E185 – Empathy in Frontline Workers

Dave starts the show by talking through a story of the heater in his house going out just days after Christmas. The guy that came out to fix it had recently had a bad day but he couldn't see past his bad Christmas day and not the fact that nearly 10 families were without heat on Christmas and had to call his company for help.

Just the past few weeks hundreds of thousands of families in Texas and across the United States (and in some other countries) have recently run into heat, power and water issues. None of these people wanted to have any of these issues but here they all were at the mercy of so many other people.

For Dave the whole experience was rather uncomfortable as he felt bad for this person but also was currently in a bad situaiton.

It was just days after Christmas and now a new unknown and possibly rather large expense.There are kids, animals and adults in a house with no heat that was quickly getting colder and colder in.It was well below 32F outside and within just 5-8 hours of no heat the house had already dipped well into the 60s.

Empathy?

The whole experience left Dave scratching his head in how this person could not see the bad spot that all of these families were in that had called him. Yes is day had been long and ruined but what about all these families likely facing high bills and emergency rates? The lack of empathy by this employee towards me and towards those that had called him in a time of need just made no sense.

For an example of HOW TO properly work with and talk to your customers check out our episode with Jay Sofer - Do You Deal in Trust? How to Unlock it for Your Business W/ Jay Sofer.

Frontline Workers

What training or support do you have in place for your workers? What do you do proactively to invest and train your employees?

Do you ever read reviews, listen to customer service calls, look for trends in reviews and try and understand if it is the customer, a single person or a company/team wide issue that needs to be addressed.

Firing Clients

The customer is not always right - sorry! As an owner/boss/leader at a company you should also be ready to protect your employees from customers that are abusive. This could be on phone/zoom or in person for those employees that are frontline workers - protect your people!

Accommodate your employees when you can and when they need it. If they raise their hand and say "today is just not a good day" see what you can do to help them help you not get into a bad situation.

Full Transcript

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt  and Dave roar. Hey guys, welcome to another business of digital podcast episode, and a great to have you with us. And, uh, how's it, Gordon,

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:17] Dave, it is going, going, going.

Matt Siltala: [00:00:20] So for today's episode guys, we're just going to jump right into it.

Um, I like this one. I like talking about the subject and, uh, when I don't like your story, obviously, but I like the meaning behind it and what we're trying to do with this, but we don't know necessarily what we're going to call it yet, uh, for what you guys are reading, but it has to do with empathy and, um, who has it?

Do you have it, Dave? Do I have it? The business owners have it. And so this comes from a, you know, a experience that you had where. You weren't, you were, was not so much given to you, but, uh, [00:01:00] you know, let's just chat about that and we'll go from

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:02] there. I will, I will gloss over some of the details, um, because this happened a couple of months ago, but, um, basically my wife woke up at like 1:00 AM, some noise kind of woke her up.

She didn't know what it was. Um, looked around kind of listened to, she didn't hear anything went back to sleep. It was about what was it? I'm looking at my notes. Cause yeah, it was a couple months ago. Um, it was lik