagine we're all familiar with the feeling: life is tough, troubles with friends or family or finances, having to sit down to work anyway and simply being unable to summon the emotional energy required to care about the person across from you, whether they're a customer or a coworker or whatever. Don't ask me to go above-and-beyond. I'm just doing my job.

And here's a personal example: one thing that gets in the way of me being empathetic is the amount of stuff I have to get done. (Oh, look, that's already shown up in this email.) Last Thursday a big issue for an important customer came in and ended up occupying almost all my working hours for the rest of the week. I still had other customers waiting for replies from me, and I wasn't able to dedicate the necessary time to actually moving their problems toward good resolutions.

These first two examples feel pretty closely related. Let's make a category and call it "preoccupied." As in, I'm too busy/stressed/afraid/distracted to offer you empathy right now. People who feel like they're drowning—whether or not they actually are—make poor lifeguards.

I like this categories thing. Let's look a second category and call it "powerless." In tech support, the person talking to the customer often doesn't have the skills or the access to actually fix issues. Part of their job is to make the case to their engineering department that something is broken or should work differently. In many cases engineering will disagree, or misunderstand, or themselves be too busy to prioritize a fix. This puts the tech support person in the awkward position of having to say, "hey, soooo.... your issue isn't going to get fixed. Sorry, there's nothing I can do." That message is hard to deliver, and is easy to do with a silent inner and I don't want to feel your disappointment or anger so I'm going to close myself off from you emotionally. Which is, of course, a big empathy killer.

Let's get one more category here: "dis-incentivized." A lot of companies measure the success of their tech support by tracking metrics like initial response times and time to close in addition to customer satisfaction. Those metrics tell a story and are reasonable indicators of success. But they always have an unintended side-effect of influencing behavior. If I'm supposed to close tickets in less than two hours, I'm incentivized to rush a resolution instead of spending the necessary time to understanding, empathize, and work toward a mutually satisfactory outcome. This dis-incentivization to empathy is magnified if any kind of personal or team bonus pay is connected to my metrics. In a lot of cases, tech support people are literally being paid to NOT empathize.

So here we have three categories that interfere with empathy: preoccupied, powerless, and dis-incentivized. What others do you see?

Of course, the twist here is that these things don't actually interfere with empathy. They're just some of the reasons we give for not empathizing. Good or bad, valid or not, it's not always easy to tell. I'm not shaming anyone for not being empathetic (including myself). What I'm trying to do is get down beneath even the reasons to something deeper, which I think is that empathy is something we can offer no matter the circumstances, and regardless of the outcome.