We can all benefit from a little empathy and a map
Understanding your customers, your audience, and even people close to you is not easy. It takes effort. It takes intentional listening. It takes intentional action. One technique to help you understand others is through empathy mapping. It is something that I use a lot, and it works.
Empathy mapping is popular in the design world. In fact, when I Googled “empathy map” today, I got back 135,000+ results. There is no one way to do empathy mapping, just like there is no one way to understand your customer or audience. But if you haven’t, then give empathy mapping a try.
Let’s start with getting into what is empathy mapping and how to do it, then we will dive into the reasons why empathy mapping is valuable, and lastly we will finish off what do you do next from with your empathy maps.
Why do empathy mapping?
There are five reasons I like using empathy mapping:
Intentional focus on defining customer segments. Putting together an empathy map first requires you to focus on segmenting your customer or audience into segments. Identifying customer segments is something that people in marketing, sales, and product, for example, do all the time. But, really segmenting our customers (whether internal or external and oftentimes not just by department) is not something many of us do but should do.
Intentional focus on understanding customer segments. Once you have your customer segments, you need to understand what your customer “does,” “says,” “thinks,” and “feels.” This is not easy. It means we need not only to listen but translate information that is not always directly said and without putting our own bias on it.
Forces me to question my assumptions and understandings. We all tend to be more confident than we should be. I know I suffer from this. Therefore, the way I do empathy mapping forces me to identify confidence in my understanding and data sources for them. For example, all too often, our understanding of our customers is because of the loudest voice only. Identifying my understanding of the customer as only the loudest voice will push me to get other voices.
Team-based understanding: Empathy mapping is something that is best done with your team or group. There are certainly individual components of the process, and it can be done entirely by yourself. But, in my experience, the best empathy maps are generated by teams together.
Good ongoing reference material. The empathy mapping process is great, but even more valuable is revisiting the resulting empathy maps as an ongoing reference. Sometimes, these empathy maps will be generated into “customer personas,” but sometimes, it just might be the empathy map itself. They are useful to revisit yourself, like when you are putting together a big communication to a customer segment. But they are just as useful for sharing and transferring knowledge to new team members.
Each of the reasons above by itself is, in my opinion, valuable enough to leverage empathy mapping. However, all five reasons together make empathy mapping an important tool in my playbook.
How do you do empathy mapping?
There is not a one-size-fits-all way to do empathy mapping. I like to keep it simple but with a twist.
Identify customer group and context. The first step is identifying your different customer groups or segments. Each customer group or segment will be a separate empathy map. For example, if you are a recruiter in human resources, a customer segment might be technology managers. Further, you identify the context or interaction that you are seeking to map out. Again, taking the same recruiter example, an interaction with your technology manager customer might be a new technical employee recruiting and hiring process.
Now that you have a customer group and context established, you need to map what that group “says,” “does,” “thinks,” and “feels.” The customer segment and context are in the middle. Then, there are four quadrants laid out for you to complete: the says, does, thinks, and feels. Oftentimes, a physical or virtual whiteboard is the place to do this.
A blank empathy map template is on the left. On the right, is an example first draft template for our recruiter working with her customer a technology hiring manager.
What information do you have to have to support what you enter? How confident are you in what you identify? Certainly, if you are an experienced recruiter working with technology managers then some of this may seem intuitive at first. However, what other information mechanisms do you have as input? Is there customer survey data? Is there customer observational data? Is there customer’s customer survey data? It is important to not only write down what you think you know but how confident you are and even how do you know it.
There are two ways that I indicate confidence. Sometimes using different colored sticky notes can represent different levels of confidence. Another thing I do and have been doing more often is using an open circle representing low confidence (e.g. maybe have some anecdotal examples or data); a half-filled circle as middle confidence (e.g. have some survey data or lots of examples); a filled in circle when I have high confidence (e.g. have lots of supporting data and examples that are consistent). Most things will be low or middle confidence in my experience and that is alright.
The first time you do an empathy map, you will generally have a lot to write down in the “says” and “does” sections. However, it will take longer and be more sparse in the “thinks” and “feels” sections. This is alright. Even when completing an empathy map, you should go about doing it
The best empathy maps come from a process of doing it as a small team or group. The participants should work with or interact with the customer segment, given the context being mapped. Doing an empathy map as a team leads to a better end product. Additionally, the process of doing empathy maps can be a good team builder. Here are a few suggestions when doing empathy mapping as a team or group:
Build in individual processing time at the beginning of the empathy mapping process. It will help ensure one or two voices don’t just dominate and that both extroverts and introverts provide important input.
Everyone should provide input and support it with reasoning or data. It is alright to have a gut feeling or reasoning identified but then identified as low confidence is appropriate.
The empathy mapping process should be done in a build-and-then-prune mentality. First, build the empathy map with everyone’s contributions and no debate or criticism for contributions. Then, in the pruning stage, you question or refine after everything is initially built.
The empathy mapping process is iterative, and groups may need to go back and get more information intentionally.
Build a feedback loop so that you get input from some of those in the target group. This input should be sought while providing your customers an admission that you seek to understand them better and value them. Hence, it is why you have invested in this empathy mapping process.
Empathy maps should be built with a built-in revisiting time. Things change over time and need refreshing. Identifying this need and timing in advance helps make sure the most value comes out of the process.
What to do with your empathy map?
The empathy mapping process itself is certainly valuable. When done by yourself, it will help you intentionally define, understand, and refine your understanding of customers and context. When done with a team, it will provide a better shared understanding of the customer and a context along with a team-building activity.
Taking these understandings and applying them to your day-to-day interactions with your customers is important. I like to ask myself two simple questions post-empathy map:
What understanding is different from what I had before?
With that different understanding, what should I do differently?
For example, this may mean I communicate differently with my customers.
Empathy maps should also not be hidden away. A new team member who joins a team should have empathy maps shared with her. Sharing it with her results in a better understanding of your customer quickly and more team alignment.
Eventually, you may translate your empathy map into full-blown customer personas that are an extension of your empathy map. In a future post, I will write about developing and leveraging customer personas. However, in short, customer personas are fictional representatives of a customer segment that can be referenced and communicated about.
In the end, understanding our customers is vital to our success no matter what we do. This is even true in our personal lives. Empathy mapping is a tool for your toolbox to be better at understanding your customers. I encourage you to give empathy mapping a try and see how it works for you.
Happy customer understanding and leveraging empathy in your life!