Why you need a Chief Empathy Officer

In today’s data-driven world, organizations have more insight than ever—but you can’t rely solely on data to gain empathy for your customers. While data may tell you what your customers are doing, it rarely tells you why they’re doing it. To prove their commitment to prioritizing customer needs, organizations appoint a Chief Empathy Officer or empathy-driven leader to own the customer experience strategy. 

Most importantly, empathy needs to come from the top, with empathetic leadership committed to infusing customer insight into all aspects of an organization.

The empathetic leader: Chief Empathy Officer

To build a customer-centric organization, empathy must come from the top—starting with your Chief Empathy Officer. 

Operating an empathy-driven organization requires the entire C-suite to get on board. Teams need the necessary solutions, resources, and time to build customer empathy, which requires support from your CMO, CFO, CIO, and everyone else. 

The C-suite is responsible for ensuring that everyone in the organization has a clear idea of your customers—their values, needs, emotions, motivations, and frustrations—and your commitment to implementing your customer experience strategy at every touchpoint.

CEOs should champion customer empathy for it to take hold throughout the organization. This means making empathy a cornerstone of your culture and strategy to ensure it’s factored into all day-to-day decisions and operations.

Related reading: The executive’s guide to empathy-driven ROI

Why empathy is important

Empathy is crucial because it’s your lifeline to your customers. Empathy is built by taking the time to interact with customers consistently and listening to them. It means bringing what you learn from customers to the daily decisions made at your organization to find ways to improve the experience.

Empathy in leadership is more than a PR exercise or nice-to-have. It offers concrete benefits and a measurable impact. 

Being in tune with your customers helps you anticipate their needs, even if they haven’t worked them out for themselves. By identifying solutions to common problems or gaps in the market, you fuel innovation and ensure that your products and services exceed expectations. In doing so, you put yourself ahead of your competitors and create an emotional connection with customers that fosters loyalty in the long run. 

Gathering customer feedback and seeing how they react to things can also help you avoid any unwanted surprises or pushback when launching a new service or campaign. Empathy is also beneficial from a diversity and inclusion perspective as you work to understand the needs of a diverse range of customers, not just one specific group. 

As more and more interactions occur digitally, it’s essential to prioritize getting direct feedback from customers and listening to what they say—proving to them that you understand them and see them as real people, not numbers in a spreadsheet.

Related reading: Emphasizing Empathy as a Cornerstone of Customer Experience: a Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Report

Customer empathy in action

How do you ensure that empathy filters down from a leadership priority to a core part of your organization? Customer centricity means making customer feedback part of your everyday processes from the top down. 

This could include conducting research and interviews to discover what customers say, do, think, and feel. It could also mean building regular touchpoints to stay connected to customers, so you can evaluate how these behaviors and attitudes evolve. Finally, what you learn from customer feedback or human insight, should be shared across your organization so cross-functional teams get a clear and consistent understanding of your customers. 

For example, digital teams play a huge role in customer centricity. Digital touchpoints are often the first customer interaction with your organization, so everything must work seamlessly. In addition, the team should fully oversee the customer journey to see where frictional points or roadblocks exist. 

Additionally, internal functions like finance and HR can contribute to a culture of customer centricity by ensuring dedicated resources for customer feedback and prioritizing empathy among employee experiences. 

Working to nurture your relationship with customers helps differentiate your product, service, and brand in a world where customers have choices. In return, you build brand trust, drive growth, and maintain relevance. Put simply, empathy drives customer loyalty, and loyalty drives ROI. 

Related reading: FORTUNE Brand Studio + UserTesting: The ROI of Customer Empathy