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Empathy: the key to better support content - The Intercom Blog
Summary
As businesses scale, they risk losing touch with customer problems, which becomes apparent in support content. The post argues that empathy—both cognitive and emotional—is essential for creating effective help content. Cognitive empathy involves understanding customer perspectives by surrounding oneself with customer information, as Harley Davidson does with bike trip photos, and by staying informed about product evolution through conversations with design, support, and engineering teams. Emotional empathy requires experiencing the frustrations customers face, such as imagining a world without the product’s key features or actively finding and reporting bugs to understand user pain, as encouraged by Intercom’s “if you find something broken, you now own fixing it” poster. By combining both types of empathy, support writers can produce content that resonates with users and addresses their real needs, as shown in Intercom’s Smart Campaigns and User Map documentation.
Context
The post is written for customer support and content teams at growing SaaS companies, emphasizing the importance of empathy in creating help documentation that truly addresses customer needs.
Approach / What changed
Build cognitive empathy by immersing in customer data and understanding product rationale; build emotional empathy by simulating customer frustrations and acknowledging product limitations.
Takeaways
Cognitive empathy requires actively surrounding yourself with customer information, such as through office displays, customer days, surveys, and interviews.
Emotional empathy involves experiencing the product from a new user’s perspective, including imagining life without key features and encountering bugs.
Effective support content acknowledges product limitations and bugs with compassion, rather than ignoring them.
FAQ
How can support writers build cognitive empathy?
By surrounding themselves with customer information through office displays, customer days, surveys, and interviews, and by staying informed about product evolution through conversations with design, support, and engineering teams.
What is the difference between cognitive and emotional empathy?
Cognitive empathy involves understanding how a customer feels while maintaining an outside perspective, whereas emotional empathy is a fully experiential state where you feel the customer's actual frustrations.
Why should support content acknowledge product bugs?
Because every product has bugs and limitations; ignoring them leaves customers frustrated. By acknowledging issues with compassion, you help customers navigate problems and build trust.
Source and freshness
- Source
- intercom.com
- Published
- Added to Yomu
Summaries are generated from the original by a language model. Check the original before relying on it.
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